Hurray For The Riff Raff Small Town Heroes on LP + Download

New Orleans, LA’s Hurray for the Riff Raff has signed to ATO Records for the release of their highly anticipated new studio album Small Town Heroes. Hurray for the Riff Raff is Alynda Lee Segarra, a 26-year-old Puerto Rican from the Bronx. After leaving home at an early age to travel the country, she eventually settled in New Orleans where she began to perform and record with a revolving cast of musicians. 

Produced by Segarra and engineered by Andrija Tokic (Alabama Shakes), Small Town Heroes features twelve new, original songs all written or co-written by Segarra, with support from a vivid cast of Crescent City musicians including her longtime right-hand-man on fiddle, Yosi Perlstein, keyboard player Casey McAllister, and two members of the Deslondes: Sam Doores on guitar and Dan Cutler on bass.

With this collection of well-crafted, timeless songs, Segarra is poised to be a powerful female voice in 2014. NPR has said that Hurray for the Riff Raff “sweeps across eras and genres with grace and grit,” never more so than on Small Town Heroes. On the hedonist country lament “I Know It’s Wrong (But That’s Alright)” Segarra sings to a forbidden love “I’ll feed you watermelon off the vine,” while on “The Body Electric” she exposes the misogyny of the traditional murder ballad, and warns “Delia’s gone, but I’m settling the score.”

Ultimately though, many of the songs embody that most magical and fated of American cities, New Orleans. Segarra bears witness to a wave of violence that struck the St. Roch neighborhood in “St. Roch Blues;” yearns for a night at BJ’s Bar in the Bywater in “Crash on the Highway;” and sings of her own Lower Ninth Ward home in “End of the Line.”

 

Small Town Heroes follows Hurray for the Riff Raff’s self-released 2012 album Look Out Mama, which led to a performance at the Newport Folk Festival, and praise from Mojo, which compared Segarra to “a soulful, young Loretta Lynn,” and The New York Times which hailed the group as “part of the loosely cohered movement of younger musicians embracing and reframing American roots music, giving it a polish of currency but otherwise leaving its bones intact.”

1.  Blue Ridge Mountain 

2.  Crash on the Highway 

3.  Good Time Blues (An Outlaw's Lament) 

4.  End of the Line 

5.  The New SF Bay Blues 

6.  The Body Electric 

7.  No One Else 

8.  St. Roch Blues 

9.  Levon's Dream 

10. I Know It's Wrong (But That's Alright) 

11. Small Town Heroes 

12. Forever Is Just a Day