Alela Diane/Looking Glass
Written by Karen Thompson Walker
When an eerie September windstorm roared through the Pacific Northwest, sparking historic wildfires that choked the region with hazardous smoke, Portland singer-songwriter Alela Diane took to the piano in her backyard studio and began to pour her unease into a song.
By the next day, Diane, who is known for her “immaculately beautiful indie-folk songs”(Paste Magazine), had recorded a rough version of the epic “Howling Wind,” the first single from her cathartic and ethereal sixth studio album Looking Glass.
What began during the unfolding of a single natural disaster evolved into a song about the wider instability and volatility of contemporary life. The “howling wind” becomes a metaphor for our many collective fears and sorrows, captured here in powerfully stark imagery. (“The orange sun burning through the smoke/vultures circling til a man choked/There is war in the street.”) In Diane’s warm voice, the mounting chorus itself takes on the feeling of a howl, mellifluous but urgent: “Howling wind, there’s a howling wind/ A wild wind that’s howling through all that we’ve built.”
The result is a song that KCRW has dubbed “a balm for our turbulent times,” one that sounds faintly like a descendent of the classic that gave voice to the troubles of another tumultuous period: Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
“Is this how it ends?” go Diane’s lyrics. “Could it be this is how it begins?/voices ricochet—shouting as one/on that howling wind.”
That shot of hope, the possibility that something better might emerge from the ashes, is signature of Diane’s songwriting, which is often bittersweet, her lyrics equal parts melancholy and uplift.
“Howling Wind was born of the great reckoning we’ve been living through these past few years,” said Diane. “These days of uncertainty, of fragility, of war, of disease, of brutality, of grief, but also hope, beauty, and love. ‘Howling Wind’ is a song for that feeling, whatever you call it.”
Another of the new tracks, “Paloma,” strikes a similar note, this time balancing lyrics of imagined catastrophe with a relaxed, upbeat melody in a characteristic braiding of lightness and dark.
“She has the sort of voice that both affirms one’s world-weariness and soothes it,” wrote Jim Vorel in Paste Magazine. “It feels like the aural equivalent of someone laying a hand on your shoulder and saying, ‘I’m here for you, if you need to talk.’”
In times like these, Diane’s haunting and reflective new songs seem to ask, where can we find shelter?
That question—of shelter, of refuge—links Looking Glass to Diane’s entire body of work, which often touches on the various meanings of home, past and present.
A self-described home-body whose tastes run toward the antique and the homemade, Diane is likely to be found drinking tea in a rocking chair on her wraparound porch (when not corralling her two young daughters). And she traces the genesis of her creative life to the traumatic loss of her first place of refuge: her magical childhood home, nestled among the mountains and rivers of Nevada City, California. When she was 19, her parents divorced and sold the house, where she recalls often listening to her parents harmonize bluegrass songs in the kitchen. Her first album, The Pirate’s Gospel, was inspired by that loss.
On a trip back to Nevada City, after learning that the beloved house had come up for sale Diane stopped by with her then six-year old daughter. Sixteen years had passed since she’d last walked through those wood-paneled rooms. The new owners weren’t home, but, as she writes in the new song “Dream a River,” she found the front door standing ajar. Something compelled her to walk inside, becoming “a trespasser in the place she once called home.” The previous owners hadn’t changed a thing, she said. It was like sneaking through a life-sized time capsule from a lost era in Diane’s life.
“I just returned to say goodbye,” goes the song’s opening, “Thought that maybe there’s something I’d find/like the way a memory moves in the corner of a room/or where the sun comes through.”
The song showcases another of Diane’s deep interests: how the past is always with us, a source of sadness, sometimes, but also solace, a kind of permanent foundation on which we all walk into the rest of our lives.
More than one song on Looking Glass draws meaning from reflecting on earlier versions of herself, as in these lines from “When We Believed” about her days as a young touring musician: “And I think of who I was then/Who I am now/Who am I now, that I was then?”
These questions felt newly potent for Diane during the recording of Looking Glass, which took place during a time of great personal transition. Diane, who has been a full-time musician for fifteen years and has toured extensively in Europe and North America, recorded Looking Glass during the same weeks that she and her family were selling the Portland house she bought at the age of 26, with the money from her first royalties contract. Diane’s family had now outgrown the house, but the leaving was bittersweet for her. While living there, she’d been married, divorced, and married again, and become the mother of two children.
The emotional and logistical chaos of that moment in her life—along with pandemic related childcare struggles—meant that finishing this record required a profound new level of discipline, with Diane logging practice sessions at 6am each morning. (Among Diane’s other recurring themes are the joys and strains of motherhood, especially for an artist.)
The result is an album that represents a new artistic achievement for Diane. Looking Glass is the first of her records to be produced by the celebrated Tucker Martine (Neko Case, My Morning Jacket, The Decembrists). The album was arranged by her longtime friend and fellow musician Heather Woods Broderick. Notable guest musicians include Carl Broemel (My Morning Jacket), Scott Avett (The Avett Brothers), Eli Moore (Lake), Mikaela Davis, Luke Ydsitie (Blind Pilot), and Ryan Fracesconi (Joanna Newsom).
Shortly after recording Looking Glass, Diane and her family moved into a sprawling 1892 Victorian home, a dollhouse-like fixer-upper set on a surprisingly hidden wooded lot in the middle of Southeast Portland. (Think white scalloped roof lines, an airy light-filled attic with an attached tower—perfect for playing guitar—but also various unpleasant surprises: a leaky roof and ancient mouse skeletons hiding in the corners of kitchen cabinets.) Restoring the house has been a labor of love for Diane and her husband, and partly a way of gifting her daughters, ages 5 and 8, some of the magic she recalls from her own childhood home. (She and her husband have installed an outdoor clawfoot bathtub on the property, an eccentricity she recalls fondly from her own childhood yard.)
Always alert to the layers of meaning in everyday spaces and moments, Diane has described the feeling of living in this old, creaky house as one of “deep settling in.” It’s a place where the artist can, if only partially, take refuge from the howling wind.
In keeping with Diane’s love of all things antiquarian, the title of her album, like the house, also has a 19th century provenance. The original definition of “looking glass,” she noted, is “mirror,” but after Lewis Carroll published the novel Through the Looking Glass in 1871, the term took on a second meaning: “the opposite of what is normal or expected.
“In the context of the album,” said Diane, “The Looking Glass refers to both meanings. It is a portal to past and future, and a reflection on all that lies between.”
