17 May 2025

HIP, HIP – LIVE MUSIC FROM HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF | The Chapel SF | 05.16.2025

ARTICLE CONTRIBUTED BY GABRIEL DAVID BARKIN | PUBLISHED ON May 17, 2025

Alynda Segarra’s Hurray for the Riff Raff (HftRR) played a solid 90-minute set of powerful indie folk at The Chapel on Friday night. The sold-out show was the second of two nights in San Francisco.

Segarra, who counts the Bronx, New Orleans and Chicago among their hometowns, paid homage to San Francisco throughout the evening. The singer told the crowd that “This place has been in my songs for over a decade now,” and reminisced about sleeping in Golden Gate Park after moving away from their East Coast home for the first time a few decades ago.

To wit, HftRR played “Colossus of Roads” early in Friday’s show and drew cheers for the lyric, “Meet me down in the Castro, we’ll pretend it’s 1985 – before we were a twinkle in our great-grandfather’s eyes.” Later, they ended the set with “Ogallala”:

Meet me back in a San Francisco bookstore
Down the stairs in the poetry aisle
We’ll get lost in a city forgotten
‘Cause I don’t like change, and I hate goodbyes

HftRR has been touring the U.S. off and on for the past year in support of 2024’s brilliant indie folk album The Past is Still Alive. The majority of songs in Friday’s setlist were pulled from that release.

Personal note: “Buffalo,” the second track on The Past is Still Alive, was my most-played Spotify song last year. Call me a fan. I’ve been on board the HftRR train since a scintillating 2018 appearance on the Swan Stage at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.

Segarra was accompanied at The Chapel by a three-piece band. They (to be clear, Segarra uses they/them pronouns) played acoustic guitar for most of the night, occasionally putting it aside to hold the mic. Notably, electric guitarist Ray Suen was a monster on frequent slide leads. (His tour chops include stints with The Flaming Lips, Childish Gambino, and Lorde.)

HftRR!

A tapestry draped behind the stage for the show featured a stencil drawing of the virgin mother overlaid by the band initials “HFTRR” nested inside the arms of a crudely paint-brushed white “X.” Uber post-modern anarchy, all the more appropriate given that The Chapel was originally built as the chapel for the Gantner-Maison-Domergue Funeral Home.

Segarra’s pedal board

Segarra models a captivating mesh of machismo and tenderness. They sport tattoos of both a knife and a butterfly on their right arm. They pout and pose like Iggy Pop at the mic, but they also have an Altoids tin on their pedal board with “I love you!!!” written inside the cover. Their hair is styled in a Chrissie Hynde shag, and when someone shouted out, “Nice haircut,” Segarra said thanks – and mentioned that it was an improvement over their last one: “A bad haircut will fuck up your life.”

In concert, as on record, you can hear echoes of Gillian Welch and Steve Earle in Segarra’s folkier tunes, like the show opener “Alibi” and the aforementioned “Buffalo.” They also evoke seminal indie darlings Big Star – and in fact, HftRR released a melancholy cover of Alex Chilton and Chris Bell’s “Thirteen” with fellow indie folkies Bedouine and Waxahatchee a few years ago. I had hoped in vain they’d bust this out on Friday, but the sole cover in Friday night’s set was a well-received version of Joan Osborne’s “One of Us” that turned into a Gen X audience singalong.

After filling most of the set with songs from The Past is Still Alive, Segarra returned to the stage solo for their first encore. Fulfilling a request shouted out by a diehard fan several times between songs, they stuck the landing on “Junebug Waltz,” a 2009 release that the singer said she hadn’t played in years. Without the band behind them, the rich tremolo of Segarra’s voice sounded better than it had all night. If I had one wish for this show, I’d ask for more solo stuff so her voice could shine even brighter.

To end the night, they brought out the rest of HftRR and delivered a tour de force version of “Pa’lante.” To introduce this song, a classic, angry protest song about the mistreatment and oppression of indigenous Puerto Ricans, Segarra stood on a virtual soapbox to preach:

It would be crazy for me not to touch on how we’re living in hell. How the fuck are we gonna get through this? Well, I’m here and I’m making my fucking art and I’m not going anywhere. I’m ready to fucking stay and fight this shit out.

Here’s hoping HftRR keeps making their fucking art for a long, long time.

Opener Merce Lemon is cut from similar cloth. The Pittsburgh PA singer meshes well with the current crop of folk-inspired, country’ish indie milieu – a ragtag ensemble of singer-songwriters who seem to have ingested Lucinda William’s entire catalog and followed that with a Ryan Adams chaser. And I mean that in the best way. It’s a healthy diet. I heartily endorse trying some of the Lemon.

Merce Lemon

By the way, Lemon also has an interesting hobby; she carves wooden spoons. Check out her gallery at https://mercelemon.com/spoons/.

Merce Lemon

On stage at The Chapel, Lemon’s half-hour set swayed between subdued and supersonic. Most of the songs started out moody and mellow, but many of them built to guitar-driven crescendos by bandmate Reid Magette. Shades of Son Volt and MJ Lenderman. Cool stuff, two spoons up.