Alynda Lee Segarra, the creative force behind Hurray for the Riff Raff, spent her formative years crisscrossing the country on greyhounds and freight trains. She climbed from the streets of New Orleans to the airwaves of NPR with a washboard and a banjo, a Horatio Alger narrative for the Americana set. Her last LP, Small Town Heroes, felt like a thesis presentation from a student of American folk music. She’d spent years studying the form and its practitioners, a product of a community that helped lift her from street corners and coffee shops to international tours and a record contract. While searching for herself, she also imitated others, living inside classic folk, roots, and country songs while shaping her own powerful voice.
In that sense, The Navigator represents a departure—she hasn’t abandoned those sounds, rather she’s graduated to something singular. It's roots music for the immigrant ID, a folk concept album from a Nuyorican runaway who grew up obsessed with West Side Story before being liberated by Bikini Kill. They lay bare the conceit in the album’s Playbill-themed packaging: The songs are presented in two “Acts” that follow her alter ego, a Puerto Rican street kid named Navita Milagros Negrón, who visits a bruja at the end of Act I looking for an escape from the oppressive confines of her city. When she wakes up from the bruja’s spell at the start of Act II (40 years later), everything she knew is gone, and she begins to realize what she’s lost.
Navi is a character, but she’s also very much Segarra. She puts years of telling others’ stories to work telling her own; in “Living in the City,” she sets the scene for the first act, a snapshot of life in the PJs for a young girl. Navi brushes off casual harassment with a shrug, watches friends self-destruct with drug abuse, and sneaks into stairwells for fleeting moments of intimacy. The city is a thinly veiled but unnamed stand-in for New York, a city and culture Segarra fled from the day after she turned 17.
The Navigator is ostensibly a rock’n’roll record, but it expands Segarra’s palette beyond the folk/country/blues lane she’s thus far occupied. Her boozy, morning-after croon is still gorgeous, but now there’s elements of Puerto Rican bomba and salsa, son cubano, doo-wop, and even the spoken-word poetry of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe she haunted as a teen. Her band has gone through a variety of lineups, but this one feels like a clean slate. Her longtime creative partners Sam Doores and Yosi Perlstein are nowhere to be seen—in their place, she’s recruited five hand percussionists, a trio of doo-wop backup singers, and Yva Las Vegass, a Venezuelan folkie from Brooklyn. She even samples the ghost of Pedro Pietri, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe co-founder whose “Puerto Rican Obituary” serves as a bridge between the two movements of her piano ballad showstopper, “Pa’lante.”