Hurray for the Riff Raff's Alynda Segarra, a 'recovering lone wolf,' in conversation

Sometimes a collaboration begins before the parties meet. Ideas travel and dance together through the universe, through books and music, and voices stream into headphones. People then fall in love with those ideas and make something new from them.

That's what happened with Hurray for the Riff Raff's LIFE ON EARTH, an album inspired by many texts, but one above all: Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown. This guide to "radical self-help, society-help and planet-help" offered Alynda Segarra a set of organizing principles as they wrote the album's tender testimonies about resistance and recovery. Bringing Segarra together with brown — a musician herself as well as a novelist, poet, activist and all-around visionary — seemed like the best way to understand the messages at the core of LIFE ON EARTH.

The minute both entered the video chat, originally posted on NPR Music's YouTube channel for the Listening Party series, the decision to put them in conversation made total sense. Brown explained that her homey backdrop was part of her new set-up in Durham, N.C., where she'd recently relocated to join her partner, a teacher there. "No way!" Segarra exclaimed. "I made LIFE ON EARTH there!" Soon these far-flung soulmates were planning further get-togethers and imagining possible collaborations.

First, though, they talked about and brown came prepared, with thorough analyses of each song and accounts of how