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Segarra’s most conceptually bold album to this point is “The Navigator,” a sort of character-driven folk-rock opera — within the vein of Anaïs Mitchell’s “Hadestown” — about Puerto Rican tradition and the American immigrant expertise. (Working with the actor and director C. Julian Jimenéz, they introduced components of a stage adaptation in progress final yr at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan.) The most wrenching track on the album was “Pa’lante,” a piano ballad that in some way blended punk’s political fury with Sondheimian songcraft. (Cook known as it “one of many biggest songs I’d ever heard.”) “Lately, I don’t perceive what I’m,” Segarra sings. “Treated as a idiot, not fairly a lady or a person.”
Since popping out as nonbinary earlier than “Life on Earth” was launched, Segarra has used music as an area to experiment extra freely with gender. There’s a gleeful fluidity to the way in which that manifests on “The Past Is Still Alive.” They sing in regards to the strain to “be a superb daughter,” but in addition assert, on “Snake Plant,” “I used to be born with a child boy’s soul.”
On the album’s cocksure cowl artwork, Segarra consciously channeled James Dean and River Phoenix. “I needed to embody considered one of these unhappy, pretty-boy-in-workwear American archetypes,” they mentioned with fun. Queer elders who confirmed them how you can transcend the gender binary make cameos all through “The Past.” In “Colossus of Roads,” Segarra name-checks the poet Eileen Myles, whose instance taught them that “there’s additionally this possibility of existence, and creation of who you’re.” (Myles occurred to be within the viewers of a small Hurray for the Riff Raff present in Marfa, Texas, and approached Segarra afterward to ask, “Did I hear my title, or am I simply stuffed with myself?”)
Re-examining their relationship with their father, Jose Enrico Segarra (who usually glided by Quico), has additionally helped Segarra perceive the expansive nature of their gender identification. “When I used to be with him, I used to be his daughter, and I mentioned that as a really honorable factor,” they mentioned. But additionally “in his passing, there have been some ways in which I actually felt like his son, within the honor of carrying his legacy musically.”
Quico was a pianist who beloved Latin jazz; Segarra remembers him all the time scatting, whistling and singing. When Segarra was younger, the 2 would sing collectively on the piano: “‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ ‘Que Sera, Sera,’ ‘You Light Up My Life’ — these had been our hits.” Later, when Segarra was a youngster, the pair would get into arguments as a result of Quico was “hilarious in a approach that might make me actually mad, as a result of I used to be so goth and brooding.”
Segarra’s father was additionally a Marine veteran who developed PTSD after coming back from the Vietnam War. His wrestle, and his determination to hunt remedy, continues to encourage Segarra. “I obtained this actually good instance from him of any individual who did determine that his life was price saving. The trauma he skilled was so intense, and to witness him actually take his peace significantly. …” They trailed off. “He began making jewellery and he would simply bead all day. He began shopping for Puerto Rican artwork and filling his residence with stunning issues.”
