Alela Diane’s Looking Glass is an escape from the world’s madness

Isn’t it great that vinyl records and albums are making a comeback? To think that just a few years ago, we feared streaming might kill the format! Sometimes good things prevail, I guess. 

However, let’s be honest with ourselves, when was the last time you stopped everything and listened to an album all the way through? Side one, followed by side two. Or, just streamed all the way through from the opening track to the closer. And during playback, did you look at your phone? How many times? Did you pick up something to read that wasn’t the album cover? And how long did it take you before you remembered you’d missed something on your fidget list? 

It’s just so hard to do these days but my take on it, as someone who finds meditation deathly dull, is that music can be a fine substitute. In this context, let me introduce you to the most recent work by Alela Diane. Released in October, Looking Glass has been on vinyl rotation in my house ever since, both as comforting background music and occasionally the full dedicated listening session. Both ways, it’s a beautiful album and one which acts most effectively as a vehicle to somehow both face the mad world out there and escape from it at the same time. 

I say that because Alela Diane’s work is not afraid of contradictions. When she appeared recently on The Art of Longevity podcast, Alela described Looking Glass as follows:

“Feeling the lightness and the darkness of the world at large. How do you get through your day-to-day life? How do we create a sweet, peaceful world for your children when there’s a lot of chaos out there”.

Five years in the making, Looking Glass is a finely crafted piece of work recorded at Tucker Martine’s ‘Flora Recording & Playback’ studios in Alela’s hometown of Portland Oregon. But these songs were written in rooms around her Portland home in-between the day-to-day challenges of raising her two daughters through the global pandemic. 

Pandemic themes course through the album’s first three songs, Paloma, Howling Wind and When We Believed (all released as the record’s preview singles). These opening songs are beautiful in their own right, though deceptive in a way, as they come with a fuller production, before the album turns sparer and becomes much more stripped down, for example Strawberry Moon, a yearning ballad with piano and strings that takes on a more personal subject of a friend’s descent into addiction. 

I don't know where you ended up
But, I heard some things around town
And I saw your face printed black and white
The sunlight gone from your eyes

Side one closes out with another bare bones composition (guitar this time) Of Love, a more lyrically abstract piece that seems to acknowledge how love can offer some comfort from the dark themes faced thus far on the record, perhaps. For all its domestic setting, side one of Looking Glass is not a cozy listen, necessarily. 

Side two lightens things up a little though. All The Light is almost a companion piece to Of Love, carrying the theme along but more lightly. Two verse-choruses into Dream A River comes a lovely, lilting violin that opens the curtains on the gloomy dim lit rooms of side one. Camelia meanwhile reminds me of Alela’s 2018 album Cusp’s Song For Sandy, borrowing the same central piano chords to drive the album’s saddest and most obviously personal song. The rest of the record though is blissfully comforting, and the string arrangements are a treat. Mother’s Arms comes with a yodel of sorts that reminds you that Alela’s music seems to arrive fully formed from the century before last, straight outta Deadwood. Another Dream closes the album with possibly the loveliest melody throughout and a bonus woodwind arrangement (the bassoon should be deployed more often on Americana records, you’ll feel). As can be expected from a Tucker Martine produced record, the whole things sounds beautiful and it really doesn’t take much to image Alela is playing these songs right there in your own front room. It’s why the record demands to be listened to on vinyl and not streaming, ideally.

There we have it. Pandemic-induced isolation, loss, the comfort of love and family and the world through a window (and all the other screens we are glued to), familiar themes for those like me who got addicted to Cusp. I still haven’t quite weighed-up how Looking Glass compares to that previous record and to some extent, I want to resist the very idea. It doesn’t really matter, does it? 

Alela Diane has a lifetime honorary membership of the slow music club (and at the same time barred for life from Daniel Ek’s “always on” musicians Facebook group) and that has to be some comfort to us all. “We’re expected to be videographers and influencers but I’m not. I’m a songwriter”, she recently protested to me on the podcast. Having created these songs (if not all the arrangements, for there is a large cast of players on this album) the truth is, she is much more than that. 

If you are anywhere near her live shows, see these songs performed in all their mesmerising glory.