Alela Diane - Who’s Keeping Time? Alela Diane

In circles and ever changing, “Who’s Keeping Time?” is a musing on life’s seasons—fleeting truths of beauty and chaos.

"For 10 days in August of 2025, we made this record in the attic of my 1892 Victorian home in Portland, Oregon, where all the songs were written. The scene felt kindred to a mouse house: a cozy world built of antique quilts,  musical instruments, sound baffles, relics, marigolds, great-grandma’s dolls, old photographs, paintings and brightly colored rugs. Sunshine poured through the skylights as Maggie the cat slept atop the pre-amps and inside guitar cases. We played these songs together in one room: no click tracks, no tricks, and no fuss. This is music from the hearts and breathing bodies of human beings, imperfect as we may be.

I hope we can all take pause, and remember what is real — thanks for listening" - Alela Diane

The songs of ‘Who’s Keeping Time?’ range from lulling to raw to cinematic, with Alela’s mellifluous voice a lively and affecting instrument throughout. As the album opens, “California” traces her down the coast to her hometown of Nevada City—a wistful blur of the memories that made her, a pursuit of identity in the external world, and in the past. “Galloping” follows like a fever dream. Written while bed-ridden with sickness, it’s a pressure storm within the walls of Alela’s own mind, a collage of findings from the internal present. Evocative, expansive songs set in perfect juxtaposition, they introduce the endless self-discovery this album celebrates.

“Piss, Coffee, Blood or Wine?” offers more raucous Americana. The title refers to an indiscernible puddle forming next to a man slumped over the sidewalk, an image Alela posits as the poster for suffering in the US and beyond. It's a protest romp, percussion intensifying with acute, political rage: In this land, our only home / They line their pockets with our souls / Men holding guns, and hiding money / Always at the church on Sunday.

Alela almost always writes from personal experience, her lyrics sparkling vulnerable, as on “Dusty Roses,” “Wide Open Spaces,” and perhaps most palpably, “To Be Kind.” Written from a mother to a child in a phase of ugly temperament, the song billows into a stunning and familiar image of human intimacy. Sparse strings and delicate piano underlie the tender plea—I need you to be kind / to me—as well as the promise—Even when you’re screaming, mad / I love you.

“I tend to go dark when I write,” Alela says. “But there was a deliberate intention this time to hold onto the light.” To face pain without getting lost in it requires a particular strength—one Alela has honed over a lifetime of songwriting. Her lustrous discography has gathered major critical acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork, The Guardian, Under The Radar, and plenty more. UNCUT counted her work in their ambitious, ‘50 best singer-songwriter albums’ roundup—a canon comprising John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Paul Simon—characterizing her skill as “insanely beautiful, with the strength and delicacy of spider silk.”

Consequence echoed that significance, declaring, “Hers is a timeless sound, that of a wayfaring troubadour, which only seems to come a few times a generation.”

This collection closes with two haunting odes to the finite nature of life: Fragile As A Flame” and “Endless Waltz.” The latter is Alela’s love letter to her grandparents. “It’s beautiful and bittersweet to watch them waltz toward the unknown. All the while, the birds keep flying along on the wind, and the piles of paper collect dust on our desks.” This veneration for the inevitable, a submission to moving forward, is the ultimate wisdom of ‘Who’s Keeping Time?’ “Everything in perpetual motion,” Alela says. “We’re all just passing through.”