The “stripped-down break-up record” is one of the most well-worn tropes in singer-songwriterdom. But on About Farewell, her fourth record, Alela Diane comes by her romantic devastation honestly. The Portland-based folkie was last heard on 2011’s excellent Alela Diane & Wild Divine, where she was backed by a crack band equally conversant in soul, country, and 1970s SoCal soft-rock. Diane’s musical co-pilot was guitarist Tom Bevitori, also her husband at the time. Sadly, the marriage ended between Alela Diane & Wild Divine and About Farewell, prompting a return to the stark guitar-and-voice arrangements of Diane’s early work on a collection of songs that ache with the specificity of poetic reportage on the last flickers of a doomed relationship.
About Farewell is a backward-looking record for Diane, musically and lyrically, but it’s also a reboot of sorts. Superficially it resembles her stunning 2004 debut, The Pirate’s Gospel, except it sounds more grown-up. The understated sumptuousness of *Alela Diane & Wild Divine *is mostly gone (and keenly missed), though Diane finds way to work that record’s expansiveness into the cozier confines of About Farewell. On the foreboding “The Way We Fall”, which sketches an evocative setting-- it’s Indian summer, there are wildfires burning, and a whiskey bottle is being passed around-- that feels like a bittersweet memory, muted horns and a muffled drum track soften the barbed-wire tentacles of Diane’s skeletal guitar and ghostly backing vocals. On “Nothing I Can Do”, the frustration expressed so beautifully in the chorus (“Honey there is nothing I can do/ to save you from yourself”) turns playful with the introduction of gently pirouetting piano ringlets.
The star of the show, as always on Alela Diane records, is Diane’s voice. Nimble and graceful like a jazz singer, sad and knowing like a blues crooner, but always restrained like a bedroom-pop auteur speaking softly into a four-track, Diane delivers her detached observations on the end of her marriage with stinging intimacy. “Before the Leaving” is a melancholic travelogue from the perspective of two traveling musicians who are slowly drifting apart. “Side by side we pass through towns/ that we’ll never see/ and it’s here I will wait out the storm,” she sings, drawing out that last part a few extra painful beats. The album’s saddest track-- the competition on About Farewell is fierce for the distinction-- is “Hazel Street”, where Diane suggests that the coupling was troubled from the beginning. (“I woke up drunk on that basement floor/and then you asked how I would read the score/ If you asked me to marry you.”) Diane is similarly fatalistic on the lilting “I Thought I Knew”, when she sighs, “I’d only just arrived/ when I foresaw the end.”
A record seemingly composed over the course of many sleepless nights and hungover mornings, About Farewell is yet another addition to the canon of brokenhearted sadsack singer-songwriter records. Surely there will be another artist attempting to make their own Blood on the Tracks or Blue very soon. Alela Diane hasn’t upended the form, but that probably wasn’t her intent. What she needed was a port in a storm, and About Farewell is a very sturdy bulwark.
