There's a version of grief that doesn't announce itself. It just changes what you reach for. When Portland folk legend Michael Hurley died on April 1, 2025, at the age of 83, Alela Diane lost someone she counted as both influence and friend. She played his tribute. And then, that August, she climbed into the attic of her 1892 Victorian home in Portland and made a record. That record is "Who's Keeping Time?," out now on Loose Music and Fluff & Gravy, and it is the most alive thing she's put to tape in years — her first full-length since 2022's "Looking Glass."
The setup matters. Diane and co-producer Sam Weber — whose credits include work with Madison Cunningham and Anna Tivel — converted the attic into a kind of cozy analog sanctuary: antique quilts, marigolds, old photographs, sound baffles wedged between relics. The band set up in one room and played together, no click tracks, no tricks. Eleven songs in ten days. You can hear it in the record's grain — the way Danny Austin-Manning's drums breathe and shift behind Diane's acoustic guitar, the way Sebastian Owens's upright bass settles into the low end like it belongs there. Kati Claborn contributes dulcimer and harmonies with the ease of someone who's been playing in living rooms her whole life. Luke Ydstie's lap steel and high-strung guitar add a shimmer that never tips into twang. Anna Tivel, herself one of the finest folk songwriters working today, contributes violin and harmonies that feel less like a feature and more like a conversation. Peter Lalish of Lucius weaves guitar lines through without calling attention to himself, and members of Blind Pilot and singer-songwriter AC Sapphire round out a cast that feels less like a session and more like a community.
The album opens with "California," the lead single, which Diane wrote after revisiting the small Northern California town where she grew up — Nevada City, the winding-rivers-and-golden-hillsides kind of place that never quite leaves you. She describes bumping into a woman she must have known in a former chapter of life but couldn't place, time moving through like a wildfire. It's a perfect opening gambit: unhurried, a little haunted, rooted in the specific. From there, the record moves through "Galloping" and "In My Own Time" — the second single, which Diane describes as a reflection on time and distraction and trying to keep oneself on track — before unfolding through "Dusty Roses," "Could Be," "Spring Is A Fine Time," and "Wide Open Spaces," reaching the bluntly titled "Piss, Coffee, Blood or Wine?" and the closing "Endless Waltz," which earns its name.
What distinguishes "Who's Keeping Time?" from a lot of contemporary folk is that it doesn't aestheticize its own quietness. There's no studied sparseness here, no self-conscious stripping-back. The record sounds the way it does because a group of musicians sat in a room together and played songs, and Sam Weber captured it honestly and mixed it clean. Diane's voice — a rich, unhurried alto with a slight catch on the high notes — is the still center around which everything else orbits. She's been making records since "The Pirate's Gospel" in 2006, and "Who's Keeping Time?" is her seventh. It sounds like someone who has stopped trying to prove anything and started simply saying what she means.
The Hurley connection is worth sitting with. Michael Hurley was the kind of artist who existed almost outside of the music industry's usual logic — beloved, eccentric, deeply rooted in a particular strain of American folk that valued strangeness and warmth in equal measure. His death sent Diane back toward community, toward live music, toward the act of playing. That impulse is all over this record. "Who's Keeping Time?" isn't an elegy, exactly — it's something more useful than that. It's the sound of someone who looked at loss and decided the answer was to gather people in a room and make something together. Folk music has always known that trick. Diane just happens to be one of the few people still doing it right.
