Alela Diane

Alela Diane emerged as an American indie folk artist whose singular melodic turns and ethereal guitar patterns prompted early likenings to Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom once her opening recording, Forest Parade, appeared in 2003. Initial releases maintained a restrained, fragile character until additional musicians joined to expand the arrangements, reaching a peak with the full-band effort Alela Diane & Wild Divine in 2011. Later projects returned to closer, more personal settings, among them the 2015 collaboration Cold Moon alongside Ryan Francesconi.

Born and raised in Nevada City, California—the same birthplace as Newsom—Diane grew up amid parents who performed music and within her school choir. As a guitarist without formal instruction, she issued Forest Parade at age twenty. Newsom arranged Diane’s earliest solo performances in public. Following brief involvement with Black Bear and travel through Europe, she came back to the States and prepared her subsequent album. Issued in 2004, The Pirate’s Gospel attracted Holocene Music, which reissued the set in 2006 featuring fresh artwork and an altered track order. Critics responded favorably, prompting the five-song EP Songs Whistled Through White Teeth that same year. Extensive touring across the United States and the British Isles occupied the next twelve months.

During a 2008 European tour she also recorded with the side project Headless Heroes, whose opening collection The Silence of Love assembled various cover songs. Her following solo album, To Be Still, introduced her to Rough Trade in 2009. Though reviewers greeted it warmly, Diane moved away from its subdued, close-knit tone toward the fuller arrangements heard on Alela Diane & Wild Divine in 2011. As her marriage to guitarist Tom Bevitori from that band concluded, she composed the material that formed 2013’s About Farewell, an unvarnished account of the separation. Two years afterward came the duet album Cold Moon with Ryan Francesconi. Her fifth solo release, 2018’s Cusp, likewise favored spare, inward-looking writing. Captured after the arrival of her first child and finalized during pregnancy with her second, the record examined Diane’s experience of new motherhood.