![](https://adops.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/aleladiane630mvds.jpg?w=990)
Alela Diane in Amsterdam, April 2009.<A href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/treenaks/">Martijn van de Streek</a>/Flickr
Alela Diane
About Farewell
Rusted Blue Records
It’s amazing how many artists on today’s indie scene are old-fashioned folk musicians passing for someone trendier. California’s Alela Diane has been making haunting, out-of-time albums (sometimes self-released) for a decade, and About Farewell is one of her most powerful. After enlisting producer Scott Litt of R.E.M. fame to provide a poppier veneer on her last outing, Alela Diane and Wild Divine, she’s back to minimal frills with this brooding collection devoted to rejection, regret, and misguided desire.
![](/wp-content/uploads/aleladianecover.jpg)
Despite occasional sweetening from strings or piano, these eloquently downhearted ballads, perhaps inspired by her real-life divorce, would be equally potent with just guitar. Diane has “one foot out the door” on the eerie title track, while, on the elegant “I Thought I Was Wrong,” she observes, “I’d only just arrived and I foresaw the end.” The spare “Hazel Street” finds her confessing: “I woke up drunk on that basement floor,” implying a far seedier reality than her restrained performance would suggest.
About Farewell might be mopey solipsism coming from a lesser singer, but the grave beauty of Diane’s voice transcends self-indulgence. Like the great Sandy Denny, she conveys a stoic intensity that’s consistently spellbinding.