We head to Portland in Oregon today to meet our next LCM featured artist the very talented singer-songwriter Alela Diane. Our LCM #SongOfTheDay is the beautiful 'Moves Us Blind' taken from her her highly anticipated fifth album 'Cusp'. The track delves into our complicated relationship with time.

If you would like to see Alela live in London, she will be performing at the marvelous Union Chapel on 19th November.

'Cusp' has a strong theme and message “This music is about motherhood,” Alela says of “Even just by saying that, it feels like people will write you off. It’s like you’ve suddenly lost the charm of being youthful and even attainable, you’ve been commoditized as available. There is not a big place in the music industry for 30-something women with kids making music.” She laughs as she pauses, then adds, “Maybe we can create that space.” 

If anyone can carve out needed new territory, it’s Alela. 'Cusp' may be a thematic departure for the Portland, Oregon-based artist, but the Argus-eyed writing and clear voice that have long-since wowed Pitchfork, NME, Paste, and other early adopters throughout Europe and elsewhere have never been stronger.  

The new 11-song collection was born during Alela’s three-week artist residency at Caldera in Oregon during January 2016. The time was a revelation to Alela, who’d been consumed with her then two-year-old daughter and had found little time to create. In a small A-frame cabin deep within Caldera’s snowy woods, alone for the first time since becoming a mother, she tended to a wood stove, made soup, rediscovered how to be on her own, and wrote songs. “I was just coming back to myself and learning how to take care of me,” she says. “It was really wonderful to be able to get back in touch with my creative side and just reflect on the intensity of what I’d been going through, becoming a mom––reflecting on that from a space where I wasn’t inside of it.”