ahlay (alexandra blakely) is a singer-songwriter, communal grief tender, and ancestral reckoning artist, living as a settler on Turtle Island along the Coast Salish Sea. Descended from Scandinavian, Ashkenazi, and British Isles lineages, she works at the intersection of song, collective grief, and ecological belonging, moving through song, ritual, and gathering as a practitioner of ecological devotion.

Her life in music began unexpectedly in 2005, when she moved to San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. After studying theatre in Seattle and film editing in Los Angeles, she arrived in Mexico carrying instruments she barely knew how to play. At a jam, a group of buskers asked her to sing. She began singing in small jazz clubs in the mountains of Chiapas, eventually spending more than a decade in Mexico, fronting two bands, performing several nights a week, and touring as a backup singer for Mexican pop artist Kalimba. Her early musical world was deeply shaped by Sade, Lauryn Hill, Jill Scott, and Erykah Badu.

In 2012, ahlay began collaborating with Quilomboarte, a Black and Brown hip-hop collective in Mexico, an experience that profoundly shaped her political consciousness and her relationship to music, whiteness, ancestry, and collective liberation. During the resistance at Standing Rock in 2016, she felt called to leave Mexico after more than a decade and return to the lands of her birth in the United States, toward the questions that would shape the next chapter of her work: what have people of European descent forgotten about our own roots, songs, grief, and ways of gathering, and what might become possible through remembering?

Back in Seattle, ahlay became immersed in climate justice organizing. During those years, she began having recurring dreams of more than a hundred people standing in a circle, rocking and swaying together, humming and toning. In 2019, inspired by the role of song in the Civil Rights Movement, she gathered a small group of climate activists to collectively write and sing at a Green New Deal meeting. That experiment became The People’s Echo, bringing participatory song into movements for climate and social justice. In early 2020, more than 200 people gathered for a two-day climate action culminating in a grief ritual inside a Chase Bank branch in downtown Seattle, where singing continued as 28 participants were arrested around a grief altar. The experience revealed something that would become central to ahlay’s work: song could transform how people experienced grief, resistance, and one another.

Today, ahlay creates music and participatory experiences rooted in communal grief, ecological devotion, and the more-than-human world. Her album WAILS: Songs for Grief, recorded with a 200-voice choir, draws from the wisdom of Whale and the Wails held in the body of the Earth, inspired by Francis Weller’s The Five Gates of Grief. Her follow-up album, Anthems for an Apocalypse, is a collection of participatory songs for collective liberation, shaped by the intelligence of Octopus and the original meaning of apocalypse as an unveiling. The album explores abolitionist love, collective liberation, and people-powered artful uprisings.

Her forthcoming multidisciplinary album, Rites of Nature, is being created in collaboration with the living world, exploring what it might mean to make music in relationship with places, species, ecosystems, field recordings, ecological science, and the growing Rights of Nature movement. The work asks how art might help translate ecological realities into felt human experience, and what songs might emerge with Rivers, Forests, Whales, Salmon, Glaciers, Watersheds, and a movement toward multispecies liberation.

Alongside the making of Rites of Nature, ahlay is preparing for an extended ancestral pilgrimage through Europe, traveling through lands connected to her ancestry while studying with people carrying traditions of grief, song, death, ritual, trance, and relationship with the living world. The journey will move through England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, and Sápmi, following threads such as Scottish keening, Sámi yoik, ancestral and earth based practices, and older ways of understanding relationship between human beings, land, animals, ancestors, death, and the unseen.

This pilgrimage is deeply entwined with Rites of Nature. As the album asks what it means to create music in relationship with the more than human world, the journey asks what forms of that relationship have been lost, fragmented, or interrupted within her own ancestral inheritance, and what might be carefully recovered through place, study, listening, and relationship. Recordings, voices, landscapes, teachings, and encounters gathered along the way will become part of the album itself.

The pilgrimage becomes part of the making of Rites of Nature, an apprenticeship in listening and remembering, tracing the places where ancestry, ecology, grief, song, and multispecies relationship meet, and allowing the music to be shaped by what is encountered there.