Rhiannon Giddens: ‘I’m trying to add to what it means to be an American’

Rhiannon Giddens is trying to do less, but it’s not quite working out. The North Carolina-born, Limerick-based musician has always been the type of person who needs to have multiple pots on the boil. “I mean, you can see it even in my crocheting,” she says, an audible Irish lilt to her Carolina twang. “I can’t just start one piece and just go til the end; I kind of have to have a few balls in the air. I think it’s just the way my brain works.” She stops, taking a breath. “I just don’t know how to stop, I guess is the best way to put it. I’m trying to learn how to slow down and smell the roses, because that’s important, too – you have to rejuvenate yourself.”

The friendly musician seems as nondescript as any random stranger you might get chatting to in a queue for coffee, but Giddens is anything but ordinary. For starters, there’s the fact that she was recently named as one of this year’s recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, alongside Michael Abels – her collaborator on Omar, an opera written about the enslaved people brought from Africa to North America. She brushes it off, almost a little embarrassed. “Every time I hear it, I’m just like… ‘That’s crazy. Is that for real?!’,” she says with a chuckle. “It’s pretty neat, I have to say. I had actually just put my son to bed and I was gonna take a walk when my phone buzzed with a tweet. I’d totally forgotten that we’d even submitted the opera months and months ago, so I wasn’t even thinking about it. I was like ‘Is this a joke? What is this?!’”

The award, which she will receive at a ceremony in October, will make a nice companion for the Best Folk Album Grammy she won for 2021′s They’re Calling Me Home, a collaboration with her musical (and romantic) partner Francesco Turrisi. Omar is just one small part of Giddens’s storied career, however. From her work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the old-time band formed in her native North Carolina (and with whom she also won a Grammy in 2011), the accomplished banjoist, fiddle player and singer has collaborated with various notable luminaries of the folk and music scenes. She has been involved in multiple music and socially conscious projects – including the Yo Yo Ma’a Silkroad ensemble, of which she is now artistic director.

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Her solo career has gone from strength to strength since the release of her T-Bone Burnett-produced 2015 debut Tomorrow is My Turn, and now Giddens has arrived at another new juncture of her career. Previously renowned as a translator and reviver of folk songs throughout her career, You’re the One is her first album of completely original material.

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“I had kind of collected these songs over the past 14 years, which didn’t really fit into the other stuff that I was doing,” she explains. “And a couple of years ago, I realised that I had this stack of songs. I’d put out the records with Francesco and reconnected with my roots, so to speak, in terms of more intimate, smaller ensembles – and then I thought ‘Maybe it’s time to go back to the band and do something with these songs.’ These songs need a bigger palette of sound; they need a different approach than what I had been doing. So it just felt like now was the time to do it.”

She laughs as she recalls the first song she wrote as a child of 10 or 11, always attuned to social injustice. “Something about saving the world or something idealistic. And then that was it for like, 20 years – I didn’t write anything else,” she jokes. “I wrote a song here and there, but nothing that I would’ve put down on a record.”

It has been fun, she says, to see herself “become” a songwriter, “because I still don’t consider myself a songwriter first and foremost,” she nods. “I mean, I am one, but it’s not the first thing that I am. But it is something that I’ve honed, like other things I’ve got better at. So it’s nice to sit back and go ‘Hey! I can write a good song too, and one that’s not about slavery!’” She laughs. “And it’s been really nice to sit back and feel like I’m exploring a new side of myself. It’s important as an artist to do that; you have to keep pushing yourself and you have to keep excavating other parts of your art, because it just makes everything stronger. If you keep ringing the same bell, after a while that sound is no longer interesting. So it’s important to keep moving.”

You’re the One saw her branch out and work with producer Jack Splash, best-known for his work with artists such as Alicia Keys, Kendrick Lamar and John Legend. Their unusual partnership works, their disparate worlds colliding to result in arguably the most immediate record that Giddens has released to date.

“It’s not an attempt to be commercial, or anything, but I do know that these songs are probably more accessible to folks,” she agrees. “The sounds that we used are somewhere in the middle, between my world and Jack’s world, and that’s what I wanted. In a way, maybe it’ll reach somebody who’s not gonna hear At the Purchaser’s Option [a song from 2017′s Freedom Highway, written from the perspective of a slave], or go to see Omar, or whatever. I’m really proud of some of the really neat fusions that I think we found on this record, so I’m hoping that it reaches some new people.”

Although You’re the One is a solo album, other musicians lent a hand – from Jason Isbell to Niwel Tsumbu, Dirk Powell and the aforementioned Turrisi. “It’s all about finding the right collaborators who bring out the best in you, and you bring out the best in them, and you make something great together,” she says. “That’s my favourite thing to do.”

The album has several tender moments, including the title track which was written for her two children, Aoife (14) and Caoimhín (10). She suffered “horrible” postpartum depression for a year following her daughter’s birth. “I still loved her, but I had this curtain down in front of my emotions,” she recalls. “And then my son was born, and it was a totally different experience. It was an easier birth, a natural birth and I was like ‘Oh my gosh, this is what they’re talking about!’ and I sat down and wrote that song. So it made me kind of sympathetic to the ‘me’ of my first child, going ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, you didn’t know. You can feel these things, it was just the circumstance that was hard.’ We have to forgive ourselves, as mothers.”

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Other songs, including the delicately plucked, rowdily sung roots track Yet to Be, documents a relationship between a black woman and an Irish man, and those communities finding common ground in America. Much of Giddens’s work has explored similar themes of black culture and history in the US across the centuries, as well as her own mixed-race ethnicity. The song, she says, is “just a reminder that we have to take stock of the things that we’ve gained – because if we don’t do that, then we lose them. Because they are taking these things back one by one. So you have to go ‘Okay, we do have a lot of things that we didn’t have before, so let’s hold onto them.’”

There are already other pots on the boil, and Giddens is already thinking about her next project. She is always open to being approached for acting work, having starred in two seasons of musical drama TV series Nashville in the past, but she is too busy to remain in the “cycle of auditions” that a full-time acting career requires. She has also dipped her toe into writing over the last few years, with her first two children’s books Build a House (published last year) and We Could Fly (due this November) based on her songs. It was a “pandemic pivot”, she says but, like her music career, her next books will be original stories. “It’s something I’m doing more and more as I’ve got older, writing,” she nods. “I’ve been doing speeches and lectures, and I’ve always been interested in the written world. So it’s part of my evolution as an artist.”

It’s difficult not to surmise that Giddens is one of those irritatingly talented all-rounders that can turn her hand to any art form, but she laughs off the compliment. “The thing is, I know it seems like I do a lot of things, but everything is around a central tenet,” she nods. “It’s always the same kind of intent – which is that I’m trying to uncover unknown stories, and I’m trying to add to the conversation about what it means to be an American, and the true diversity of American culture. So I’m just using these different things – children’s books, songs, operas – even [the character of] Hallie in Nashville. I use them all in order to tell the same idea, just with different tools; sometimes I write a song about it, and sometimes I write a book about it. That’s the only difference. I’m hardly a household name, y’know?” She chuckles. “I have a ways to go, so I’m gonna keep going and making things that will keep pushing the message out there.”

You’re the One is released on August 18th. Rhiannon Giddens plays Vicar Street on February 25th, 2024