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Chris Willman
Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
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Karen Cox If roots music in America has a poster woman, it’s Rhiannon Giddens, who we can always picture with her banjo, even if she’s doing projects as far afield from that as an opera. She has just announced her seventh album, “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers,” which she describes as a “culmination” of the two decades she has spent becoming a leading figure in Americana music. Some sort of musical turn may be ahead, Giddens hints, but for right now, she wanted to throw a party on record, bringing together most of the musicians who’ve been with her on the journey since she co-founded the Carolina Chocolate Drops, recording a mixture of original material and folk standards or classics live in the studio in Louisiana. The new album, with a title track inspired by Emily Dickinson, will arrive Sept. 18.
“I feel so beautiful about so many things,” she tells Variety, “amidst the just horrible nature of what’s going on in the world right now. So it’s a weird position, but I just will just continue to fight all of that with joy and kindness.” And with fiddles, accordions, guitars and her current instrument of choice, the minstrel banjo. The first single from the album was released Thursday, the uplifting ballad “Carolina Rain,” written and recorded with a longtime music partner, Dirk Powell.
Others contributing to the sessions include her fellow Carolina Chocolate Drop, fiddler Justin Robinson, with whom she made a duo project last year, the Grammy-nominated “What Did the Scarecrow Say to the Crow,” an album of old-time songs recorded entirely outdoors; the Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, with whom she made two duo albums, including a Grammy winner for Best Folk Album, 2021’s “They’re Calling Me Home”; longtime bassist Jason Sypher; Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu; percussionist Charly Lowry; and, keeping things in the family, her nephew Justin Harrington on bones, her sister Lalenja Harrington on vocals, and Powell’s daughter Amelia Powell on acoustic guitar.
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