Pulitzer Prize-winning, two-time GRAMMY Award-winning artist and MacArthur Fellow Rhiannon Giddens today releases her seventh album, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, via Nonesuch Records. https://rhiannongiddens.lnk.to/hopeisthething. The album has been met with praise, extensive international profiles including in Variety, The Observer and beyond, and featured in the New York Times fall albums preview.

Today Giddens has also shared a music video for the title track. The timelapse video captures the creation of the album cover artwork, a six-by-six foot patchwork quilt made by textile artist Uzoma Samuel Anyanwu based on a photograph by Ebru Yildiz.

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEfmRXYCguc

The ten-song album, recorded mostly live in the studio, gathers musicians and traditions that have shaped Giddens across more than two decades into the same room. Recorded at The Cypress House in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers highlights  the magic of people making music together. Musicians speak, stomp, listen and respond to one another in real time, making the room itself part of the record.

The result is a living map of the expansive American musical story Giddens has spent her career bringing into fuller view. Old songs live next to new ones. Rather than treating tradition as something fixed in the past, Giddens shows it as a language that continues to move, change and become something new.

“Louisiana, the Congo, Italy, the Carolinas—all of these influences and people coming together to make something: that is American music,” says Giddens. “It’s how American music came to be, and that was the original thought of creating a band with the musicians that I’ve been playing with for years, and featured on this album.”

Giddens, a North Carolina native who lives much of the year in Ireland, performs lead vocals, minstrel banjo and fiddle. She is joined by a circle of longtime collaborators that reflects the breadth of her musical life, including Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu, longtime bassist Jason Sypher, and Louisiana musician Dirk Powell, who co-produced, engineered and mixed the album with Giddens. The record also reunites her with fellow North Carolinian Justin Robinson, her first bandmate and fellow founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and with members of Giddens’ family.

On Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, original material sits beside songs inherited from artists whose work helped shape Giddens’ own. “Carolina Rain,” written by Giddens and Powell, draws listeners into the album’s world, while her interpretation of North Carolina icon Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” reduces the song to its elemental core: Giddens’ voice and Powell’s acoustic guitar. She also turns to Ola Belle Reed’s “High on a Mountain,” Pura Fé’s “Going Home” and traditional material including “Cluck Old Hen” and “Walk with Me,” the latter sung with her sister Lalenja Harrington.

The album takes its name from Emily Dickinson’s poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” but its sense of hope is rooted firmly in the tangible: people finding one another, carrying histories forward and creating something together. In many ways, the record distills the story Giddens has been telling throughout her career: that American music is far larger, Blacker and more interconnected than the traditional canon has often allowed. If much of her work has been devoted to recovering histories that were overlooked or erased, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers asks what happens when those histories are allowed to live together in the present.

Earlier this week, Giddens also announced a new run of 2027 tour dates, with stops in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and more. Tickets for the newly announced dates go on sale today, September 18, at 10am local time. Full routing is listed below.

The album arrives amid an extraordinary period of creative expansion for Giddens. She served as a music consultant and contributed original music to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, created new music for Ken Burns’ PBS documentary The American Revolution and co-authored Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black Music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo with historian Kristina R. Gaddy. She also recently launched the Biscuits & Banjos Foundation, expanding the mission behind her sold-out Durham festival into a nonprofit celebrating the African diaspora’s role in shaping American culture, and will make her leading-role film debut in the forthcoming An Ode To Mary Jo while continuing her work as Artistic Director of the Silkroad Ensemble.

That work extends into the public sphere this weekend, as Giddens joins Return of the Buffalo: Tatanka Owe Akupi as one of its featured artists. Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse, The Walk Productions and KBH Arts, the monumental free public art project will send a herd of 40 life-size buffalo puppets through the streets of Lower Manhattan on September 18 and Downtown Brooklyn on September 19, accompanied by artistic activations along the routes. Created by Amir Nizar Zuabi in partnership with Elders from Lenape and Lakota communities, the project brings artists, tribal leaders and communities together around public memory, land and cultural history.

[Credit: Karen Cox]

Track List

1. Angel Fire Rise
2. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
3. Step Away Blues
4. Wish in Vain
5. Carolina Rain
6. High on a Mountain
7. Freight Train
8. Walk with Me
9. Cluck Old Hen
10. Going Home

Tour Dates:
Sep 22 – Groningen, Netherlands – De Oosterpoort
Sep 23 – Antwerp, Belgium – De Roma
Sep 24 – Utrecht, Netherlands – TivoliVredenburg
Sep 26 – Paris, France – Alhambra
Sep 27 – Luxembourg, Luxembourg – Philharmonie Luxembourg
Sep 29 – Manchester, United Kingdom – Albert Hall
Sep 30 – Dublin, Ireland – Vicar Street
Oct 01 – Cork, County Cork – Cyprus Avenue
Oct 03 – Belfast, UK – Ulster Hall
Nov 01 – Minneapolis, MN – Walker Art Center (Mack Lecture Series)
Nov 14 – New York, NY – Carnegie Hall (with Silkroad Ensemble & Yo-Yo Ma)
Nov 25 – Hamburg, Germany – Elbphilharmonie – Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi: When I Am Laid In Earth
Nov 26 – Hamburg, Germany – Elbphilharmonie – Juba Zinga Jubilee: Bringing Early Banjo Music Back Home
Nov 27 – Hamburg, Germany – Elbphilharmonie – Go Back and Fetch It: Rhiannon Giddens & Kristina Gaddy – A Book Talk
Nov 28 – Hamburg, Germany – Elbphilharmonie – Rhiannon Giddens & Friends: The People Could Fly – African Diasporic Re-connections Across the Atlantic
Nov 29 – Hamburg, Germany – Elbphilharmonie – Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens – Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual
Dec 06 – London, United Kingdom – KOKO
Dec 07 – Edinburgh, Scotland – Assembly Rooms
Dec 08 – Gateshead, United Kingdom – The Glasshouse – Sage Two
Jan 30, 2027 – Denver, CO – Newman Center for the Performing Arts
Feb 09, 2027 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore
Feb 11, 2027 – San Diego, CA – Jacobs Music Center
Feb 20, 2027 – Pittsburgh, PA – Byham Theater
Feb 22, 2027 – Toronto, Canada – Massey Hall
Feb 23, 2027 – Montreal, QC – Beanfield Theater
Feb 24,2027 – Ridgefield, CT – Ridgefield Playhouse
Feb 27, 2027 – Brooklyn, NY – Kings Theatre
Feb 28, 2027 – Washington, DC – The Anthem

* Performance with Silkroad Ensemble — Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual