RHIANNON GIDDENS - Hope Is the Thing with Feathers

Over time, even the most inattentive listeners have come to appreciate not only the remarkable vocal qualities but also the stylistic rigor with which Rhiannon Giddens, since her early days with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, has breathed new life into the blues and country tradition with a personal style that never feels academic.
True to her almost biennial release schedule, the new album "Hope Is The Thing With Feathers" brings together, with her usual sense of cohesion, an elegant selection of original and classic songs.
Binding the ten tracks together is the theme of brotherhood and community, which has always been a founding element of Giddens's artistic vision. It's no coincidence that for the recordings, made live at Cypress House studios in Louisiana, the artist gathered together the many collaborators who have accompanied her across her numerous recording projects, while production duties once again fall to the faithful Dirk Powell.

For the album's title, Giddens drew on a line from a poem by Emily Dickinson; the music leans more heavily on tradition, with banjo and violin providing the main support for her splendid voice, bringing together sorrowful spirituals of enslaved African Americans ("Walk With Me"), classics reimagined with an expressive essentialism as intense as it is poignant (Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train"), and new songs that hold their own against the past (the opening track "Angel Fire Rise").
With "Hope Is The Thing With Feathers" Rhiannon Giddens sets aside the sumptuous staging of her previous albums for a more intimate, direct approach: the voice is front and center, as if to underscore the importance of the word. The magical sound of Francesco Turrisi's accordion on the title track, or the dialogue between banjo and violin on the gospel-blues of "Step Away Blues", are enough to leave you captivated by the project's rare expressive intensity.

Musically richer, yet equally moving, the single "Carolina Rain" has all the makings of a future classic. The approach to traditional songs like "High On A Mountain" remains essential, while "Cluck Old Hen" bursts with exuberant primitive folk energy, a track that more than any other highlights the sense of communal sharing that pervaded the album's live recordings.
In this return to roots, there was no way to leave out Pura Fé's "Going Home", a visceral, ancestral blues that resounds as a warning to anyone who has forgotten the long history of suffering endured by those torn from their homeland — a theme that returns with full force in "Wish In Vain", an invocation that becomes a choral cry.

"Hope Is The Thing With Feathers" is, in the end, an embroidery of light and dust, a prayer whispered to the Southern wind, turning age-old pain into a promise of tomorrow. On this record Giddens doesn't merely sing history: she breathes it, cradles it, and hands it to us bare, stripped of all artifice. Her songs thus become invisible threads binding souls together, essential pages in the story of one of the most authoritative and authentic voices of American roots music.

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30/09/2026