ARTIST STATEMENT
Hey my lovely folks in Grand Rapids - well, this is an awful thing to have to write but I've lost my voice and I have to cancel tonight's show at St. Cecilia Music Center. Cancelling shows is never something I want to do, and I am so sorry I cannot be there with you. Try as I might, I have to listen to my body right now and it's telling me to rest. I promise I will make it up to everyone in Grand Rapids and reschedule as soon as I can. And when we make it back, the show will be even BETTER! Take care of yourselves out there. -- xxR
THIS EVENT IS CURRENTLY BEING RESCHEDULED
At this time please hold on to your tickets as you can see we are working on a reschedule date with Rhiannon’s team. We should know by next week what the new date will be and will be in communication as soon as we know.
140th ANNIVERSARY!
We still invite you to SCMC tonight! PLEASE COME DOWN for free wine and birthday cake to celebrate our 140th birthday. Really, we desperately need help in eating more birthday cake than you can imagine! And free wine for all!! The building will be open from 5-7pm tonight. It feels too sad to just close up and go home when we had been prepping for such a big night and we want the community to be here to toast to the anniversary. We hope you will stop in anytime between 5-7pm and again, hold tight to your tickets as we plan for a new date with Rhiannon Giddens.
Best,
Cathy Holbrook
Executive and Artistic Director
Rhiannon Giddens has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. A two-time GRAMMY Award-winning singer and instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art.
As Pitchfork once said, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration”—a journey that has led to NPR naming her one of its 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century and to American Songwriter calling her “one of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.”
For her highly anticipated third solo studio album, You're The One, out August 18 on Nonesuch Records, she recruited producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, Solange, Alicia Keys, Valerie June, Tank and the Bangas) to help her bring this collection of songs that she'd written over the course of her career—her first album of all originals—to life at Criteria Recording Studios in Miami last November. Together with a band composed of Giddens’s closest musical collaborators from the past decade alongside Miami-based musicians from Splash’s own Rolodex, and topped off with a horn section making an impressive ten- to twelve-person ensemble, they drew from the folk music that Giddens knows so deeply and its pop descendants.
You’re the One features electric and upright bass, conga, Cajun and piano accordions, guitars, a Western string section, and Miami horns, among other instruments. "I hope that people just hear American music," Giddens says. "Blues, jazz, Cajun, country, gospel, and rock—it's all there. I like to be where it meets organically."
The album is in line with her previous work, as she explains, because it's yet another kind of project she's never done before. "I just wanted to expand my sound palette," Giddens says. "I feel like I've done lots in the acoustic realm, and I certainly will again. But these songs really needed a larger field."
Her song-writing range is audible on You're The One, from the groovy funk of "Hen In The Foxhouse" to the vintage AM radio-ready ballad "Who Are You Dreaming Of" and the string-band dance music of "Way Over Yonder"—likely the most familiar sound to Giddens’ fans. Her voice, though, is instantly recognizable throughout, even as the sounds around Giddens shift; she owns all of it with ease.
The album teems with Giddens' breadth of knowledge of, curiosity about, and experience with American vernacular musics. Though it might be filtered through a slightly more familiar blend of sounds, You're The One never forsakes depth and groundedness for its listenability.
"They're fun songs, and I wanted them to have as much of a chance as they could to reach people who might dig them but don't know anything about, you know, what I do," Giddens says. "If they're introduced to me through this record, they might go listen to other music I've made with a different set of ears."
Giddens also is exploring other mediums and creative possibilities just as actively as she has American musical history. With 1858 replica minstrel banjo in hand, she wrote the opera Omar with film composer Michael Abels (Get Out, Us, Nope) and, with her partner Francesco Turrisi, she wrote and performed the music for Black Lucy and the Bard, which was recorded for PBS’ Great Performances; she has appeared on the ABC hit drama Nashville and throughout Ken Burns’ Country Music series, also on PBS. Giddens has published children's books and written and performed music for the soundtrack of Red Dead Redemption II, one of the best-selling video games of all time. She sang for the Obamas at the White House; is a three-time NPR Tiny Desk Concert alum; and hosts her own show on PBS, My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, as well as the Aria Code podcast, which is produced by New York City’s NPR affiliate station WQXR.
"I've been able to create a lot of different things around stories that are difficult to tell, and managed to get them done in a way that's gotten noticed," as Giddens puts it. "I know who to collaborate with, and it has gotten me into all sorts of corners that I would have never expected when I started doing this."
Adia Victoria
"In her music, the blues is a baseline and a frame of mind, not a genre boundary; it pushes her to take risks. " The New York Times
“Adia Victoria sings on an arc between Memphis Minnie and Sojourner Truth.” – T Bone Burnett
"An eerie, acoustic-guitar-driven tune that expands to thick bass and a ghostly orchestra of strings and banjo, "Magnolia Blues" traces one woman's journey back home. In the process, it reclaims a piece of Southern iconography for all Southerners." Rolling Stone Magazine
Nominated for two American Music Awards
2022 Emerging act of the Year and Album of the Year
NEW ALBUM – A Southern Gothic featuring Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Matt Berninger, and Kyshona Armstrong
Adia Victoria is a daughter of the South, a born and bred South Carolinian who now makes her home in Nashville, Tennessee. It is no surprise, then, that stories of the South find their way into her music, into the lyrics she pens and the chords she plays. It has been the case through her first two albums—2016’s Beyond the Bloodhounds and 2019’s Silences—and it remains so for third full-length effort, A Southern Gothic. This time, though, the stories don’t just belong to Victoria.
Sonically, A Southern Gothic is full of frequent juxtaposition. It is equal parts historical montage and modern prophesy, dark and light, love and loathing. Put simply, it is the musical embodiment of the relationship that so many people, especially Black women, have with the South. Indeed, even as Victoria’s lyrics feel weighted by a Southern heaviness that is so often smothering, the music is also buoyed by rhythm and melody that illuminate the best of what this region has to offer.
Recording for A Southern Gothic began in Paris in 2019/early 2020, and it was while in France that Victoria discovered a sense of clarity about her home that she didn’t always have when she was writing from her home.
Without excess or access—to musicians, producers, studio—Victoria and Hickman became a two-man band of sorts, connecting over Victoria’s collection of Southern tales as they tried to keep the pandemic from killing them. Hickman taught himself mandolin and banjo while Victoria cut drum and piano parts. And later, even when the world began tore-open, vaccines became available, and Victoria was able to get in the studio with executive producer T-Bone Burnett, the recordings that Victoria and Hickman had done on their own remained.
The result is a project that fits perfectly into Victoria’s catalogue and the rich legacy of Black Southern storytelling, even as it stands alone as a freshly innovative work.
Adds Victoria: “With this project, I was so anchored in the past and the Black brilliance that came before me that it was kind of a road map. They said, ‘Sweetie, we’re gonna locate you, and we’re gonna allow you to move it forward.’”
