Rhiannon Giddens’ new album, They're Calling Me Home, recorded with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, is out now on Nonesuch Records (vinyl June 11). Giddens and Turrisi, who both live in Ireland when they aren’t on tour, have been there since March 2020 due to the pandemic. The two expats found themselves drawn to the music of their native and adoptive countries of America, Italy, and Ireland during lockdown. Exploring the emotions brought up by the moment, Giddens and Turrisi decamped to Hellfire, a small studio on a working farm outside of Dublin, to record these songs over six days. Giddens has released a video for "Avalon," an original song on the album, which you can watch here.
Rhiannon Giddens’ new album, They're Calling Me Home, recorded with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, is out now on Nonesuch Records (vinyl June 11) and is available here. Giddens and Turrisi, who both live in Ireland when they aren’t on tour, have been there since March 2020 due to the pandemic. The two expats found themselves drawn to the music of their native and adoptive countries of America, Italy, and Ireland during lockdown. Exploring the emotions brought up by the moment, Giddens and Turrisi decamped to Hellfire, a small studio on a working farm outside of Dublin, to record these songs over six days. The result is They're Calling Me Home, a twelve-track album that speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical "call home" of death, which has been a tragic reality for so many during the COVID-19 crisis.
"They're Calling Me Home is, without reservation, her finest work to date. Intimately recorded and emotionally accessible, it is a near perfect album," exclaims No Depression. The album "masterfully mixes the music of Ireland, Italy, Appalachia and heaven, says the AP. Uncut calls it "a sublime follow-up to 2019's there is no Other," finding that "Giddens' extraordinary voice hits new levels of resolute power." "Rhiannon's voice is as soaring and show-stopping as ever," says Brooklyn Vegan. "One of the most quietly beautiful and evocative records you’re likely to hear this year," adds Air Mail.
Giddens has also released a video for "Avalon," an original song on the album. The video, directed by Laura Sheeran in County Galway, Ireland, features choreography and performances by Stephanie Dufresne and Mintesinot Wolde. You can watch it here:
"There are pieces of our birth homes that musically speaking really came out in our comforting ourselves through music," Giddens told NPR's All Songs Considered, which premiered the song earlier this week. "There's the sad part of it, but then there's this undercurrent of joy that came out in the way it was written and the way we performed it."
This afternoon at 3pm ET, Giddens will also be a featured guest at the On Air Festival, in conversation with Hanif Abdurraqib for a live version of the Object of Sound podcast he hosts.
In the past two years alone Rhiannon Giddens has been profiled in the New Yorker, featured on multiple magazine covers, and appeared in Ken Burns' Country Music on PBS and Samuel L. Jackson's Epix series Enslaved, among other appearances. She received the inaugural Legacy of Americana Award at the Americana Awards & Honors, composed her first opera (with a forthcoming debut at Spoleto Festival USA), shared remote performances for the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and NPR’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert, and was named Artistic Director of the Silk Road Ensemble.
They’re Calling Me Home is the follow-up to Giddens’ 2019 album with Turrisi, there is no Other, of which Pitchfork said, “There are few artists so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration." Giddens earned a Grammy Award nomination (her sixth) for the album, which is at once a condemnation of “othering” and a celebration of the spread of ideas, connectivity, and shared experience.
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