Rhiannon Giddens
“One of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.” – American Songwriter
Grammy award-winning singer and instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grantee, and now Pulitzer Prize-winner, Rhiannon Giddens is no stranger to Big Ears Festival. Her singular, iconic career, which also includes composing for opera, ballet, and film, has stretched her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. She 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. For her highly anticipated third solo studio album – and first album of all originals – You’re The One, Giddens recruited producer Jack Splash to help her bring this collection of songs that she’d written over the course of her career to life. 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 twelve-person ensemble, they drew from the folk music that Giddens knows so deeply as well as its pop descendants.
