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Grammy- and Pulitzer-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens, one of the leading artists in the roots and Americana realm, has signed with WME for representation in music worldwide, she and the agency announced Tuesday.
The
move comes as Giddens prepares to unveil her seventh studio album, “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers,” on Sept. 18 on Nonesuch Records, a release that was first announced and previewed with an interview in Variety.
The singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist described the forthcoming album as a sort of culmination — or “punctuation point” — to “20 years of me being a roots and Americana artist.” She explained, “I feel so beautiful about so many things, amidst the just horrible nature of what’s going on in the world right now. So it’s a weird position, but I just will just continue to fight all of that with joy and kindness.” A new single, “Carolina Rain,” was released to preview the album.
Giddens’ shelf of honors includes the Pulitzer Prize for Music she was awarded in 2023 for her opera, “Omar,” written about Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar in Africa who found himself sold into slavery in the 1800s. She has also won the National Humanities Medal, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and two Grammys, including the best folk album prize for 2021’s “They’re Calling Me Home.”
Her collaborative efforts in pop culture have included appearing on the “Sinners” soundtrack — and being in the band that represented that music at the Oscars — and playing banjo on Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ‘Em.”
She has been a proponent for expanding awareness of the African American roots of the banjo. Those efforts have included live extravaganzas like her Biscuits & Banjos Festival in her native North Carolina last year, as well as a Hollywood Bowl concert, “Rhiannon Giddens: American Tunes,” in 2025 that featured guests including Steve Martin and Our Native Daughters, her all-female, all-banjo playing supergroup.
This summer, Giddens embarked on a short concert series titled “American Tunes: Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” celebrating the American songbook with guests including Mavis Staples, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Hurray for the Riff Raff. Apart from that, she has continued to do concerts with the Silkroad Ensemble, the Yo-Yo Ma-founded collective for which she serves as artistic director, with the theme for this year’s shows being “Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual.”
Her books range from “Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black Music in the Americas,” written with Kristina R. Gaddy, to two children’s books. She was seen as an expert witness in Ken Burns’ “Country Music” series on PBS and contributed music to his forthcoming “The American Revolution” documentary.
Giddens recently filmed her first lead role in a motion picture, “An Ode to Mary Joe,” afilm on which she also serves as executive producer and music supervisor. She stars in the movie alongside Ed Helms, Jason Isbell, Steve Earle, Regina Taylor and John Sayles.
Talking about her forthcoming “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers” album with Variety, Giddens said, “I’d say it was really all about celebrating my musical family. It’s been the last 20 years — 21 years, really, if I date it back to 2005, when I met the other original Chocolate Drops at the Black Banjo Gathering; that’s kind of where I place the beginning of my career. Along the way I’ve made many musical friends, and the family slowly expands over the years, and so what happens is that we have this deep musical common language that we’ve developed by playing with each other. So I had all the different branches that I could — everything but Silkroad Ensemble, really — come together for this record. It’s all the people that I’ve been creating music with over the years, including my blood family, who were the first people that I made music with when I was 4 or 5 years old, when I started singing with my sister. It means a lot to have so many people represented on one project.”
Of the lyrics for “Carolina Rain,” which speak to placing art and humanity before money, Giddens said, “It just says a lot of things that I believe. You know, I am not really made for this industry.… I mean, it’s just like, I’m not really made for this world. And I’m having a career in spite of that. So I’m super grateful that I get to do what I do, that I get to foreground the musicians that I get to foreground and be a part of what I’m doing.
“For me, the verses say a lot. We’re so focused on money and stature and status that we’re destroying ourselves and our environment. And I don’t know that a song does anything other than just create a moment that maybe makes people think of something, or maybe makes them feel good for a second. But if I’m gonna make a song, I’m gonna make a song that has my philosophy in it, you know? And that a lot of people that I know, including my collaborators on the record, we’re all making music because we believe in it and we love it, not to be famous and rich and all that stuff. So that really kind of plants a flag in the sand as far as I’m concerned, for what I think and feel.”
