Rhiannon Giddens’ Hope Is The Thing With Feathers Out Today

September 18, 2026 — Pulitzer Prize-winning, two-time GRAMMY Award-winning artist and MacArthur Fellow Rhiannon Giddens today releases her seventh album, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, via Nonesuch Records. https://rhiannongiddens.lnk.to/hopeisthething. The album has been met with praise, extensive international profiles including in Variety, The Observer and beyond, and featured in the New York Times fall albums preview.  

Today Giddens has also shared a music video for the title track. The timelapse video captures the creation of the album cover artwork, a six-by-six foot patchwork quilt made by textile artist Uzoma Samuel Anyanwu based on a photograph by Ebru Yildiz.

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEfmRXYCguc 

The ten-song album, recorded mostly live in the studio, gathers musicians and traditions that have shaped Giddens across more than two decades into the same room. Recorded at The Cypress House in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, Hope Is the Thing with Feathershighlights the magic of people making music together. Musicians speak, stomp, listen and respond to one another in real time, making the room itself part of the record.

The result is a living map of the expansive American musical story Giddens has spent her career bringing into fuller view. Old songs live next to new ones. Rather than treating tradition as something fixed in the past, Giddens shows it as a language that continues to move, change and become something new.

“Louisiana, the Congo, Italy, the Carolinas—all of these influences and people coming together to make something: that is American music,” says Giddens. “It’s how American music came to be, and that was the original thought of creating a band with the musicians that I’ve been playing with for years, and featured on this album.”

Giddens, a North Carolina native who lives much of the year in Ireland, performs lead vocals, minstrel banjo and fiddle. She is joined by a circle of longtime collaborators that reflects the breadth of her musical life, including Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu, longtime bassist Jason Sypher, and Louisiana musician Dirk Powell, who co-produced, engineered and mixed the album with Giddens. The record also reunites her with fellow North Carolinian Justin Robinson, her first bandmate and fellow founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and with members of Giddens’ family.

On Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, original material sits beside songs inherited from artists whose work helped shape Giddens’ own. “Carolina Rain,” written by Giddens and Powell, draws listeners into the album’s world, while her interpretation of North Carolina icon Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” reduces the song to its elemental core: Giddens’ voice and Powell’s acoustic guitar. She also turns to Ola Belle Reed’s “High on a Mountain,” Pura Fé’s “Going Home” and traditional material including “Cluck Old Hen” and “Walk with Me,” the latter sung with her sister Lalenja Harrington.

The album takes its name from Emily Dickinson’s poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” but its sense of hope is rooted firmly in the tangible: people finding one another, carrying histories forward and creating something together. In many ways, the record distills the story Giddens has been telling throughout her career: that American music is far larger, Blacker and more interconnected than the traditional canon has often allowed. If much of her work has been devoted to recovering histories that were overlooked or erased, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers asks what happens when those histories are allowed to live together in the present.

Earlier this week, Giddens also announced a new run of 2027 tour dates, with stops in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and more. Tickets for the newly announced dates go on sale today, September 18, at 10am local time. Full routing is listed below.

The album arrives amid an extraordinary period of creative expansion for Giddens. She served as a music consultant and contributed original music to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, created new music for Ken Burns’ PBS documentary The American Revolution and co-authored Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black Music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo with historian Kristina R. Gaddy. She also recently launched the Biscuits & Banjos Foundation, expanding the mission behind her sold-out Durham festival into a nonprofit celebrating the African diaspora’s role in shaping American culture, and will make her leading-role film debut in the forthcoming An Ode To Mary Jowhile continuing her work as Artistic Director of the Silkroad Ensemble.

That work extends into the public sphere this weekend, as Giddens joins Return of the Buffalo: Tatanka Owe Akupi as one of its featured artists. Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse, The Walk Productions and KBH Arts, the monumental free public art project will send a herd of 40 life-size buffalo puppets through the streets of Lower Manhattan on September 18 and Downtown Brooklyn on September 19, accompanied by artistic activations along the routes. Created by Amir Nizar Zuabi in partnership with Elders from Lenape and Lakota communities, the project brings artists, tribal leaders and communities together around public memory, land and cultural history.

Track List

1. Angel Fire Rise
2. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
3. Step Away Blues 
4. Wish in Vain
5. Carolina Rain
6. High on a Mountain
7. Freight Train
8. Walk with Me
9. Cluck Old Hen
10. Going Home

Tour Dates:

Sep 22 – Groningen, Netherlands – De Oosterpoort

Sep 23 – Antwerp, Belgium – De Roma

Sep 24 – Utrecht, Netherlands – TivoliVredenburg

Sep 26 – Paris, France – Alhambra

Sep 27 – Luxembourg, Luxembourg – Philharmonie Luxembourg

Sep 29 – Manchester, United Kingdom – Albert Hall

Sep 30 – Dublin, Ireland – Vicar Street

Oct 01 – Cork, County Cork – Cyprus Avenue

Oct 03 – Belfast, UK – Ulster Hall

Nov 01 – Minneapolis, MN – Walker Art Center (Mack Lecture Series)

Nov 14 – New York, NY – Carnegie Hall (with Silkroad Ensemble & Yo-Yo Ma)

Nov 25 – Hamburg, Germany – Elbphilharmonie – Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi: When I Am Laid In Earth

Nov 26 – Hamburg, Germany – Elbphilharmonie – Juba Zinga Jubilee: Bringing Early Banjo Music Back Home

Nov 27 – Hamburg, Germany – Elbphilharmonie – Go Back and Fetch It: Rhiannon Giddens & Kristina Gaddy – A Book Talk

Nov 28 – Hamburg, Germany – Elbphilharmonie – Rhiannon Giddens & Friends: The People Could Fly – African Diasporic Re-connections Across the Atlantic

Nov 29 – Hamburg, Germany – Elbphilharmonie – Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens – Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual

Dec 06 – London, United Kingdom – KOKO

Dec 07 – Edinburgh, Scotland – Assembly Rooms

Dec 08 – Gateshead, United Kingdom – The Glasshouse – Sage Two

Jan 30, 2027 – Denver, CO – Newman Center for the Performing Arts

Feb 09, 2027 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore

Feb 11, 2027 – San Diego, CA – Jacobs Music Center

Feb 20, 2027 – Pittsburgh, PA – Byham Theater

Feb 22, 2027 – Toronto, Canada – Massey Hall

Feb 23, 2027 – Montreal, QC – Beanfield Theater

Feb 24,2027 – Ridgefield, CT – Ridgefield Playhouse

Feb 27, 2027 – Brooklyn, NY – Kings Theatre 

Feb 28, 2027 – Washington, DC – The Anthem

* Performance with Silkroad Ensemble — Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual

About Rhiannon Giddens

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 multi-instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, Pulitzer Prize winner, 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.

Giddens has released three previous albums under her own name and two in collaboration with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, all on Nonesuch Records. American Railroad, her first album in collaboration with the Silkroad Ensemble, was released by the label in November 2024. A collaboration with Justin Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, was released by Nonesuch in April 2025.

A founding member of the landmark Black string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, and the all-female banjo supergroup, Our Native Daughters, Giddens is as much a curator as a creator. She is the current Artistic Director of the Yo-Yo Ma-founded Silkroad Ensemble, hosted a TV show on PBS, My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, and has hosted two podcasts (Aria Code from New York City’s NPR affiliate station WQXR, which ran for three seasons, and American Railroad from Silkroad). Giddens has published two 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 was a music consultant for 2025’s landmark film Sinners, and appeared as a recurring cast member on ABC's hit drama Nashville and as a music history expert on Ken Burns’ Country Music series on PBS. In 2025, she launched her own music festival in Durham, NC called Biscuits & Banjos, to celebrate Black culture outside the mainstream, and in 2026 she turned that initiative into a Foundation to house her mission-based work, the Biscuits and Banjos Foundation.

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.”