Rhiannon Giddens has been a force in roots music for years, first with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and now as a solo artist. But with Tomorrow Is My Turn, she’s stepping even further into the spotlight—whether she likes it or not.
“I started off as a vocalist, you know? I went to school for vocals,” Giddens says. “I always knew someday I wanted to do a vocal record, but I was so focused on the Chocolate Drops, and I didn’t want to pull focus from them. I always kept my singing as a piece of it so it didn’t become ‘me and the backup Drops.’”
Of course, now it is her name front and center. But don’t call this a vanity project—Giddens is here to serve the song, not herself. “For me, it’s always about the story. What am I trying to communicate? Am I doing that?” she explains. “I want to make it my own, sure, but if I play the story right, if I’m with the right musicians and the right producer, I don’t have to worry about that—it’ll happen. I just have to communicate.”
If Giddens seems hesitant about the spotlight, it makes sense. The album title Tomorrow Is My Turn invites easy assumptions about its meaning, but she swears it wasn’t chosen to signal some kind of ‘finally, it’s my moment’ narrative. “I knew naming it that would lead to that question,” she says, exasperated. “It’s not about me—it’s about the emotional centerpiece of the record. I just hate that kind of framing, the ‘Look at me, I’m stepping out!’ thing. I was like, ‘Do we have to put my picture on the cover?’”
One artist she doesn’t mind the spotlight on? Nina Simone. Giddens has long been a fan, and with Simone experiencing yet another cultural resurgence thanks to a documentary and—controversially—a long-delayed biopic, she has thoughts. “Nina always deserves as much ink as can be written about her,” she says. “She was a singular American artist, a genius, one of the ultimate interpreters. I mean, I just found an aria—an opera aria—that she did in a jazz way. And I was like, ‘Of course she did it first.’”
Simone was also known for her politically charged music, a legacy that feels frustratingly relevant today. “I’ve been listening to a lot of her stuff lately, and it’s just… unfortunate how much it still makes sense,” Giddens says. “I mean, Mississippi Goddamn? You could play it right now, and it wouldn’t feel like history—it would feel like the present.”
Giddens herself is no stranger to protest music. She released a song in response to the Charleston church shooting, and her track We Rise is another call for action. But she’s pragmatic about the power of music. “I used to ask artists, ‘Can a song change the world?’ And I’d get mixed answers,” I tell her. “Now I think I should be asking, ‘How can a song change the world?’”
Her response? “Songs don’t change anything—people do,” she says. “Music is incredibly important. Art is one of the most fundamental aspects of the human experience. Our job as artists is to take an emotion, put it into a song, and hope that someone reacts to it emotionally and is inspired to do something. I’ve been inspired to act by music before. That’s what we’re here to do.”
It’s not an easy job, though. “It’s a terrible time to be a folk artist,” she laughs. “Unless you’re talking about the state of the world, in which case, it’s a great time to be a folk artist. But in terms of exposure? Nobody’s hearing this stuff. Folk music isn’t breaking through. We’ve got public radio, which is important, but compared to the ‘60s? It’s night and day.”
That leads to a bigger concern: Who’s actually hearing these songs? “Are we just preaching to the choir?” she wonders. “Is it just, ‘Oh, nice protest song, I agree with you 100%—anyway, let’s all go back to our lives’? Meanwhile, the people who need to hear it aren’t getting it.”
She points to artists like Janelle Monáe and Kendrick Lamar as examples of musicians reaching beyond their core audience. “Janelle’s really stepping into that role, and Kendrick, too, though I wonder if he’s mostly talking to people who are already on his side,” she says. “I mean, look at my video—it got posted on NPR. And I love NPR! But, you know, we’re all on the same team there. No ground is being broken.”
The solution? Organizing, collaborating, and getting creative about how messages spread. “Maybe four of us don’t need to write four separate protest songs—maybe we need to get together and write one and make it count,” she suggests.
Her ultimate goal isn’t just making music—it’s leaving something behind that matters. “I’m not worried about my career. I’m not worried about whether I say the right thing,” she says. “When I get to my last day, I just want to feel good about what I’ve put into the world.”
And what does that mean in the short term? “It means I’m a musician first. I’m not a public speaker, I’m not a politician. My job is to make music,” she says. “I’m not gonna be on Twitter talking about Trump—that’s not my lane. But I will write a song about Kalief Browder.”
It’s that clarity of purpose that makes Giddens so compelling—whether she’s reinterpreting a classic, writing her own protest song, or juggling it all while raising a family. “I feel like I have a unique vantage point,” she says. “And I think it’s one that needs to be heard.”
Rhiannon Giddens' Tomorrow Is My Turn is out now, and it’s more than just an album—it’s a statement.
