Amazing Grace

RHIANNON Giddens sits in her kitchen, hair pulled back, wearing a maroon sweatshirt, waiting for the washing machine to finish its final, furious cycle. For the past year, the Grammy-winning singer, fiddle and banjo player has been shored up at her home in Limerick, discovering, for the first time in 16 years, how to live a life other than that of a touring musician. It has not been an entirely elegant process. “Everything has been a learning curve,” she says: the relentless slog of cleaning and housekeeping, the notion of keeping more than two weeks’ worth of food in the house, teaching herself how to cook the dishes she remembered from growing up in North Carolina. “I probably went overboard baking biscuits,” she says. “Just to try and fill that creativity.”

This is the longest Giddens has ever been away from her American homeland. Although she relocated to Ireland when her children, now eight and 12, began Gaelic-language school – and her new partner and musical collaborator, Francesco Turrisi, is also based in the country – she has travelled back and forth between the States and Ireland every few weeks. Last year, of all years, was a particularly hard time to be away from America. As the Black Lives Matter movement spilled out across the country and the November election was followed in January by the storming of the Capitol, Giddens looked on with a feeling of helplessness. “All I could think about was what was going on in my home and how I couldn’t be there,” she says. “Not that I think I could have done anything, but even just to add to the conversation, to be a positive energy there, to support the people doing the work… It was really tough to feel I was stuck here.”

She wrote a song, “Build A House”, with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, to mark Juneteenth – the annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. “What can I say about what’s been happening, what’s happened, and what continues to happen?” she wrote on Twitter. “There are too many