Rhiannon Giddens goes big on the album Hope is the Thing With Feathers

Rhiannon Giddens has a new album out, and when NPR put it to her that she had gone for large emotions this time, her answer was that it is time for them. Folk music, she said, is always there for exactly that, and she is feeling it more than ever at the moment. The record is called Hope is the Thing With Feathers.

Wish In Vain, one of the songs NPR played, is about refugees. Giddens described people at the mercy of huge forces, capitalism and environments being destroyed and states fighting each other, with almost no power of their own. Her sympathy, she said, always sits with the people who have none.

Carolina Rain goes somewhere more personal. She called it a song about longing and remembering, then widened it: she is going through menopause, almost 50, and at the stage of asking what she actually wants rather than what she was told to want. Money and success turn out to be hollow without other people, she said, and human connection is in short supply in a period where the technology delivering everything is also dividing everyone.

Freight Train is Elizabeth Cotten's, the North Carolina guitarist the Seegers discovered and handed a guitar. Giddens stayed away from it for a long time because it is so well known and so thoroughly done, and waited until she was in the right place to try. Recording it was a way of leaning into the musical lineage she comes from rather than arguing with the industry, on the basis that a voice and a guitar is sometimes all a song needs.

The argument she did want to have was about artificial intelligence. Generative systems trained on the work of living and dead artists feel like an attack to her, because the process of making something is the point and the engagement with other people is what the process is for. Her response has been to head in the opposite direction: writing with a fountain pen in notebooks, and making a record two years ago outdoors with Justin Robinson, locusts and all, which she hoped was un-AI-able. She was quick to add that being able to work that way is a privilege. The wider fight is still running through the industry, from Spotify flagging AI artists to the copyright cases against the generators.

Cluck Old Hen, an Appalachian tune, shows the other half of her method. It opens traditionally and then the tempo shifts and the whole thing turns into a jam. Giddens distinguishes interpretation from covering: in traditional music the tune is only the bones, it has been around forever, and it changes a little with every generation of hands that touches it, varying by region and era. So you sit down and you play it with people you know, and they recorded it in one take.

Giddens has won close to every honour available in music and has worked with Paul Simon, Yo-Yo Ma and Beyonce. This record, filed between country and jazz, is on the release calendar with the rest of the autumn.