On Green, Kimaya Diggs Makes Room for Anger, Joy and Gratitude
The opening song on Kimaya Diggs’ Green establishes that the album’s interest in growth includes confrontation. “I Know That I’m Perfect” turns anger over an ex-boyfriend’s attempt to pressure her into having children into an assertion of bodily autonomy. It is a pointed beginning for a record that also examines compassion and remaining open to life.
Released October 2, Green approaches those ideas through a range of situations rather than a single emotional register. Diggs’ question about resilience concerns how to endure pain without becoming hardened. Placing a song about personal boundaries at the outset complicates any expectation that openness requires accommodation.
“Dance With Me” draws from another part of her experience: the joy of growing up in a family of dancers. Its presence broadens the record’s account of identity. Family enters the album through pleasure and movement as well as through the grief that informed its creation.
Collaboration provides further variation. “All The Way Through” features Jess Nolan, while Lizzie No appears on the spoken-word “A Sense of Place.” The latter examines Diggs’ simultaneous attachment to New England’s land and sense of social displacement within the region. That subject gives the album’s question of home a tension that cannot be resolved by affection alone.
Recent single “Plants (Still Grow)” considers place through intimacy, memory and summer. Its Eli Howe-directed video was filmed largely in Diggs’ backyard, bringing an actual location into the album’s discussion of belonging. The song’s seasonal focus offers a different scale from the explicit social questions of “A Sense of Place.”
At the other end of the track list, “Daylight” grew out of a gratitude practice Diggs developed after her mother’s death. The distance between that closer and the opening assertion of autonomy gives Green an interesting span. Both respond to difficult experience, but each identifies a different need.
The musical range supports that breadth, moving among soul, indie pop, R&B, folk, rock and spoken word. Diggs serves as lead producer, with foundational sessions recorded over three days at Barnfire Creative in Nashville. The full 13-song list includes “Little Sister,” a CD and Bandcamp exclusive. Taken together, the songs suggest an album willing to let emotional growth include several kinds of response, without forcing anger, joy and gratitude into the same shape.
