Kimaya Diggs Finds a Complicated Kind of Home on ‘Green’

The backyard behind Kimaya Diggs’ home holds one version of belonging. Woods give way to farmland, native plants grow where invasive species once stood, and birds and insects populate a landscape she has spent years tending. That relationship with the land helps explain Green, her new album, released October 2. Its title suggests growth, but the record’s questions concern the conditions that make growth possible.

Raised in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Diggs has spent much of her life in the western part of the state. Her connection to its rivers, mountains and wildlife exists alongside the social isolation she has sometimes experienced as a Black and Desi artist in a predominantly white environment. Across Green, home becomes something that can offer comfort and leave essential needs unmet at the same time.

Recent single “Plants (Still Grow)” gives that tension a particularly personal setting. Conceived as a love letter to New England summer, the song connects intimacy and memory with the natural world. Its Eli Howe-directed video, filmed largely in Diggs’ backyard, brings the album’s sense of place back to the landscape that helped shape it.

“A Sense of Place,” a spoken-word piece featuring Lizzie No, addresses the question more directly. Its subject is the distance between social displacement and a deep attachment to the land itself. Including that distinction allows Diggs to examine belonging without reducing it to a choice between staying and leaving.

The album’s other concerns emerge from a difficult period that included the deaths of her mother, a close friend and her dog Quincy, the onset of a disabling autoimmune disease, and the abrupt end of a close friendship. Those experiences informed an early search for a way to prevent further pain. Over the course of making the record, that search developed into a question about enduring uncertainty while remaining compassionate and open.

Diggs gives these ideas room to take different musical forms. Green moves among indie pop, soul, R&B, folk, rock and spoken word, with her role as lead producer providing a consistent point of view. The foundational sessions took place over three days at Nashville’s Barnfire Creative, where drummer Erick Slick of Dr. Dog joined a band assembled with help from bassist Rhees Williams.

The release arrives with a return to a familiar stage: Northampton’s Academy of Music Theatre, where Diggs will celebrate the album on October 10 with special guest Alisa Amador. Northeast and Southeast dates follow through November. For an album concerned with the complicated meaning of home, that hometown opening has a fitting significance: Green begins its public life in the region whose beauty and contradictions helped bring it into being.