Kimaya Diggs moves from survival toward gratitude on the road to Green
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Newsdesk
Kimaya Diggs began her forthcoming album with a difficult question: how good would a person have to become to stop painful things from happening? By the time she completed Green, that question had evolved into something more sustainable. The Western Massachusetts songwriter had started thinking about how to endure life’s inevitable losses while remaining open, curious, compassionate, and alive.
Her new single, “Plants (Still Grow)”, approaches that larger transformation through the tender scale of one New England summer. It follows a relationship as experiences gather into shared history, capturing the point when present-tense happiness begins to resemble a future memory.
The landscape surrounding Diggs’ rural home supplies the song with its grounding. Rivers, summer greenery, backyard plants, fireflies, and red squirrels all belong to a place she knows intimately. That knowledge brings peace, but it also raises the central question running through Green: whether belonging grows from the land itself or from the people with whom a life is built.
Diggs’ answer remains fluid. Her community changes over time, and the feeling of being at home shifts with it. As a Black and Desi artist living in a mostly white farm town, she experiences the beauty of the setting alongside an undercurrent of unease. Close relationships with kin and fellow outsiders provide a necessary counterweight.
The song’s video, directed by Eli Howe, was filmed largely in Diggs’ backyard. Its setting makes the album’s ideas visible without separating them from everyday life. The natural world in “Plants (Still Grow)” is observed, tended, remembered, and connected to human relationships.
Green follows Diggs’ 2023 album Quincy, a record closely tied to grief and caregiving. It also follows a long recovery from vocal surgery seven years ago. Diggs considers the new album the first on which she could use the full power of her restored voice, adding another meaning to its preoccupation with survival and growth.
The record represents a creative arrival as well. Diggs served as its lead producer, beginning the recording process by searching for the right drummer and eventually traveling to Nashville to work with Dr. Dog’s Erick Slick. Basic tracks were completed over three days at Barnfire Creative with a band assembled with assistance from bassist Rhees Williams. Diggs also engineered roughly a quarter of the album herself.
Listeners can watch “Plants (Still Grow)” here and pre-save Green ahead of its October 2 release. A hometown celebration at Northampton’s Academy of Music Theatre follows on October 10. The single offers a quiet but revealing view of the album’s larger journey, showing how gratitude can take root without requiring uncertainty or pain to disappear.
