With Green, Kimaya Diggs takes the producer’s seat

Kimaya Diggs began the recording process for Green with a practical decision: find the right drummer. She wanted groove and the natural energy of musicians playing together to anchor the album, and that priority guided the sessions toward Nashville. It is a revealing starting point for a record whose personal subject matter could easily overshadow the work involved in shaping it.

At Barnfire Creative, Diggs recorded the foundational tracks over three days with Erick Slick of Dr. Dog on drums. Bassist Rhees Williams, a longtime friend from her performing arts high school days, helped assemble the band. The arrangement placed a clear musical intention at the beginning of the process, before the album’s many themes had to find their finished forms.

Released October 2, Green represents Diggs’ most complete undertaking as a producer. She led the production and engineered roughly a quarter of the record herself, with additional production from Jacob Rosazza and Ben Sanders. Scott Hundley handled the mix. Those credits describe a collaborative project with Diggs responsible for its overall direction.



That direction accommodates indie pop, soul, R&B, folk, rock and spoken word. Her formative influences include Stevie Wonder, Minnie Riperton, Lauryn Hill, D’Angelo and Corinne Bailey Rae, among others. Rather than assigning the album a single genre identity, its framework connects songs through questions of home, goodness and change, allowing different approaches to address different parts of the story.

The subjects themselves require that flexibility. “Dance With Me” draws on the pleasure of growing up in a family of dancers, while “A Sense of Place,” featuring Lizzie No, examines the conflict between social displacement and attachment to New England’s landscape.
“Plants (Still Grow)” brings intimacy, memory and summer into the same frame. These are related concerns, but they do not ask for identical treatment.

Diggs’ production role also coincides with an important change in her relationship to singing. A vocal injury sustained while studying opera led to surgery, weeks of silence and years of recovery. Green is the first album on which she feels able to access the full power of her voice again. Her authority over the recording therefore carries both a technical and a personal dimension.

The record’s scale is worth clarifying: its 13-song track list includes “Little Sister,” available exclusively on CD and Bandcamp. The album can be streamed and downloaded now, with physical and additional listening options available through Diggs’ Bandcamp. Across those formats, Green documents an artist making decisions about the musicians, the recording process and the shape of her own story.