I meet Kimaya Diggs in a verdant field. Her eye shadow is the color of the sky; her brown eyes blaze against bronze skin that glows already. Jet-black curls, parted in the middle, cascade towards her collarbone. At 5’10”, she is commanding, elegant.
We sit on the bike path behind Eastworks in Easthampton, a location she picked because it’s surrounded by trees. Her new album, “Green,” celebrates the beauty of the Valley and the nature of beginnings. At 33, the musician has reckoned with more losses than some see in a lifetime. Her mother. Her dog. Her health. Her voice, which thankfully has been restored and reinvigorated. “Green” is the first album that showcases the high notes she can hit, now that her scars have healed.
Behind us, surrounded by orange netting, sits a mountain of soil as tall as the lone basketball hoop beside it. Next spring, she tells me excitedly, it will bloom into a long-awaited skatepark. The season that “Green” represents is all about possibility — promise that is cultivated, that eventually arrives like clockwork.
On Saturday, Oct. 10, the Northampton-based musician, a genre-bending world-builder who has opened for Grammy-winner Mavis Staples, will kick off her “Green” album release tour at the Academy of Music. The album, lead produced by Diggs, is ultimately a collaboration of about 90 local artists. She started with a question: What makes someplace feel like home — is it the people, or the land? In 12 songs, the community claimed her.
Diggs, whose writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, approached her album, which dropped on Oct. 2, with a second question, a prickly one:
How good do I have to be so that bad things stop happening to me?
Is it better or worse that the good things came first? The singer, who grew up in South Hadley, never knew a life without music. Her parents were dancers. She and her siblings toured libraries as the Knock a Noodlehead Sister Singers. Everyone acted in a local production of “The Music Man.” The family song? “September,” by Earth, Wind & Fire.
Cue the horns! Do you remember / The 21st night of September? / Love was changin’ the minds of pretenders / While chasin’ the clouds away.
On her own, Diggs imagined an audience bigger than the local library’s. Locked in her family’s first-floor bathroom, she turned off the lights and belted Whitney Houston ballads in the dark. She couldn’t see them, but she could sense the hundreds of people stunned into silence in the shadows.
At Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, Diggs discovered opera. “I’ll sometimes describe myself as a theater artist disguised as a musician,” she tells me. “Because I think of myself, especially when I perform, as someone who’s presenting a play or an opera, a start-to-finish story that is supposed to carry you through an arc where the main character is changed and so are you, as an audience member.”
What change blooms in me? Sitting on a black bench in Millside Park, I lean towards her, awaiting our evolution.
At 24, her first album, “Breastfed,” was a reckoning with her mother’s years-long battle with metastatic breast cancer — and her mom’s desire to keep the diagnosis private until she passed. Soon Diggs sustained a vocal hemorrhage, and following surgery, she couldn’t speak for two weeks. The storyteller, silenced, pondered a life without her voice.
As the musician practiced endless tongue twisters for her own eventual ease — She stood on the balcony, inexplicably mimicking him hiccupping and amicably welcoming him in. She stood on the balcony, inexplicably mimicking him hiccupping and amicably welcoming him in. She stood on the balcony, inexplicably mimicking him hiccupping — her mother passed, followed by her rescued greyhound, Quincy Bones. Then came an autoimmune diagnosis, and the beginning of a chronic standoff with her body.
At 29, in the midst of a sorrow so profound that she had trouble feeling anything, Diggs jumped into the ocean.
In the middle of February, it was electrifying.
In a standalone essay in Split Lip magazine that is also part of her forthcoming memoir, she writes:
‘Go,’ I whispered to myself as my feet touched the steely gray water. Go, I repeated in my mind as I kept running. I was in at my knees, in at my waist, I flung myself face down through the waves, felt the water rake its frigid fingers through my curls and along my scalp. My skin tightened everywhere at once and I felt the most recent wave recede, pulling me out into the sea only as I surfaced and gasped like I’d never tasted air before. Water, flung from my hair, fell in front of me like pebbles. My legs worked like pistons and I was on the shore, skin suddenly aflame and blooming …
“It was just taking this universe-sized grief, and then bringing it down,” she remembers. “Being in the water in the wintertime, you can’t think about anything else, and that was the first time my brain realized, ‘OK, there is something else.’”
But then came the questions, relentless like waves: Why had she lost so much, so fast? Had she had it coming? What now? What next?
“I reached this crossroads where I had to go: Either I’ve been so terrible that I have no chance of being good enough to be rewarded by the universe, or perhaps these things are not correlated at all,” she explains.
And there it was: daylight. An opening.
On the final track of “Green,” Diggs sings about the moments in the mornings, following her mother’s death. Her mom was gone forever, but Diggs was still here, awake:
Daylight is daybreak is stay with me / Baby where you belong / Head on the pillow your mind on the wind / While I write this song / I can’t think of all the words to say / But I’ll try to say it anyway
Other songs on the album explore the idea of being “born free,” without the trappings of a narrative. Diggs toes the line between acceptance and accountability, shaking hands with the hand she’s been dealt, negotiating with it, collaborating with it, leading it onto the dance floor:
Come on up, you got your shoes on / It’s okay, put your good moves on / Dance with me, dance with me / Out on the floor, it’s a new world for me / I’m finally home, it’s where I want to be
In songs like “Dance with me,” infused with soul, jazz, pop and funk, Diggs keeps her own time. She also welcomes collaborators, like her husband Jacob Rosazza, who co-produced the album and plays bass in the local band LuxDeluxe. “I just set out to work with people that I know and love, and it turns out that I have become surrounded with so many incredible artists,” she says, noting that Trevor Healy made her guitar, Lizzie No played the harp on a spoken-word track on the album, and dozens of dancers and actors and crew members helped create 12 music videos, one for each song.
That said, she has also felt “captive” at times, as a person of color in western Massachusetts, which she says can feel “isolating in a way that feels like my fullest expression is stifled.” Her three albums thus far — “Breastfed”; “Quincy,” released in 2023; and “Green” — have all been opportunities to stake her claim on her experience while calling out what she can’t control.
As she sings in “I know that I’m perfect”:
I was born between two worlds / Like a clenched fist, like an open hand / The bearer of everything / With nothing to lose.
But in the same song, there is agency, too:
I was born to be free / And that that is mine cannot part from me / The blood flows through me / It’s something I choose
This Saturday, Diggs will play through her new album, accompanied by the local trio Road Dogs and a seven-piece band. Alisa Amador, winner of NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2022, will open the show. “I’m pulling out all the stops with this one,” says Diggs, smiling with her whole mouth.
She returns to the essence of “Green”: “There’s just this moment in spring, you know, like the three days where all the leaves pop, and to me, that moment is filled with infinite potential.”
Potential to reflect, potential to dream, potential to rage, potential to love.
I hear it in her story. I feel it in my body — the hum of all that freedom.
Visit kimayadiggs.com to join her mailing list, purchase “Green,” and buy tickets to her album release on Oct. 10. Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.
