Working on a monthly magazine like Uncut, with early promos and advanced deadlines, it can sometimes be easy to forget when specific albums actually come out. That’s been the case with Rhiannon Giddens’ “Tomorrow Is My Turn”, which I noticed over the weekend actually came out last week.

For someone who’s called her record “Tomorrow Is My Turn”, Giddens often seems mighty preoccupied with history. With her old-time string band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, she’s meticulously celebrated the role of African-Americans in their country’s folk music. More recently, she figured on the New Basement Tapes, a distaff presence in the group tasked by T Bone Burnett to at least try and pick up where Dylan left off in 1967.

Giddens’ place in that project, alongside marquee names like Elvis Costello and Marcus Mumford, earmarked her as a singer of whom great things were expected. An artful repositioning as a kind of new Norah Jones, with a conservatory-trained voice that could be as stentorian as it was tender, did not seem implausible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHnh8_8Cx7E

A scholarly long view, however, means that Giddens’ first solo album has turned out rather differently. While “Tomorrow Is My Turn” is certainly an expansive sampler of her range, it’s also an eloquent disquisition on the cultural paths that have kept intersecting, time and again, through the last century of American popular music. A key text here is the elemental field holler “Waterboy”, rendered pretty faithfully to Odetta’s version. Giddens’ performance of “Waterboy” stole the show at the Inside Llewyn Davis concert in New York, September 2013, and the clarity and force of her vocal make it an obvious highlight, But it’s also only a taster of what this supple, ambitious singer can do.

The exceptionally well-curated material is all drawn from women singers – if not always women writers – and does a fine job of placing Giddens at the nexus of a multiplicity of traditions. There’s a polished effortlessness to the way she can switch from the uncanny blues of Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words” to the tender swagger of “Don’t Let It Trouble Your Mind”, an early Dolly Parton gem. A rambunctious tilt at Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s proto-rock’n’roller, “Up Above My Head”, leads into to an exquisite, torchy take on Charles Aznavour’s “Tomorrow Is My Turn”, based on a Nina Simone version that Giddens found during one of her fact-finding missions on Youtube.

“O Love Is Teasin'”, meanwhile, learned from Peggy Seeger and Jean Ritchie, moves in the misty hinterland between Celtic folk and the Appalachians, not unlike some work by another T Bone client, Alison Krauss. It’s at this point, perhaps, that “Tomorrow Is My Turn” starts to feel kin to one of the real masterpieces in Burnett’s production catalogue, Krauss and Robert Plant’s “Raising Sand”. Like that album, there’s a prevailing intelligence, craftsmanship and good taste, which even a human beatbox-powered version of “Black Is The Color” can’t quite undermine. And Giddens, for all her poise, is an emotionally resonant as well as academically precise musician; Elizabeth Cotten’s “Shake Sugaree”, in particular, benefits from a striking lightness of touch.

“Tomorrow Is My Turn” ends with a play that seems both poignant and strategic. “Angel City”, the album’s sole new composition, was written by Giddens during the New Basement Tapes sessions, and has a measure, a stillness, that collapses the genre adventures which have preceded it, and eventually transcends them. Its theme, too, is the implicit theme of the whole album, and captures Giddens’ perspective as a new phase of her career begins. When you’ve learned so much, so diligently from the past, the possibilities of where you can go next are tantalising.

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Q&A

Did you always think you’d make a solo record?

Rhiannon Giddens: Eventually. The timing of it was a little surprising, because I was settling in to work on the next Carolina Chocolate Drops record. Then this lightning bolt happened [the response to her performance at the Inside Llewyn Davis concert] and everything changed. It was kind of… accelerated.

How do you think the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ concept connects to Tomorrow Is My Turn?

RG: It’s the same idea of highlighting history, highlighting the struggles of African Americans in the history of America, and the creation of American music, and all these very rich, deep things. But on this record I’ve been really thinking about women, and just being so grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, as a 21st Century woman in a First World country, realising that not everybody has that opportunity, and they didn’t in the past. I got really inspired by Nina Simone and Dolly Parton: these women are my heroes, they’re the reason I can do what I do.

The album’s a very effective sampler of your range – was that something you were conscious of when you were selecting the songs?

RG: I’ve always been a mimic, ever since I was a kid. I really try and crawl inside a style. But I didn’t so much want to showcase my ability, I wanted to show how well country and blues and celtic and gospel and all of this stuff go side by side. It’s like they’re not so far apart. We’re too genre-fied and too specialised and we should be able to have these things next to each other, mixing together to make the music that we love.

Not just about a girl in a band…

There is plenty of talk about music in Kim Gordon‘s memoir, but its animating force is disappointment. The book opens with Sonic Youth’s final performance; in November 2011 at the SWU Music & Arts Festival in São Paulo, Brazil. By then, Gordon and her husband and bandmate Thurston Moore are estranged after 30 years together; he has been unfaithful and she reflects on “a life’s work now inextricable from heartbreak”. Indeed, much of Girl As A Band is overshadowed by her relationship with Moore. But curiously, the book is often at its most interesting when discussing neither music nor Moore.

In her 1979 collection of essays, The White Album, Joan Didion noted, “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.” Didion was the sharp-eyed observer of cultural values and experiences in California during the 1960s and Seventies; a period, incidentally, which Kim Gordon knows very well.

Didion is clearly an influence on Gordon – like Didion, Gordon’s writing is precise, her tone unsentimental, and her eye for detail sharp. Although born in Rochester, New York, Gordon moved to California when she was five years old when her father accepted a professorship at UCLA. This was 1958, and much of the early part of her excellent memoir subsequently finds Gordon staking out California, much as Didion had done before her. “LA in the late Sixties had a desolation about it, a disquiet,” she writes. “More than anything, that had to do with a feeling, one that you still find in parts of the San Fernando Valley. There was a sense of apocalyptic expanse, of sidewalks and houses centipeding over mountains and going on forever, combined with a shrugging kind of anchorlessness. Growing up I was always aware of LA’s diffuseness, its lack of an attachment to anything other than its own good reflection in the mirror.”

In some ways, Girl In A Band is a self-deprecating title – evidently, Gordon is much more than that – but it is also an extremely limiting one. Any one expecting this to be a definitive biography of Sonic Youth, for instance, will be disappointed. Inevitably, Sonic Youth play a critical part in this book; but this is much more than just an account of life in a band. In fact, the strongest parts of Girl In A Band are Gordon’s observations of California during the dissonance of the Sixties. “Back then, there were lots of eccentric bearded guys dressed in white roaming round LA,” she notes; indeed, her brother, Keller, is invited up to “the ranch” by Manson acolyte Bobby Beausoleil, while one of Keller’s ex girlfriends is abducted and later found stabbed to death.

Although Gordon’s parents were both liberal intellectuals – jazz, “Venice beatnik guys” and documentary filmmakers figure highly in the early chapters -– the dominant figure during her childhood was Keller, a “sadistic, arrogant” figure who is later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Gradually, Gordon’s artistic temperament surfaces; she enrolls at Santa Monica College in 1972 and moves to Venice where her landlord is a former CSNY roadie. She becomes friendly with Bruce Berry, a relative of Jan Berry from Jan and Dean, and she finds herself in “Jan’s house high in the hills, a cheesy contemporary glass box on a tacky hilltop in a would-be neighbourhood, surrounded by nothing. Cocaine was prevalent, heroin more under-the-table, but I wasn’t into that stuff. I do remember being there one morning at around 8am watching a topless girl float through the living room playing a violin.”

If the early part of Girl In A Band is concerned with depicting California’s post-60s malady, the book is equally strong in capturing downtown Manhattan in the 1980s, where Gordon moves to pursue a career in art. “In 1980 New York was near bankruptcy, with garbage strikes every month, it seemed, and a crumbling, weedy infrastructure. These days, it gleams and towers in ways most people I know hate and can’t understand.” She documents the art scene on the Lower East Side with a kind of casual aloofness; Basquiat, Warhol, Jeff Koons all drift through. It is here, of course, that she finally meets Thurston Moore, and Sonic Youth come together.

The band stuff is all fillet, no fat. Gordon zones in on a specific memories for each album. About Sister, for instance, she explains that “Pacific Coast Highway” was “a direct pull from the fears of my teenage years when I was focused on the lore surrounding Charles Manson”. Such insights are accompanied by colourful vignettes – cooking dinner for Neil Young while he tunes the sound of a cow mooing for his electric train set. She writes eloquently about Kurt Cobain; evidently a loss she still feels to this day. Additionally, the cast list includes Danny Elfman, Larry Gagosian, Gerhard Richter, Courtney Love, Marc Jacobs, Sofia Coppola, Tony Oursler and Julie Cafritz (a staunch friend in troubled times). The final section takes place in Northampton, Massachusetts where the density of alt-rock royalty – Gordon and Moore, J Mascis and his wife, Cafritz and her husband – assumes an unintentionally amusing quality, like a real life Stellar Street. In this bohemian enclave, Gordon and Moore raise their daughter, Coco: but “I’ve never had any domestic talents or hobbies,” admits Gordon. They struggle to adapt, despite the good neighbours.

Finally, Gordon returns to California, to work on art projects. “The older I get, the smaller the world seems,” she muses. She works on an exhibition in the basement of a house in Lauren Canyon, close to Mulholland Drive. She writes about hearing “fire engines, helicopters, and traffic zooming up and down the canyon” before linking it back to “the favoured route of the Manson family for crosstown travel and creepy crawling exploits from their place near Calabasas to Hollywood.” In truth, however far Kim Gordon has come – figuratively, creatively, literally – it is hard to completely shake of the past.

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Girl In A Band is published on February 24 by Faber & Faber