You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Rhiannon Giddens is one of those people where I feel
like they have to start inventing new awards because she's already won all of them.
She's got multiple Grammys.
She won the Pulitzer Prize for an opera she co-wrote called Omar.
She's a MacArthur genius.
And the new Beyonce song, Texas Hold'em?
that features the banjo, that's Rhiannon Giddens playing the banjo.
I guess that's not technically an award, but it feels like one to me.
Rhiannon Giddens has released five solo albums since 2015, and before that,
she was a member of the Grammy-winning band the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
She's now also the artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble,
the musical supergroup that Yo-Yo Ma founded.
In 2023, Rhiannon released an album called You're the One,
And I talked to her about a song she wrote for it called You Louisiana Man,
which was nominated for a Grammy for Best American Roots Performance.
I never knew that things were going to get so far.
I never knew it.