‘The kind of a tour that I’ve been dreaming of,’ Rhiannon Giddens says of new shows

The adjective “renaissance” is often overused when describing someone proficient in a wide range of fields. In the case of Rhiannon Giddens, the term would be drastically underused to sum up the ride she’s been on since releasing her 2015 solo debut “Tomorrow Is My Turn,” following her successful run with old-time string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops.

A renowned banjo player and a 2000 graduate of Oberlin College, where she studied opera, Giddens has had quite the recent five-year run. She released two albums with creative/romantic partner Francesco Turrisi (2019’s “There Is No Other” and 2021’s Grammy-winning “They’re Calling Me Home”), wrapped up the second of two seasons playing a gospel-singing social worker on the television drama “Nashville,” wrote a pair of children’s books (“Build a House” and “We Could Fly”), scored music for the Nashville Ballet (“Lucy Negro, Redux”) and was commissioned to write music for an opera for which she won a Pulitzer Prize for Music (2020’s “Omar”).

And that doesn’t include stints hosting a podcast (Aria Code with Rhiannon Giddens), being named the artistic director of the cross-cultural music organization Silkroad Ensemble, overseeing a 12-part video series called “The Banjo: Music, History and Heritage” or being named the musical director of the 2023 Ojai Music Festival. And let’s not forget she recently released the Jack Splash-produced “You’re the One,” her first solo album since 2017’s “Freedom Highway,” and has another album, “My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall,” coming out in April. That album features contributions of several African American vocalists, including Allison Russell and Valerie June, performing songs from Randall, a rare African American songwriter working for four decades in country music.

If this sounds like a rather hectic pace to maintain, understand it is the North Carolina native’s modus operandi.

“I tend to work better when I’m also doing eight other things,” she admitted during a Whatsapp call from her home in Ireland. “I think I’m destined to go through life constantly stressed, but it is what it is. I’ve had a lot of amazing opportunities that I’m grateful for.”

And while much of Giddens’ other recorded work deals in weighty subjects ranging from the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of a Baptist church in Alabama that killed four little girls to the evils of slavery, the dozen songs that make up “You’re the One” allowed the musical polyglot to step back and not write about such heavy fare.

“I’ve been doing pretty heavy mission-based work for a long time with my music and I’m happy to,” she explained, turning her thoughts to her new album. “I think it’s my raison d’être. I needed to play a little and I just needed to take a break. I definitely felt like things were getting mentally a bit tough.

“There are these songs that hadn’t really fit into anything,” Giddens said. “I was playing around with form, looking at the American Songbook and thinking about people who’ve inspired me in American musical history like Dolly Parton, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone. I was just taking those inspirations and turning them into songs and just writing and putting them away. It seemed time to give them life.”

For folks looking to see how this sounds live, Giddens says to expect more of that spontaneity and juicy musical interplay in her shows.

“I’m going to be doing most of the songs on the record and everyone on the stage, with the exception of one musician, was all on the record, which is always a great thing,” she said. “We’ll also be doing some of the older stuff from my previous records. It’s a big band — there are six people on stage who are all incredible musicians. It’s just the kind of a tour that I’ve been dreaming of. We’re going to have improvisational moments and a whole lot of songs you’ve never heard me do. My goal is to just have a righteous time every night.”

As for Giddens’ other pursuits/accomplishments, being a children’s author whose influences include Virginia Hamilton, Robin McKinley and Shel Silverstein, ranked rather high for her.

“That was a pivot that came about during the pandemic,” she said. “I always wanted to write kids’ books.”

And then there’s that certain accomplishment of landing a Pulitzer Prize for Music for composing an opera based on the Arabic language autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a highly literate Muslim cleric who was enslaved and brought over to the United States in the early 1800s, during which time he died in bondage, but not before penning his memoirs.

“The Spoleto Festival USA approached me about it and asked if I’d ever heard of Omar Ibn Said and I said no,” Giddens said. “They told me a story about him being brought to South Carolina as a slave and they asked if I’d be interested in writing an opera about it and I agreed. And then I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ But yeah, it was an amazing experience. I’m not sure it’s one I want to repeat, but it got delayed a few years by the pandemic, which only made it better to give us a little extra breathing room to finish the things we needed to.”

Rhiannon Giddens and special guest Charly Lowry will perform at Eisenhower Auditorium on 7:30 p.m. March 19. For more information, visit cpa.psu.edu.