BEST FIT: This is another quite unusual song in your catalogue because it’s one that you reworked from a post-war aria. What was it about this particular piece of opera that made you want to bring it into this other musical world?
RHIANNON GIDDENS: I remember having a discussion with Joe Henry, the producer, about what the material was going to be for this record and I was like, “Okay, this might seem a little weird but what do you think of this?” and I played him Nina Simone’s version of “Black Swan”, and he was like, “This is ridiculous. What is this? This is amazing!”
People talk to me as if my career is something singular, but whatever I have done, Nina did it first, you know? She was active at a time when the classical world, the folk world, and commercial music were much closer together than they are today. I mean, it’s not like she was making pop music, but she was far more mainstream than you would imagine for someone doing the breadth of what she was doing. I always say that I’m an artist of the '60s, because I’m just doing what they were doing back then and somehow managing to eke a career out of it. I mean, Nina was doing arias. She was doing songs in different languages. She was doing folk songs, modern songs, activist songs, and “Black Swan” was such an interesting choice.
It’s a song written by Gian Carlo Menotti, and it’s very disturbing. I remember singing this aria as a freshman in college and it’s stayed with me this whole time. The thing with Nina’s version is that she left off the middle part, so I thought, well, I love the vibe here but what if we did the whole thing? It’s funny because there are all these old jazz recordings where the singers leave out certain verses, which are often very interesting, and I’ve always been a bit obsessed with that. So that became my whole thing with this, like, what can we do for the middle part?
One of the reasons why I included it – and it was really this or “Si Dolce è'l Tormento”, which is another favourite aria that we recorded our own version of – was because I wanted to include all the words, as they were written. But the other is that making this song was really one of the purest moments in the studio that I’ve ever had. We got in there without having made a plan for the middle part, and I just kept singing as Francesco was playing the ostinato. We just made it up on the spot, because it didn’t exist in Nina’s version, and I think it’s freaking weird. It’s very mid-century classical, and I love it so much.
The funny thing is that I had to relearn how to sing it afterwards, because I was really in another space at the time. It was my first time really releasing myself to improvisation in that way, and that’s a big deal for a classical singer who was taught that there’s only one right way to sing, which is to sing the notes that are written. We weren’t really allowed to be co-creators of the music. But I’m now able to work in that improvisational space more, and I’ve gotten better at it, and I have to thank Francesco for bringing that into my life.
With Joe Henry at the helm and working with Francesco, I felt very safe to try it. Francesco and I have a very instinctual way of making music together, and that’s allowed me to find spaces as a singer that I never would have found on my own. So that’s why I wanted to include “Black Swan” on this list, because it’s not one that people necessarily will know from my catalogue, but there’s a lot going on there that’s interesting.