Kimaya Diggs - “I know that I’m perfect”

From her upcoming album Green October 2

Fresh off tour dates with Mavis Staples, Emily King, and Trombone shorty, Kimaya Diggs returns with her expansive new collection, Green, out October 2. Green showcases twelve tracks of glittering, genre-bending indie pop, carried by Diggs’ powerful, honeyed vocals, and honest, attentive lyricism. 

Green sees Diggs as lead producer, and features a roster of Nashville and Western Massachusetts musicians, including Eric Slick (Dr. Dog), David Linaburg (J. Cole), Jess Nolan (Jenny Lewis, New Pornographers), harpist Lizzie No, and Sen Morimoto on saxophone. In its production, Green is heavily anchored by the lineage of Black soul and R&B.

The album asks questions of belonging and goodness. “You can't be good enough to deserve to be treated kindly by the universe,” she came to realize. “But you can figure out how to be made of something tougher.” And this is where we find Kimaya Diggs on Green: an artist at her toughest and most confident; unafraid, verdant, alive.

“I know that I’m perfect” brings an indie rock backbone to the question of self-determination.

Written in response to a college boyfriend who tried to coerce her into having children, the song follows Diggs’ attempts to choose herself over and over throughout her life. “I keep thinking, if I had known then what I know now, would I have made different choices?” she asks. “There’s no way to know, but there is a way to stop making the same mistakes, and to stop being the side character in someone else’s story.”

With the final choruses screamed into mic made out of an old telephone, the song feels like a phonecall to the past. “I wanna be perfec; I swear to god I’m trying,” Diggs sings. The power she may have lacked in the past is on full display in the present.