Kimaya Diggs Lets Love and Landscape Take Root on “Plants (Still Grow)”
Photo credit: Jo Chattman
Summer always begins disappearing before anyone is ready to admit it. On “Plants (Still Grow)”, Western Massachusetts songwriter Kimaya Diggs captures that quiet turn, when a season still feels vivid even as it starts becoming a memory. The latest single from her forthcoming album, Green, arrives with an Eli Howe-directed video filmed largely in Diggs’ own backyard.
The song reflects on a relationship through the experiences that will eventually define it. Its lyrical focus rests on shared laughter, accumulated memories, and the strange awareness that ordinary days may later become the moments two people remember most clearly. Diggs places that intimacy within the greens and rivers of a rural New England summer, allowing romance and geography to become closely intertwined.
That relationship between people and place runs throughout Green. Diggs approaches home as a changing idea rather than a fixed address. Familiar land can offer peace, recognition, and continuity, while chosen community can provide the belonging that a landscape alone cannot guarantee. “Plants (Still Grow)” leaves room for both answers.
The specificity of Diggs’ surroundings gives the song’s larger questions a tangible setting. Her backyard contains black walnut, jewelweed, pokeweed, wild lettuce, fireflies, and red squirrels. These are parts of an environment she knows intimately, having cultivated and observed it over time. The land holds evidence of attention, care, and repeated return.
Yet the album’s New England setting carries tension alongside its beauty. Diggs has spoken about the unease of living as a Black and Desi artist in a predominantly white farm town. That awareness complicates the pastoral picture without erasing its joy. The sense of home described in “Plants (Still Grow)” emerges through both the landscape and the close relationships formed among people who have felt outside their surrounding community.
The single follows two earlier glimpses of Green. “I Know That I’m Perfect” channels anger at an ex-boyfriend who attempted to pressure Diggs into having children, with her voice passing through a distorted microphone fashioned from an old telephone. “Dance With Me” draws from the pleasure of growing up in a family of dancers and inviting a hesitant partner onto the floor.
Placed beside those songs, “Plants (Still Grow)” reveals another part of the album’s emotional vocabulary. Green spans indie pop, soul, R&B, folk, rock, and spoken word across 13 tracks, held together by Diggs’ questions about goodness, change, resilience, and belonging. The record is also her fullest production statement to date, with basic tracks recorded in Nashville alongside drummer Erick Slick and a band assembled with help from bassist Rhees Williams.
Green arrives October 2, followed by a hometown release show at Northampton’s Academy of Music Theatre on October 10 with Alisa Amador. Tour dates will continue across the Northeast and Southeast this fall, with a West Coast run scheduled for January. As an introduction to the album’s living landscape, “Plants (Still Grow)” finds Diggs considering how love, memory, and attentive knowledge of a place can gradually create a home.
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