Poetry has been an integral part of American singer-songwriter Jamila Woods’ life, but her love of the spoken word actually started by chance.
As a teenager, she was rejected from an after-school singing program. To her disappointment, she was slotted into her third choice: poetry. “I guess my audition wasn’t that good…” she tells Junkee with thoughtful, soft-spoken candour. “I was upset at first, my mum reminds me, but I eventually fell in love with it.”
This crossroads is pivotal to Jamila’s story. Those spoken word open mics in the robust, smoky depths of Chicago were where she would eventually meet the people responsible for her early success in solo music — artists like Chance the Rapper, Noname and Nico Segal (formerly known as Donnie Trumpet). They’d venture out to her open mic nights, or she’d be introduced to these kindred spirits through a friend of a friend. Those relationships grew organically, proving to be fruitful in the confines of Chicogean culture, and would ultimately lead her to collaborate with her first mainstream outsiders: Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.
Through each project, set against the backdrop of the Illinois city and rooted in her deep connection to Black poets, she’s come one step closer to realising her own voice. Her most recent album, Water Made Us, is, according to her press release, “her most intimate to date”. She describes it as a winding journey that has allowed her to put her inner self on full display.
“I didn’t really know where [it was] gonna go, or how [it was] going to fit together,” she says. “And I had to just have a long period of just writing and not knowing, before I realised, ‘Oh, there’s this emerging theme of like, love and relationships — patterns that show up in my relationships.”
Jamila Woods: Identity In Chicago
Chicago is one of the most racially segregated cities in the US. In 2021, Dr Selwyn Rogers, the founding director of the University of Chicago Medicine Trauma Center and a leading public health expert, told The Guardian: “Racism and discrimination are still prevalent, the longstanding impact of things like redlining and economic disinvestment in communities of color persists, and we see the evidence of that here in Chicago.”
Yet despite years of historical racism the city’s also home to rich and deep-rooted Black culture. Jamila grew up in the wealthier suburb of Beverly, and her community-minded and musically-oriented parents fostered an innate fascination in Black identity, feminism and lineage. From the very beginning, her works — like her chapbook, The Truth About Dolls and her 2018 anthology, Black Girl Magic — positioned her as a triumphant voice in an often silenced community.
Milo & Otis (M&O), a project with her college friend Owen Hill and a dedication to the heyday of R&B, was her first proper foray into the world of music. However, it was her collaborations with Chance the Rapper on ‘LSD’ and ‘Blessings’, and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis on ‘White Privilege II’ that would cement her as the go-to artist for words of Black affirmation.
“The Black Lives Matter movement, police brutality, these really important potent issues — Macklemore was really trying to engage with [them] from a personal level and figure out how to authentically engage with those topics as a white person,” she recalls.
“I’d never done anything like that before. I’m always obsessed with trying to take a subject matter and transform it into a song… put them through a filter that’s really authentic to me. And that was the same mindset that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis were approaching that song from, so I think that also really attracted me to that project.”
Her second album, LEGACY! LEGACY!, was a laser-focused tribute to historical Black figures. Jamila wrote it like she would a thesis: there was structure, prompts and a journey from A to B that involved writing songs through the eyes of people like Muddy Waters, Eartha Kitt and James Baldwin. It’s an element of her process that she had to jettison when crafting Water Made Us.
“With this project, it was so jarring to me to be like writing songs without that structure anymore,” she says. “I [tried] to look at my journals, look at my therapy notes, look at my astrology notes. And use that as if it was a Nikki Giovani poem. This is the material of myself, my inner world, but it took a winding path to get there.”
Jamila Woods: Making The Album
Jamila’s album journey began almost naively. Rather than thinking about the contents of the project, the 32-year-old focused more on the technicalities of creating a project. She wanted to write a hundred songs, put them on a whiteboard, pick the best ones, then have a dozen features. “I was working with a lot of new producers, but I realised that I wasn’t enjoying it as much. I was just making songs, making songs, making songs,” she says. “There’s this spark feeling. This lit up feeling where I just know I’m on the right track. And I wasn’t getting that feeling from that sort of process.”
So Jamila tried to find a story — a map of where she should go. And then she met McClenney, a producer she’d connected with in the early stages of the album. He was a Virgo and she “had a lot of Virgo energy”. They’d organise, structure and plot and eventually she flew to LA where a conversation about her relationships sparked the beginning of the project.
“There’s this obsessive crush phase, the beginning, then ambivalence like, ‘Oh, there’s some things I’m finding out that I don’t really like’. And then there’s the first argument or negotiating what conflict is like, all these things,” she says. “And he was like, ‘Ooh, it’d be great if we tried to write songs that kind of spoke to each of these phases. And the album could flow through each of these phases.’ And so then, that gave me the map. And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m into this now. This is exciting.’”
Opening track ‘Bugs’ features a soaring Sunday afternoon melody that begins in the middle phases,“it bugs me but I do it for you” she sings. Then we go back to the start on ‘Tiny Garden’, a sweet, subtle R&B track soundtracking her ‘obsessive crush phase’. The next half of the project moves through a bit of funk, slow-moving R&B and hip-hop, as well as interludes that involve real voice recordings of friends and family. ‘out of the doldrums’ has a particularly heartfelt soliloquy from her great-uncle as he speaks on meeting his wife.
“That was just us sitting in a room with him while she was just sitting in the room just quiet in the corner,” she says with a slight laugh. “He’s kind of talking about how he wasn’t really a great guy… I love that recording.”
According to her, it was the perfect recording to introduce the song straight after — the album’s turning point — ‘Wolfsheep’. “Can I tell between who loves, who’s hunting me,” she sings.
“It’s easy to think about just romantic love. But really, I think every love that I have in my life is sustained by so many other loves,” she says. “I wanted to reflect that in the album, not just talk about the romantic loves that I’ve had, but also include the conversations around those loves with the loves that helped me process and think about how I want to love and how I want to grow in loving.”
Jamila Woods: Bringing It Back to Chicago
Other voices on the album include those of longtime collaborators Saba and Peter Cottontail. Saba, in particular, is an artist from Chicago whose works travel in the same way as hers. “I think I always really admire his writing but also the way he’s making his way in the industry,” she says. “He’s always like how he can amplify the voices of his brothers, his people and Pivot Gang [Saba’s rapper collective], as well as hone his craft.”
This brings the conversation back to Chicago. A community-oriented city where people work with each other rather than against. Where people are multi-hyphenated in their crafts and giving in their collaborations. Where they’re authentic down to the core.
“The more I’ve worked in LA, the more I’ve realised how special it is that people in Chicago are like, ‘Oh, I was on your song? Okay, you’ll do something on my song.’ Just being there for each other in a way that’s kind of not normal, I think, outside of Chicago,” she says. “[There’s] that shared energy where it’s just purely about making stuff together.”
It’s what Jamila wanted to get across on Water Made Us.
“Gwendolyn Brooks is a poet from Chicago, she would always just be like, ‘I wrote about what I saw and heard on the street’, there is an accessibility there, but it’s not compromising authenticity,” she says.
“I think with music, it’s about wanting to not hide, wanting to be open in a way that I think [in] my past writing — I don’t want to say that it was hiding — but there was some conceits or some conceptual elements that took the front seat over my personal story.”
“I think with this album, I was conscious. This is pretty much my personal story upfront.”
Jamila Woods’ new album Water Made Us is out now.
Julie Fenwick is a music and culture writer from Naarm/Melbourne. Follow her on Instagram @juliefenfen.
Image credit: Elizabeth De La Piedra