In the final countdown to the release of her forthcoming album, out today, we sat down with the Chicago-based singer and poet to discuss the angst and joys of putting out her most personal project to date.
“I’m feeling good and really proud of it,” starts Jamila Woods, 34, video chatting from New York, where she’s based, for a listening session of her forthcoming album Water Made Us, out this Friday, October 13th, via Jagjaguwar. “I’m just excited to be face-to-face and see people listening to the album and feel them react to it,” she shares. The next stops are Los Angeles and Chicago, her birthplace. Wood’s music and poetry are two that can’t be separated, but in this new project, she reaches her purest form, putting herself and her emotional experiences as the main source material for the 17 tracks. “It feels like I’m opening my journal to the world,” she says.
The album is the result of a deep and introspective journey that started in the early days of the pandemic, when Woods took a u-turn from her traditional creative process and decided to experiment producing with different names in the industry while writing as many songs as she could, without sticking to themes or directions. “Which is kind of different for me,” she explains. Water Made Us is an emotionally-drenched, raw, and powerful album, where we see Woods’ musical essence and presence undress and evolve from a place of spectator to the main character. “[this album] reminded me of when I first came up doing poetry in high school. My poetry was very metaphorical, and coded, and you would listen to it and not know what it was about. And I thought that was cool because I was like, ‘I know what I’m saying.’ But then, as you grow, as I grew, I felt the need to be more specific and to say things straight out,” she shares.
Jamila isn’t the poet she was in high school anymore, and neither is her music. In Water Made Us, we watch her emotional bravery and maturity take the spotlight that she once fully dedicated to others. With her debut solo album, Heavn, in 2016, she established herself as a potent voice transforming her poetry into protest music while exploring Black womanhood in a time of social turmoil. Her activism and art then evolved into her critically acclaimed second album, Legacy! Legacy!, in 2019, where she dedicated every song to a legendary artist of colour. “In a way, I feel like naming the songs after the people in Legacy! Legacy! was like a comfort blanket. It’s a way to give a little bit of distance to what is actually very personal,” says Woods. “So, I do feel proud of myself. It feels good to be aware of that, and to choose not to have that blanket,” she finishes.
With Water Made Us, the feeling is that Jamila gives us room to get to know her behind her shield, meeting an ultimately relatable, soft, and human side of her experience. “With this album, I became the source material,” says Woods. “My memories in my journal served as the source material, as did the things I discussed with my therapist and astrologers. It’s as if this is something I will always strive to perfect, but it flows naturally. I believe this is a fundamental aspect of my essence as an artist – the ability to alchemize and synthesize things from one form to another, through my own language, like I’m translating it into my kind of lexicon.”
The album is her take on a love anthem, bringing her own stories and the way she processes (or processed) them to the foundation of the album’s sonic experience. After looking at some personal notes she once drafted while trying to understand patterns in her previous relationships, Woods and LA-based co-producer and fellow Virgo, Chris McClenney, decided to sequence the 17 tracks as “the phases of a relationship” — from “a quiet, obsessive-crush phase to the icky phase and not being so sure about it anymore.” “There’s not really an ending,” she says, “it’s more like you’re continually entering new relationships and learning fresh lessons within them. It’s somewhat like a spiral staircase, where you’re improving, yet still face the same lessons at different levels.”
The album starts with “Bugs,” a soft R&B-infused track where we watch with our ears the first spark of a new love, graphically felt in the spoken-word verses that intertwine with soulful lyrics. “Love is the warmest weather,” she sings. Upbeat, laid-back, and a personal favorite “Tiny Garden,” with duendita, follows. And as the album grows, the involving tunes open room to more crude versions of her poetry, on tracks like “I Miss All My Exes,” and to what feels like real-life sound excerpts, such as “libra intuition,” a 14-second recording that could’ve been a voice note between friends. “I’m a poet and I feel like that comes through in my lyrics all the time,” she says. “But I’ve never put poems on my album. And one of my friends, who is a rapper, told me about wanting to make a book alongside his album, writing an essay inspired by every song. And I loved the idea. So I kind of went back to the songs I had, and tried to be like, what would I write about this? How would I rewrite this translated into a poem? So that’s how “I Miss All My Exes” came through, looking at a song called “Still,” about this annoying feeling of not being able to get over somebody,” she shares.
For an album that overflows emotions and sentiments, it was obvious for Woods that water would be the starting point of this visual story. “I wanted the shoot to be underwater,” she says. So she went on a personal mission on YouTube to watch hours of interviews with underwater photographers looking for a potential connection, until she came across Birdie. “Her words just really stood out to me. She talked a lot about how water teaches you about surrender. How you can plan all you want, but at the end of the day, this prop you brought might start melting, and things might go differently than you expected because you’re underwater,” she shares. One DM later, the match was made. “We took a whole bunch of images, and a lot of them are coming out with the singles, but for the cover, I really wanted there to be a reflection because, when you’re in love, you have to kind of face these things about yourself, which, you know, it’s something we don’t always think about — not just focusing on the other person; it brings up your triggers and touches your sensitive, vulnerable sides.”
Sitting down with Jamila Woods felt like an invitation to look deeply at my own self. By opening her wounds, reliving the past, and embracing her extremely relatable vulnerabilities, she found the strength to reinterpret with her poetry, music, and holistic approach to life one of the most mundane yet complex human feelings. Woods is one of those people who reminds me of why I always carry a pocket-sized notebook in my bag wherever I go, intoxicating those around her with extremely quotable knowledge and the self-awareness and confidence of a woman who has emerged from her healing journey. Forty minutes into this interview and only one question was left:
What does love mean to you today and how has your relationship with love evolved while working on this album?
Jamila Woods: I feel like the concept of love as a choice. You know, during one of the years when I was working on this album, I think it was either 2021 or 2022, all the astrology girlies had picked the lover’s card as the card of the year. So, I was learning a lot about the idea of love as an act of choice every day. It’s not just something that happens to you; it’s not something you stumble into. Well, maybe in a Greek sense for certain types of love, but then, how do you approach love as an act of devotion? I almost think of my spiritual practice as a commitment to something every day, which can make you a more solid partner in love and a stronger friend. So, I truly consider love to be the most active choice. I also view it as a mirror, as I mentioned earlier, that can encourage me to love myself in a more expansive way. Through many partnerships, I’ve learned that the things I’m not very loving towards in myself, the things I might be ashamed of, embarrassed about, or wish were different, allowing those parts of myself to be seen feels incredibly healing. So, yes, I think another aspect of love is to see and be seen. This has evolved from my perspective when I was younger. Back then, I used to think, “I said ‘I love you’ to that person, and now I really know what love is because I said it to this person, and it feels a bit different.” I used to wonder if it would always feel that way. But now, I think of it less in terms of the other person and more in terms of this quote, which I can’t recall exactly, but it goes something like, “Whatever someone brings out of you is actually within you. It’s not about that other person.” Even now, in the most committed partnership I’ve ever been in, I realize that it’s not solely about this person. It’s about the fact that I’ve grown so much to feel secure enough to commit myself in this way. So, it’s a meaningful indicator of how much I’ve evolved. I’ve definitely learned this through working on this album.
