COVER STORY | The Cosmic Devotion of Jamila Woods

On New Year’s Day 2021, as I was bedridden by my only bout with COVID, the Academy of American Poets published Woods in their ongoing Poem-a-Day series. “Day 29 (2020),” the piece was called; I devoured every line of it. It was deeply personal, Woods’ recounting of years of memory and what it looks like to physically—viscerally—take something beautiful and divine for granted. “i used to lie in bed on Sunday evenings wishing / for a whole week of weekends / now i forget what day it is / and still feel i’m running out of time,” she wrote. That navigation of vulnerability and of retrospect, it crops up again two years later, on Woods’ new album Water Made Us. “Please be patient with me,” Jamila Woods sings on “Bugs,” the opening track. It’s a fitting entrance for the 34-year-old Chicago poet, educator and performer, given that she hasn’t put out an album since she unveiled LEGACY! LEGACY! back in 2019. But these words—this idea of “patience”—don’t arrive like a desire to just take it slow. No, the phrasing feels much more like a mark of her just needing a moment to catch up and reintroduce herself.

Where Woods’ 2017 debut album, HEAVN, was very much informed, framed and written in service to Black womanhood, LEGACY! LEGACY! paid such strong gratitude to iconic Black and brown figures in not just her life, but in the world altogether. On Water Made Us, Wood has turned the caps lock off and the camera inwards on herself. In that way, it feels like a trio of records—this recurring, momentous idea of “who I am,” “who made me” and “where I’m going next.” The throughline are these different extensions of affection, be it self-love or a love of community and lineage. Woods is studious in her intentionality, each story on her first two records glowing with a resonance that’s coupled with an entire lifetime carried out by somebody else. In a sense, that was freeing for her. Now, Water Made Us is an opportunity for her to expel all of the reference points and leave it as just her and whomever has time to lend to hear her out.

“With this album, the form eluded me for longer than I was used to, because I was trying a lot of new things,” Woods says. “But I do think that I’ve always been interested in my interior world and my emotional world and talking about love in different forms. When I look back at the trio, I really do see LEGACY! LEGACY! as bulking me up, almost—because I was writing a lot about my own relationships on songs like “EARTHA” and “SONIA” and “FRIDA,” but framing them in this way, this protective layer, of relating to these other stories of these other people who are great, almost like a safety blanket. Now, I think I’m shedding that layer to have a more one-to-one conversation between whoever’s listening and myself.”

And with these projects and these songs, Jamila Woods is forging her own archival project. Whether it’s calling out her grandmother by name, dedicating 13 spaces on LEGACY! LEGACY! to the importance of 13 of her elders or infusing the wisdom of Nikki Giovanni that leaps off of her syllabus and into a song like “Send a Dove,” there’s an importance—a celebration—in observing these people’s impact and naming every speck of it, as opposed to using illusions or referential fodder that is more accessible for audiences not hip to the work of James Baldwin or Sun Ra or Jean-Michel Basquiat. There’s power in specificity, and Woods employs it in spades. When she brought Sonia Sanchez to her college a few years ago for a Black History Month program, Sanchez spent the first part of her set naming all of the people who came before her who inspire her, and that resonated deeply with Woods.

“Maybe it comes from the importance of the Black Arts Movement, or maybe it’s just a Black oral practice of naming who came before [us]—and even how I got my name, names just always feel very intentional to me. My parents did a naming ceremony and they had a Ghanian practitioner come in and give me my name, and my family all put blessings into my name. So, I think the names are so weighted and important. My poetry teachers would always encourage us to write poems after people. You say, ‘Oh, this is my poem about myself after Nikki Giovanni, or whatever.’ I think that was what I was doing on LEGACY!, and I love connecting that to creating an archive, as well. There’s this writer, Daphne Brooks, she has a book called Liner Notes for the Revolution and the whole thesis is ‘Black women are archives’ and the practice of how we make work. I think about that a lot, and I like the idea of how getting as specific as naming a name makes someone wonder who that person is—and, hopefully, enough to look them up or have a different weight associated with that name. I love saying my grandma’s name. She pretends that it annoys her, but I think she likes it.”

Jamila Woods’ biggest act of respect and devotion towards her heroes on Water Made Us comes via the title, which is derived from a talk that Toni Morrison gave at the New York Public Library almost 30 years ago, and it appears in the lyric “The good news is, we were happy once / The good news is, water always runs back” in “Good News.” “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back where it was,” Morrison said, her imprint on the world already an eternal mark that was destined to never weaken. This concept of returning—of reconciliation—is a feverish recurrence in Woods’ work, her songs often serving as reliquaries for the past, present and future, something you can find in any of Morrison’s books, from Beloved to Jazz.

“The way [Toni] talks about being an artist, being a Black artist, being a writer—I’m always gravitating towards artists that I like talking about the practice of making art,” Woods says. “I connected with that quote because I think the way that Toni Morrison thinks about memory is so fascinating, and that’s really a part of my medium—the material that I use is memory and nostalgia and going back to experiences and inhabiting them and writing from that place.” How Water Made Us came to be the title of the record wasn’t the product of some grand, deliberate revelation that encircled the Morrison quote. Instead, Woods went into the naming process without an inkling of where it might take her.

“I wasn’t thinking about [Toni’s quote] consciously when I wrote that lyrics on ‘Good News,’ but then, when I was looking for the title—which was a whole process, because I really was like ‘What is the title of this thing?’ And I was like, ‘Okay, well, some people just go in their lyrics and find a title. I’ve never done that, let me try.’ That was the lyric that just stood out really apparently, because it describes the process of this album, which was this retracing of looking through my relationships—looking through my experiences witnessing relationships—and trying to get to the root of how my heart works, why it works the way it works,” she adds.

There’s an interesting dichotomy between different mediums of art, given that poetry is music in many ways but not all poets consider themselves songwriters. Woods’ relationship with both parts of herself is not a cut and dry distinction; she came up in choirs but spent a lot of years becoming confident with her singing, whereas she feels most comfortable identifying as a poet. She’s not all that interested in adhering to any sort of rules when it comes to expression and is much more interested in the poetry of everyday speech and how that can inform hip-hop sampling. In fact, the line between where Jamila Woods the singer begins and Jamila Woods the poet ends is pretty blurred at this point. She cites Questlove’s book Creative Quest and how the Roots drummer’s philosophy about the duality of art really speaks to her own understanding of the ways poetry and music, for her, converge.

“He was like, ‘There’s two kinds of artists: One will learn everything about painting and then forget everything about that and go learn how to do films. And the other one will learn painting and then go learn films through the lens of a painter,’” Woods says. “I feel like that’s how I am with poetry; I do everything through the lens of poetry. I remember the feeling of being in high school and it was like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s like I’ve learned a whole new language. It’s like I’m now fluent in a whole new language that feels so natural to me.’ I think I approach whatever I do—directing a music video or writing—always keeping those lessons from poetry top of mind. I think a lot about collage and sampling because I came to the practices through poetry. Those are musical and visual concepts, as well.”

Before I knew Jamila Woods the singer, I knew Jamila Woods the poet, and I found her poetry through the community she keeps. For years, she’s surrounded herself with folks like Fatimah Asghar, Danez Smith, Kaveh Akbar, Hanif Abdurraqib and Franny Choi. Most of them are a part of Dark Noise, a “nationwide, multiracial, multi-genre collective” of writers who “find common ground in their commitment to using art as a site for radical truth-telling.” The list goes on and on, and Asghar even makes an appearance on a Water Made Us interlude called “the best thing.” These are people who are not just some of the most important minds in poetry, but people she cares for deeply and is continuously learning from. That influence takes shape in these songs not through making records, but through making art and language together as a full-bodied, symbiotic community or affection, trust and grace. The page versus stage idea of Dark Noise encompasses thoughtful explorations of trauma, healing and identity, which all find room across the 17-song tracklist of Water Made Us. When she migrated to Los Angeles to work with producer Chris McClenney, she started to realize that California wasn’t as keen on the practice of writing in community, that there are more boundaries in place in those spaces.

“The process I was taking for this album, I think I rely even more on my community than usual—especially Dark Noise—because I think, for HEAVN and LEGACY! LEGACY!, it was me and Oddcouple and Slot-A. [On Water Made Us], I spent a long period of time just making, making, making with many different people before, ultimately, really connecting with McClenney. In that in-between time, I was just like, ‘Let me make as many songs as I can.’ And I was putting them in Google folders and sending them to Dark Noise and being like, ‘What do you think? What are your favorites?’ From a critique or crit-circle standpoint, that’s just so valuable to me. I remember having a conversation with a producer and I was like, ‘Yeah, do you guys ever just share songs with each other and give writing feedback?’ and they’d be like ‘No, no, because then you’d have to pay those people, you’d have to give them splits if they gave you a suggestion.’ So, I really appreciate those poetry spaces—those poetry friends—where I can get that.”

There are four interludes on Water Made Us (each distinguishable by being titled in all lowercase) and are depictions of what Woods calls “her lifelines” during quarantine—moments with her loved onces that were shared via long voicemails or voice memo conversations that she calls “podcast length.” They make sense in the continuity of the record and emphasize the fluidity of tenderness and help expel it from the confines of singularity. “I really wanted to include that because I didn’t want it to feel like it’s only a romantic, one partner-type of love,” Woods says. “There’s all these loves that support me. I’m thinking a lot about hierarchy and poly theory, because I’ve always had really deep, intimate friendships and I also have beautiful relationships with my siblings and my elders. I wanted to include those lines of support, too.”

You can feel that type of support in the features Woods includes on her records, too. On HEAVN, it was Chance the Rapper and Nico Segal; on LEGACY! LEGACY!, it was Saba (whose prolific verses can actually be found on every one of Woods’ LPs); on Water Made Us, it’s Peter CottonTale and Gia Margaret. There’s a certain reward in making a record with your neighbors rather than going out and trying to get the most recognizable name and voice possible and it gives a record like Water Made Us, which was made mostly outside of Illinois for the first time in her career, the hometown color it exudes. Each name you read in the liner notes is a name that Woods has built copious amounts of trust with—to the point where, on her most naked and transparent record to date, she feels comfortable having them hold a piece of it and it paves way for upbeat, Song of the Summer material like “Boomerang” or “Practice.”

“I always come back to this idea that a feature is, really, like a conversation with someone,” Woods says. “Especially with this album being very personal, it became hard to be cold-calling someone to be like, ‘Can you have this very deep and intimate conversation with me?’ Peter and Saba, these are people who I know their work very well but they’re always pushing themselves and evolving. When Saba’s verse [on ‘Practice’] came back, I was like, ‘Who is this?’ It just sounded so different from anything I had heard from him. I was so amazed. I love the way it feels to work with people I’ve worked with for a long time and still be surprised and continue to be inspired by the way that they create.”

Given that LEGACY! LEGACY! was such an outward-facing record and Water Made Us is so deeply personal for Woods, it makes sense that pandemic-inspired self-reflection is the cause for much of the musings we hear. But it’s not just that universal forced grounding that carries the songs. During quarantine, Woods got really into tarot and took a breathwork class while also going to therapy more regularly and seeing her astrologer friends. It was a time that, according to her, allowed for practices that she wanted to do but didn’t always have the means or time to explore them. She was on tour right up until lockdowns were carried out in the US, and she had just moved into a new house in the city. While Water Made Us touches on breakup poetics, it’s not a full-fledged breakup album—and Woods’ ability to distinguish that is a product of becoming the work she makes.

“Toni Morrison’s idea of ‘re-memory,’ I always imagined it as there’s these memories hanging in the air in a place and you walk through them or you’re in it—and that’s how it feels in certain parts of Chicago, remembering certain relationships.” she says. “Right after I turned in LEGACY!, in 2018, I had a really bad breakup and I was like, ‘Oh, no, I wrote the wrong album. I don’t have any breakup songs.’ I was like, ‘Man, I just want to listen to some breakup songs.’ But then, when I did the tour, I was charged up. ‘Muddy,’ ‘Miles’—all of the songs gave me this new energy and confidence and I was like, ‘Oh, no, I wrote the right album.’ It’s not only just the writing or the putting it out, but the performing and the embodying of it that shows me what the record is. I think that gave me the strength to look inward and really straight on and be able to write about that. I see that very clearly now, when I look back.”

On top of that strength to look inward, Woods was able to transmit different cosmic energies into crucial parts of her record and allow portraits of magnetic attachment to get their flowers, too. One of her musician friends helped guide her to deciding on October 13th as a release date for Water Made Us—namely because it was near when the annular solar eclipse was going to occur, an event that also coincided with releases of D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, among others. While she was making the album, Woods was doing frequent consultations with an astrologer, Deborah, and found herself taking their exercises in navigating openness and affection through sharing and implementing them into the songwriting process, too.

“I was talking to her about what I wanted in a relationship and I was like, ‘I just really want intimacy. I just really want closeness.’ And she was like, ‘Well, what is intimacy to you?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, being able to speak freely,’ or whatever I was saying,” Woods explains. “She really read me—I’m an oldest sibling, and I have a lot of natural, care-taking energy about me—and she was like, ‘If you go into relationships or interactions with that sort of parent-child dynamic, or older-younger dynamic, that’s not balanced. A parent isn’t sharing all of their most intimate worries with their child, there’s an imbalance there. If you really want intimacy, you have to come down to the same level and share.’ That’s also a lot of this project, too, the practice of being vulnerable and the practice of opening and sharing where I was at with each of the individual songs when I wrote them.”

Through talking with other astrologer peers, Woods was able to discover crystalline mantras around her writing—especially the idea that you don’t have to worry about if something you’re writing is true if it happened to you. It became a crucial and freeing truth for Woods, who was facing a different intentionality behind the construction of Water Made Us. “Because [LEGACY! LEGACY!] had such a strong structure—the names, the titles—the curriculum that I would teach, with poetry it went from the individual to the self and the community to the other, the people outside of your community to ‘Okay, now that you have explored each of those, what’s your theory about the world?’” she says. “And me and Slot-A were like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna make the album flow through this curriculum—start out with songs about the self and then the community.’ And it was just so clear. With this one, it didn’t have a clear tie to anything else in the world, so I was feeling a bit like ‘I don’t know who’s gonna like this,’ just those insecurities. A different astrologer friend—I don’t think I even said those things to him—he was like, ‘Whatever you’re making now, it’s healing for the throat chakras of the women in your family who might not have been able to share the things that you’re sharing or might not have been listened to if they did.’ Something clicked for me there.”

Through the guidance of a friend, Woods began writing ekphrastic poems off of her own songs—sampling herself and finding ways to better appreciate the parts of love and loss that have stuck with you. There’s a poem at the end of “Bugs” that riffs on the verses from “Still”; “I Miss All My Exes” arrives like a spoken-word performance delivered atop beautiful instrumentation provided by Gia Margaret. I was like, ‘Okay, how would I re-enter this or write this song as a poem from where I am now?’” Woods says. “I like that, they’re like partners in my mind and ‘the still’ is the frustration of when you can’t get over somebody and they’re haunting your head and you’re like, ‘Okay, you’re here.’ Then, the poem is more at peace, once you’ve had more time or distance to be appreciating the presence.” It’s a fun process, to try and translate myself.”

I keep coming back to the water, as it has been such a precious motif across most of Woods’ discography, be it her talking about the parts of Lake Michigan that hug the coasts of Chicago or how bodies and tributaries can become portals to ancestors. There’s a historical significance present for her in water that is meant to signify a greater folklore around her community, along with her desire to obliterate the spaces she’s been left out of. You can see that in the whitewashing of beauty in contemporary poetics, how delicacy is swapped out for brutality and so on. I think about how a former Poet Laureate of Ohio is pretty well-known for a pastoral poem that is, at its core, riskless verse about white suburbia. How, then, it becomes a question of who is allowed to experience such a glow, especially in written and spoken language. Jamila Woods is thinking about that, too, on her records.

“I love thinking about Black people’s particular relationship to nature because, in terms of poetics, Black people aren’t always associated with pastoral poetics or writing about nature,” Woods says. “There’s such a rich mythology and history of crossing the ocean—of being taken across the ocean on the Middle Passage and all of those afro-futurist myths of enslaved people who jumped off the boat and then started their own communities underwater. On HEAVN, I was really obsessed with all of that, so I think there’s also a way where Water Made Us can have a particular resonance for how a person and their historical community relates to water which, for me, is so, so deep.”

“my sister hears me singing and asks / if i am happy. no, i say / i’m just counting,” Woods wrote in “Day 29 (2020)” two years ago. I think about that final line—“i’m just counting”—often, how it holds so much imperfect depth while also existing as an anchor for vulnerability. This idea of how curiosity can look a lot like survival, how surrender feels a bit lighter in the name of pursuing a love that is not grand so much as it is fruitful, virtuous, familiar and comfortable. On “Wreckage Room,” Woods invites her siblings Ayanna and Kamaria to do harmonies; on “Backburner,” she names her grandmother Joycetta and goes to a place where cooking too much food is akin to spreading herself too thin with the people she’s close to. Water Made Us is not the urgent siren of historical milieu that LEGACY! LEGACY! was four years ago, nor does it try to be. The sage is not in the use of proper nouns, but in the revelation of compelling familiarity. It’s no longer a matter of writing and singing about her peers through images of her heroes, as she did on LEGACY! LEGACY!; no, it’s a matter of figuring out whether or not those peers can give her the love she needs and deserves.

And thus, across 17 tracks, Jamila Woods is tuned into the cyclical nature of devotion and all the ways it can take shape more than ever, how we must continue talking in as many languages as we can and continue searching for ways to communicate the uniqueness we relish behind closed doors—be it by recounting exes who cook veggie burgers doused in lemon pepper or being driven to fields full of fireflies. She is a poet after all, drafting lifetimes that are not means of profundity but, rather, expansions of the ordinary—told through Allen Iverson quotes or stories about wearing hoodies around the house because the thermostat is kept low—and always exploring her own fascinations. There’s an obvious tonal shift midway through Water Made Us, where it becomes clear that Woods is no longer running out of time. The stars have now aligned for her, and her choreography for searching for love feels a lot less daunting. She’s savoring all of it now. “I never left any of them, not really,” Woods sings at the end of “I Miss All My Exes.” “I just went somewhere new.”

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.