FEATURE:
Saluting the Queens
PHOTO CREDIT: Brennan Bucannan for The Line of Best Fit
the amazing Kara Jackson before. I feel, as an artist, she is someone worthy of further spotlight and love. This feature salutes queens of music. Whether they are an inspiring and important artist, a woman doing incredible work on radio, production, at a label, organisation or anywhere else in the music industry. I am going to select a few artists for special consideration. The previous inclusion, Little Simz, is a British Hip-Hop icon and modern-day idol. Kara Jackson hails from Illinois. In various features, I have highlighted albums by women. The strongest work of the year from some of the best female artists around. I realise, in the course of my writing, I have not given enough space to a tremendous artist who I feel is one of the most distinct and important voices in modern music. Whilst some label Kara Jackson’s music as ‘Folk’, I think it is much harder to pin down. I shall come to a couple of reviews for her stunning debut, Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?. That was released on 14th April through the label, September. As a producer and writer of all the tracks, there is so much of Kara Jackson in the sound and the songs’ themes and tones. She is an exceptional artist I just had to salute! In the next couple of features, I am looking more at broadcaster and those behind the scenes. In the case of Kara Jackson, she is someone who is at her most powerful and impactful when it front of people. Delivering that incredible music to adoring and captive fans. I think that her fanbase in the U.K. has grown through this year.
Recently, The Line of Best Fit named Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? as their favourite album of the year. For those who do not know why Kara Jackson is such an important artist whose music is must-listen, I hope that this feature helps in emphasising and augmenting a music queen. I shall come to some sections of the interview The Line of Best Fit conducted with Jackson in regards them honouring her stunning debut album. I am going to come to the incredible recent interview from The Line of Best Fit. As we are almost at the end of the year, many people are putting out their albums of the year lists. Kara Jackson’s Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? is worthy of riding high in every single one of them! I want to bring in first some of an interview The Guardian published back in October. They say – as does Jackson – that many female songwriter are labelled ‘confessional’. That their music is diaristic. It seems rather cliché and a little sexist that this tag is always applied. Kara Jackson refutes and refuses this idea that her music is confessional:
“Critics have long labelled female writers, artists and musicians as “confessional”. It was once the case for Kara Jackson’s idol Joni Mitchell and it is now the case for Jackson herself. “I push back against this idea that what I’m doing is diaristic,” she says, suspicious of the gendered framing. “A lot of women are pigeonholed by this idea that they’re confessing. Mitski talks a lot about that. She’s like: ‘I don’t just draw something in my journal and sing it. I construct verses.’”
PHOTO CREDIT: Lawrence Agyei for The Guardian
While each song of the US folk musician’s debut album Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?, sung in her uniquely cavernous voice against somber guitar arrangements, does feel like the distillation of a deep memory or emotion, Jackson is more often a narrator than a protagonist. From dates to funerals, she is a master of world-building and creates landscapes and narratives that feel immersive and soberingly real. As a result, the record has rightly become one of the year’s most critically acclaimed. “As much as people think I’m being so vulnerable, sometimes I listen back to the album and think, ‘I’m actually not really giving away that much,’” she says, wearing pink braids, jeans and a face mask as we chat in her label’s office in Notting Hill, west London.
Born and raised in Chicago, Jackson got her first guitar for her 11th birthday and learned to play piano: “My mom had a rule that we had to play piano before we left the house at 18.” Raised on Jim Croce and Charley Pride, Jackson fell in love with folk music as a child. “Folk has a big history of political commentary,” says the 23-year-old. “My mom works for a labour union so I learned a lot of my favourite folk songs from protesting with her. Pete Seeger [and others].” Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell, she says, are the “blueprints”.
Jackson joined a spoken-word club in high school and began taking part in poetry slams. She released her debut poetry collection, Bloodstone Cowboy, in 2019 and served as the US national youth poet laureate from 2019-20. “I’m not as prolific as a poet now, but I do think that it provided a foundation. I love how concise it can be. How nonlinear.” That poetic foundation seems especially apparent in the rhyme pattern of the album’s striking opener Recognized – “some people get high to be recognised / some people roll dice to be recognised” – that makes it more poem than song. “A lot of people are really struck by the non-traditional structures of the songs. I’ve been accused of not writing choruses, but that’s just me. I’ve never really thought about those formalities.”
There are many years ahead for this young talent to stretch into, and Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? offers a rich introduction to her vision and voice. Though Jackson tells me her next project is going to be “a little different”, here’s hoping it retains the essence and beauty of folk that she has mastered so authentically. “I come from people in the south. There’s something really spiritual about folk music to me. Where it comes from. The way that it brings people together. The acoustic pulled-back aspect of everything. I’ve always loved the way that it feels to hear someone just singing and playing their guitar”.
There is no doubt in my mind that Kara Jackson is a name that we will be hearing about for many years to come. In future features, I may explore and highlight contemporaries like Jamila Woods, boygenius, and the wonderful Mitski. I am going to come to The Line of Best Fit’s interview with the magnificent Kara Jackson. I feel she is an artist that deserves a lot of focus. The way she writes. Her experiences and inspirations. Having released one of this year’s finest albums, I feel that 2024 will be another huge one for her. The Line of Best Fit caught up with Jackson as she was booked to play a sold-out performance at Pitchfork Festival in London:
“The debut album of Chicago singer-songwriter Kara Jackson is negotiated out of that old pact between love and loss; it bears the weight of those unwelcome lessons and endures despite it all like a flower rising from cracks in concrete, a defiant act of humour. Why Does The Earth Gives Us People To Love? – that central question around which everything orbits – is not a manifesto of grief as much as it is a receipt of her love.
Jackson’s tools are simple. Her voice, exceptionally rich at a low simmer, belies her twenty-three years; when you listen, you feel like she knows, heavy with the kind of experience we call ‘soul’. Her guitar is more of a light sketch, shaded with only occasionally with meandering piano and strings which seemingly creates more space for Jackson than they take up. And then there are her words: the sharp, funny, devastating things that seem to find her like iron filings to a magnet.
PHOTO CREDIT: Parri Thomas for The Line of Best Fit
She's here in London to play a sold-out performance at Pitchfork Festival; two nights ago she played Pitchfork Paris. The applause at her London show stretched out longer than the we might have instinctively let it, caught a second wind that teased a bashful smile on Jackson’s face. People are paying attention.
“I’ve always been an introvert, but I feel like since the album has come out, I’ve been more introverted, honestly,” she tells me. After shows, she prefers to be alone. “Sometimes,” she admits, “I just want to blend in and be normal.” There’s a sense of visibility following the release of the album that borders on over-exposure: “I didn’t know if it was gonna reach anybody. I’ve had to start considering myself as a public figure, in a way, which is strange because I’ve been so used to just doing my own thing and just being a jokester on Twitter, or whatever. People interact with me as their perception of me from the album.”
Jackson has had to navigate presumptions and combat comparisons that are as baffling to her as they are ill-fitting. “The weirdest part about putting my album out is people’s random opinions about it that just feel based on nothing. I’ve had so many comparisons to Frank Ocean, and I don’t know why. Someone commented on ‘no fun / party’ and said something like, ‘The Frank Ocean production style needs to end’ – and no hate to Frank Ocean at all, but I’m so confused.
"Or, people always compare me to Tracy Chapman, which I think is lazy. She’s someone I respect, but my songs don’t sound like hers at all. I feel like the way people engage with Black artists who are women is so different. The standards and random formalities are so ridiculous: looking a certain way, talking a certain way; ‘We don’t want to hear your political opinions’, or, ‘Don’t bring race into it all the time’. But people do project a lot, and that is the nature of the game,” she says shrewdly. “Also, you know, I feel like people are just really unwell these days, on a mass scale. People are looking for places to put their hurt, and that’s fair. Times are hard.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Parri Thomas for The Line of Best Fit
Jackson’s music, at first, was met with caution. “I feel like my label was very nervous about my album; they made me feel insecure about my songs because of their length, or because I can’t market them on TikTok, or whatever,” she recalls. “It’s been interesting to see the reception in real time, though, and know that people have engaged with these really thoughtful things that I didn’t think anyone was going to give a shit about. I feel like something is happening. People are hungry for something real. We’re on the verge – if not in the thick of – a folk resurgence. People are getting into the earthiness of their music. Because as much as I love hip-hop and pop music, I think people are becoming really alienated from the same message. It’s like, ‘Hey, I’m with your bitch!’, or whatever, and that’s all there is. People want real stories from straight-up real people. The cult of celebrity is dying. In 2020, people got really fed up: when people were dying, celebrities were complaining about how bored they were in their mansion. People want something real."
PHOTO CREDIT: Parri Thomas for The Line of Best Fit
In the Black experience, Jackson tells me, their grief has always been conflated with transactional entertainment. “It’s particularly true in the United States,” she shares. “There’s our history with minstrelsy in the United States and people expecting Black folk to exist for amusement. Even in our death, people would watch lynchings for entertainment and bring their children. I think in every facet of our lives, we’re performing. But I also refuse to be the kind of artist who stays silent just to make people comfortable. My friend McKinley Dixon, he also has struggles presenting his stories of loss,” she shares, “and I feel like Noname’s most recent album [Sundial] articulates it in a better way than I ever could, this idea of voyeurism from a white audience. I’m very lucky to have a community of Black artists and friends where we can commiserate together and lean on each other – it’s something I think I really needed.”
When I ask Jackson how this year, this album, have changed her life, she tells me: “I’ve prayed more than ever.” Growing up has given her a certain kind of grace, and more than that, gratitude. Already, Jackson has appeared on Kevin Abstract’s latest album Blanket alongside MJ Lenderman on the tender closing track “My Friend”, her name appearing in spaces beyond that which she carved for herself. For now, though, she is studying; she is watching and learning. “I’ve forgiven myself a lot more, and I’ve learned to accept my limitations as strengths,” she shares. “I know that I don’t have to prove myself to anyone. I’ve always been concerned with the doom of life, but I’ve never felt more optimistic”.
I will end up with a couple of reviews for the essential and unforgettable Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?. There has been so much love aimed in the direction of an album that everyone needs to listen to. Loud and Quiet shared their thoughts when they spent some time with Kara Jackson’s debut album:
“Every man thinks I’m his fucking mother,” bemoans Kara Jackson on ‘Therapy’, with the bluntness and sardonic wit that defines the Illinois musician’s debut album.
Recorded in her childhood bedroom during the pandemic, much of the material retains a lo-fi quality. Opening with the sound of a cassette being clunked into a deck, an acoustic guitar or simple piano note are often the integral backing. This is despite her subsequently reaching out to friends such as Nnamdï and Kaina to re-record the demos, shape the production, and add strings to several tracks.
Largely sidestepping conventional verse-chorus-verse structure, there’s a focus on words that’s to be expected from someone who served as the third US National Youth Poet Laureate. Influenced by poets Sharon Olds and Lucille Clifton as much as Fiona Apple and Megan Thee Stallion, the arrangements shift around a world-weary delivery that was designed for cheap bars and cigarettes.
There may not be any big choruses, unless you count devastating one-liners that double as self-help manuals, but this music has substance. There are alt-country slide guitars on ‘Pawnshop’, jazzy piano ripples on ‘Free’, and ‘Dickhead Blues’ twists into a Broadway number halfway through. The astute use of instruments to emphasise lyrical delivery is typified on ‘No Fun/Party’, which turns on a knife edge from strings to sparse banjo for its dénouement.
A collection of songs about love and relationships, the album is also about self-discovery. She’s not far wrong when she has the revelation that, “I am pretty top-notch”.
I am going to finish with Pitchfork’s review for Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?. Undoubtedly one of the most original and accomplished modern artists, it is going to be so exciting seeing where Kara Jackson heads next. It is clear that her debut album has really impacted people. Everyone has not heard it needs to listen to it as soon as they get the chance:
“Kara Jackson doesn’t just wear her heart on her sleeve, she offers it to you in her palms after cutting it from her chest. In the music video for “no fun/party,” the lead single to her debut record, Why Does the Earth Give Us People To Love?, the 23-year-old Chicago native and former National Youth Poet Laureate straddles a double of herself and pulls the organ from the doppelganger’s body. “Isn’t that just love?” she sings ironically, placing her heart, still slick with blood, delicately on a table of makeshift wires. It’s a striking visual that speaks to Jackson’s commitment to painful vulnerability, her recognition that agony and adoration must stem from the same source.
That love and suffering often go hand in hand is conventional wisdom by now, and one that Jackson herself tackled in her 2019 EP, A Song for Every Chamber of the Heart. On her latest record, the singer-songwriter has both refined her musical capabilities and pushed her existential questions into rockier terrain. Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? is an album about love, certainly, but none of its tracks are love songs. The music is neither sweet nor loving; many of the songs are harsh and disorienting, probing and uncomfortable. Where others might posit that it’s better to have loved and lost, Jackson argues that love is loss.
Her storytelling is masterful, filled with earnest lyricism and a knack for arresting imagery. On “no fun/party,” she describes the banality and repetition of finding the one: “It’s hard to have patience when you’re waiting on luck, like a postal truck, like a postal truck…” Jackson also flexes her wide vocal range to drive home the emotions behind her words. “Don’t you bother me,” she warns her ex-lover on the meditative, breakup ballad “Free,” the deep rumbling of her voice adding a menacing edge. On the title track, Jackson pitches her voice high and childlike, almost as though her philosophical questioning—“Why does the earth give us people to love then take them away from our reach?”—soars toward the heavens.
Jackson is a guitarist whose instrument functions not as an appendage to her words, but the very skin that holds her music together. On “no fun/party,” she rarely deviates from a five-note lick which cradles her lyrics and maintains the song’s pensive undertones. These songs introduce lusher arrangements—piano, banjo, xylophone—and a few hometown guests—KAINA, NNAMDÏ, Sen Morimoto—into her repertoire, which let her melodies shift and meander; just when you think you’ve grasped one, it wiggles out of your fist. On the outstanding “Dickhead Blues,” her lackadaisical guitar changes shape when layered with frenetic drums and then disappears altogether, drowned by the layered voices of a choir.
The cost of love comes up repeatedly on Why Does the Earth, and it’s never clear if it’s one Jackson feels is worth paying. “Have you thought about the price of my mouth?” she asks her lover cheekily on “Free.” On “Rat,” Jackson sings of a man who “couldn’t buy compassion cause it’d cost him 40 dollars.” “Price,” “cost,” “bargain,” “pay”; her frustration with transactional relationships is palpable, as is her desire to devote herself to someone without giving away parts of herself. The record captures the dangers of living with an open heart at a time of diminished personal connection, massive overwork, incessant productivity, and constant grief: To prioritize love one must give up something else.
But real love is never free. bell hooks said it best in her landmark 1999 text, All About Love: “To be loving is to be open to grief. To be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love.” Throughout these 13 songs, Jackson never answers the question she poses in the album’s title. But she does have some breakthroughs. At the end of “Dickhead Blues,” as she finishes recounting her tumultuous love affair, she affirms the value in herself in a way her partner never could. “I am pretty top notch, I’m useful!” Jackson cries, her layered falsetto drifting into the ether. Though much of the loss that accompanies love is outside of our control, there is one thing Jackson’s certain of: She will not lose herself”.
Affirmative, inspiring, emotional, open, strengthening, always remarkable and moving, Kara Jackson’s Why Does the Earth Gives Us People to Love? is dedicated to her childhood best friend, Maya-Gabrielle Gary – who sadly died in 2016 after a brief battle with a rare muscle cancer. Someone I was never going to leave out of my Saluting the Queens feature, everyone needs to know about Kara Jackson. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter. You can buy her debut album and experience something truly transformative. There are some fine wordsmiths, poets and lyricists in music. You only need to read and hear the words Kara Jackson sings throughout Why Does the Earth Gives Us People to Love? to understand that she is one of the finest songwriters…
OF her generation.