Jamila Woods
Water Made Us
JAGJAGUWAR
ABOVE THE CURRENT
When we last heard from Jamila Woods, she was conjuring the spirits of luminous Black- and brown-skinned ancestors, penning songs from the vantage points of James Baldwin, Betty Davis, and Octavia Butler. But what if, as we toured Legacy! Legacy!’s hall of heroes, we were just seeing Jamila Woods all along? She’s admitted as much in interviews leading up to her third album, Water Made Us, sharing that her character work on that 2019 record was a kind of armor; a way for her to bare her truest feelings about love and liberation while minimizing personal exposure.
On Water Made Us, exposure is the dominant mode, vulnerability the overriding virtue. Through a song cycle that reckons candidly with relationships in different forms (from the flush of infatuation to the rubble of dissolution), Woods mines revelations and personal discoveries from her own romantic past, always speaking in confessional, first-person terms. A spoken-word piece called “I Miss All My Exes” airs its central conceit right there in the title while rattling off a hypnotic list of specific, even intimate remembrances. Elsewhere, Woods provides recorded interview snippets with family members, as if the last album’s history lessons have shifted toward a much more personal sense of cultivated legacy.
Woods was a poet before she was a songwriter, and while spoken-word has always been a part of her art, it’s never been more central than it is here. That’s not just because spoken recitations are worked into so many of the songs, but because her language feels more carefully chiseled, more focused and impactful than ever before. In song after song she distills complex emotions into crisp, clear images: In “Tiny Garden,” for example, she imagines a fledgling love as a tiny nursery that needs tending—not something that will blossom into a rainforest overnight, but something that may well come to thrive with just a little daily attention. Though writerly and thoughtful, her words also come across as intuitive and simple. On opener “Bugs,” she describes love as “the warmest weather,” inviting a partner to just bask in it. Such tender moments are genuinely disarming not just for the listener, but for Woods herself, who’s left herself without any formal conceits to hide behind.
Water Made Us feels a bit like an album born from therapy, not because it uses self-helpy language but because it manifests moments of clarity that only come about with time to think and to process. “Backburner” harnesses feelings of inadequacy and envy as a kind of self-diagnostic test, while the stark “Wolfsheep” relitigates a breakup to find that there were no wholly good or bad actors involved. In “Practice,” Woods views each relationship as an opportunity to hone the practical skills of love and communication, even if the union itself later fractures.
Made with several of her recurring collaborators (Saba, Peter Cottontale), Water Made Us sounds sleek and contemporary while also gesturing back toward earlier eras of R&B: Its glistening, gospel-influenced Chicago sound is in conversation with Chance the Rapper and Noname, but also with analog-era Erykah Badu. (It should also be said that, in her magnetically chill delivery, Woods is mining some of the same low-key territory as Aaliyah’s self-titled.) Nothing on the record feels aggressive or works up a sweat, yet there are driving beats and earworm melodies throughout: the percolating anthem “Tiny Garden,” the bluesy notes in “Backburner,” the subtle snap in “Boomerang.” It all adds up to an album that feels as assured as it does unguarded; the sound of an artist fully confident in her own process of self-discovery.
