On her expansive new album Water Made Us, Chicago musician
and poet Jamila Woods shines anew as she asks the question, what does it
mean to fully surrender into love? Across Water Made Us, Jamila embraces
new genres, playful melodies, and hypnotizing wordplay, as she wades
through the exhilarating tumult of love's wreckage and refuge.
While 2017's HEAVN saw Jamila celebrating her community
within a lineage of Black feminist movement organizing, and 2019's Legacy!
Legacy! Reframed her life's experiences through the storied personas of iconic
Black and brown artists, Water Made Us is self-revelatory in an entirely new
way, making this her most personal album yet. Made together with LAbased producer McClenney, and boasting features from longtime friends
and Chicago natives such as Saba and Peter CottonTale, Water Made Us is
a sprawling and intimate portrait of self-reflection, cleverly designed to echo
the different stages of a relationship: the early days of easy compromising,
flirtatiousness, and fun; the careful negotiation through moments of conflict
or hurt; the grieving of something lost; and the tender realization at the end of
it all that the person who is gone never really leaves, but stays with you as you
find yourself ready to try again, refreshed and reassured.
The album's title - taken from a line in album highlight "Good
News" - is a subtle reference to the famous Toni Morrison quote "All water
has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was." It's
this sentiment - of memory, place, and returning - that acts as a pillar for the
album's arc. Water Made Us reminds us that at it's best love is a warm, still
ocean. Deep, shimmering, and endless in it's wonder. And at it's worst love can
be a riptide that takes us so far away from ourselves we can hardly find our
way back, hardly even remember how to swim. And yet Jamila surrenders to
this surf - every wave and undertow - because maybe even the most painful
endings can in fact be an invitation that calls her back home, back to shore,
back to herself.