The first song recorded by Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, is 1923's "Downhearted Blues." It starts with Smith pining after unrequited love, for a man who never treated her well and left her shattered. "Trouble, trouble / I've had it all my days," she sings in her thick, gravelly tone, each word dragging like a boulder dislodged. Once she gets to the final verse however, she's cleared a path for herself, and "the man that wrecked [her] life" is left in the dust. "I've got the world in a jug," Smith asserts. "The stopper's in my hand."
In January of this year, Illinois artist Kara Jackson shared a pair of singles from her debut album Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?, one of which was "Dickhead Blues," a song that sounds like a '20s standard punched up with modern accents. When it's just Jackson stretching patient phrases over her guitar, her husky voice strikes with gravitas reminiscent of classic blues royalty; it's when the track keeps cracking open and winding down — the ding of a bell, crash of a drumroll, or rip of a Wurlitzer punctuating the peaks and valleys of Jackson's emotive delivery — that familiar structures prove to be of little interest.
On "Dickhead Blues," opposite ends of popular music history fuse into one another. Jackson deals in the kind of sticky, tactile imagery rooted in Black Southern songwriting, and she skewers the same disappointing men as Bessie Smith and countless other blues women. "Damn the dickhead blues," goes the refrain, dropping a contemporary insult into an outmoded form of lament; "When you're stuck sinking in someone else's lagoon / Like a spoon drowns in a stew / What kind of meal are they making of you?" And like Smith, Jackson turns the tables around — after more witty wordplay about "no longer [being] amused by losers who find themselves losing [her]," she declares: "That's why I choose…."
Jackson doesn't furnish that verb with an object. The act of choosing is what's of significance — what counters the downward spiral of heartbreak — and this contemplation of preference, agency, and desire courses through Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? Over the chamber folk of "No Fun/Party," after Jackson bellows "Every person that I've dated / Tells me I'm intimidating," she decides to lean into this characterization: "I want to be as dangerous as a dancing dragon / Or a steam engine / A loaded gun." The album's spellbinding seven-minute centerpiece, "Free" locates power in the process of severing ties and delineating boundaries post-breakup. Its spacey jazz composition starts with sparse instrumentation — guitar chords dispersed, a lazy bass lumbering, woodwinds faintly fluttering — and then, as if a beast awoken, rises to an ominous rumble, while Jackson repeatedly, slowly insists, "Don't you bother me." Toward the song's conclusion, that line is sung amid a rapturous swirl of harp, strings and choral harmonies before a question arises: "Can't you see I'm free?"
Once Jackson has found and asserted freedom, she moves into "Lily," the first song on the record to address a feminine name and be written from an affectionate place of softness. The love captured in "Lily" — with ambiguity as to whether it's romantic or platonic — is the kind of love Jackson wishes could be reified into something everlasting, or at least less fragile; she imagines building a statue that could outlive her and Lily, yet this ode, infused with the weight of a hymn by its gospel tinges, approaches transcendence. It also dances with another classic blues theme — that of migration. "Lily" aches with the hurt of loved ones departing for other towns and other lives while saddled with histories of home.
That sense of horizonless escape is paralleled on "Rat," wherein Jackson pens a road narrative in the lineage of Joni Mitchell's "Coyote" and Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car," documenting the eponymous character's attempt to move west. Dramatic accompaniments are peppered atop a gentle guitar loop, and for close to eight minutes, we see an impotent man flail across cleverly plotted tableaus — one of him ruffling through garbage, another of him drowning in the bath he drew — as he morphs into an ever-tinier creature in our minds.
Whether in its novelistic narratives or little ditties ("Recognized," "Therapy," "Liquor"), Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? is an album of great substance, one that both rewards and demands close listening. Songs either crackle with a muted cassette quality or build into hearty symphonies as Jackson's co-executive producers — Chicago-based indie artists KAINA (Castillo), NNAMDÏ (Ogbonnaya), and Sen Morimoto — layer pitched vocals and warm analog instruments in a fashion that often calls to mind Frank Ocean's Blonde. Meanwhile, Jackson, who served as the National Youth Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2020, has you hanging on every word, choosing phrases that are chewy or incisive, ones that work the muscles of the mouth. The journey on "Rat," for instance, is propelled by tough consonants; its protagonist was "imitating tales of cowboy trails and travelling man," until the road made a fool of him: "Shook the country from him like a cub clawing its father / Couldn't buy compassion 'cause it cost him forty dollars."
Notably, much of Jackson's rugged language is grounded in the materiality of working-class life. After modestly claiming to be "useful" on "Dickhead Blues," she boasts a more confident appraisal of herself on the country jam "Pawnshop": "I'm not a liquidated asset / I'm sharper than a jewel / What kind of miner does that make you?" Economic terms frame romance again on "Free," when Jackson asks, "Have you thought about the price of my mouth?" And then there's the recurring image of liquor, which appears when she likens the "Dickhead Blues" to "Feeling as broke as a bottle of booze," as well as in the domestic setting of the album's one-minute closer: "Whiskey always wets the winner / In the land of TV dinners," she sings, nodding one last time to a storied blues tradition replete with alcohol and shadows.
At the centre of all this is the album's grand question: "Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?" The title track reveals an addendum to this thought; Jackson wonders why the Earth gives us these people, only "to then take them out of reach." But if the album revolves around the void of grief, that grief is tucked inside the music in a way that lends it astounding power, in the same way that omitting that addendum from the title makes the question register as an invigorating prompt. It sent Jackson searching, and she found ways to value her time, know her worth, and honour the departed.
The title track first asks the impossible, universe-spanning questions, set against a brooding horn and mournful strings. Then, just as Jackson starts to sing about her late friend — outlining their specific relationship and that specific loss, the high notes and the low — the percussion kicks in with a hopeful swing.
(September)In January of this year, Illinois artist Kara Jackson shared a pair of singles from her debut album Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?, one of which was "Dickhead Blues," a song that sounds like a '20s standard punched up with modern accents. When it's just Jackson stretching patient phrases over her guitar, her husky voice strikes with gravitas reminiscent of classic blues royalty; it's when the track keeps cracking open and winding down — the ding of a bell, crash of a drumroll, or rip of a Wurlitzer punctuating the peaks and valleys of Jackson's emotive delivery — that familiar structures prove to be of little interest.
On "Dickhead Blues," opposite ends of popular music history fuse into one another. Jackson deals in the kind of sticky, tactile imagery rooted in Black Southern songwriting, and she skewers the same disappointing men as Bessie Smith and countless other blues women. "Damn the dickhead blues," goes the refrain, dropping a contemporary insult into an outmoded form of lament; "When you're stuck sinking in someone else's lagoon / Like a spoon drowns in a stew / What kind of meal are they making of you?" And like Smith, Jackson turns the tables around — after more witty wordplay about "no longer [being] amused by losers who find themselves losing [her]," she declares: "That's why I choose…."
Jackson doesn't furnish that verb with an object. The act of choosing is what's of significance — what counters the downward spiral of heartbreak — and this contemplation of preference, agency, and desire courses through Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? Over the chamber folk of "No Fun/Party," after Jackson bellows "Every person that I've dated / Tells me I'm intimidating," she decides to lean into this characterization: "I want to be as dangerous as a dancing dragon / Or a steam engine / A loaded gun." The album's spellbinding seven-minute centerpiece, "Free" locates power in the process of severing ties and delineating boundaries post-breakup. Its spacey jazz composition starts with sparse instrumentation — guitar chords dispersed, a lazy bass lumbering, woodwinds faintly fluttering — and then, as if a beast awoken, rises to an ominous rumble, while Jackson repeatedly, slowly insists, "Don't you bother me." Toward the song's conclusion, that line is sung amid a rapturous swirl of harp, strings and choral harmonies before a question arises: "Can't you see I'm free?"
Once Jackson has found and asserted freedom, she moves into "Lily," the first song on the record to address a feminine name and be written from an affectionate place of softness. The love captured in "Lily" — with ambiguity as to whether it's romantic or platonic — is the kind of love Jackson wishes could be reified into something everlasting, or at least less fragile; she imagines building a statue that could outlive her and Lily, yet this ode, infused with the weight of a hymn by its gospel tinges, approaches transcendence. It also dances with another classic blues theme — that of migration. "Lily" aches with the hurt of loved ones departing for other towns and other lives while saddled with histories of home.
That sense of horizonless escape is paralleled on "Rat," wherein Jackson pens a road narrative in the lineage of Joni Mitchell's "Coyote" and Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car," documenting the eponymous character's attempt to move west. Dramatic accompaniments are peppered atop a gentle guitar loop, and for close to eight minutes, we see an impotent man flail across cleverly plotted tableaus — one of him ruffling through garbage, another of him drowning in the bath he drew — as he morphs into an ever-tinier creature in our minds.
Whether in its novelistic narratives or little ditties ("Recognized," "Therapy," "Liquor"), Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? is an album of great substance, one that both rewards and demands close listening. Songs either crackle with a muted cassette quality or build into hearty symphonies as Jackson's co-executive producers — Chicago-based indie artists KAINA (Castillo), NNAMDÏ (Ogbonnaya), and Sen Morimoto — layer pitched vocals and warm analog instruments in a fashion that often calls to mind Frank Ocean's Blonde. Meanwhile, Jackson, who served as the National Youth Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2020, has you hanging on every word, choosing phrases that are chewy or incisive, ones that work the muscles of the mouth. The journey on "Rat," for instance, is propelled by tough consonants; its protagonist was "imitating tales of cowboy trails and travelling man," until the road made a fool of him: "Shook the country from him like a cub clawing its father / Couldn't buy compassion 'cause it cost him forty dollars."
Notably, much of Jackson's rugged language is grounded in the materiality of working-class life. After modestly claiming to be "useful" on "Dickhead Blues," she boasts a more confident appraisal of herself on the country jam "Pawnshop": "I'm not a liquidated asset / I'm sharper than a jewel / What kind of miner does that make you?" Economic terms frame romance again on "Free," when Jackson asks, "Have you thought about the price of my mouth?" And then there's the recurring image of liquor, which appears when she likens the "Dickhead Blues" to "Feeling as broke as a bottle of booze," as well as in the domestic setting of the album's one-minute closer: "Whiskey always wets the winner / In the land of TV dinners," she sings, nodding one last time to a storied blues tradition replete with alcohol and shadows.
At the centre of all this is the album's grand question: "Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?" The title track reveals an addendum to this thought; Jackson wonders why the Earth gives us these people, only "to then take them out of reach." But if the album revolves around the void of grief, that grief is tucked inside the music in a way that lends it astounding power, in the same way that omitting that addendum from the title makes the question register as an invigorating prompt. It sent Jackson searching, and she found ways to value her time, know her worth, and honour the departed.
The title track first asks the impossible, universe-spanning questions, set against a brooding horn and mournful strings. Then, just as Jackson starts to sing about her late friend — outlining their specific relationship and that specific loss, the high notes and the low — the percussion kicks in with a hopeful swing.
