Jamila Woods Water Made Us HHV Exclusive Seaglass Vinyl Edition

100 copies available at HHV!
On her expansive new album, "Water Made Us," Chicago musician and poet Jamila Woods questions what it means to fully surrender to love. On "Water Made Us," Jamila embraces new genres, playful melodies, and hypnotic wordplay as she wades through the heady turbulence of love wrecks and refuge. While Jamila celebrated her community within the black feminist movement on "heavn" (2017), and on "Legacy! Legacy!" (2019), she processed her life experiences through the stories of black and brown artists, "Water Made Us" is an entirely new kind of self-revelation, making it her most personal album to date. "Water Made Us," which she recorded with LA-based producer McClenney and features longtime Chicago friends Saba and Peter CottonTale, is a sprawling and intimate portrait of self-reflection that deftly reflects the various stages of a relationship: The beginnings of easily compromising, flirting and having fun; the careful negotiation of moments of conflict or hurt; the mourning of something lost; and the tender realization at the end of it all that the person who left never really leaves you, but stays with you while you're ready to try again, refreshed and reassured. The album's title - a line from the album's 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 is this sense - of memory, of place, and of return - that serves as the pillar for the album's arc. "Water Made Us" reminds us that, at its best, love is a warm, still ocean. Deep, shimmering and endless in its wonder. And at its worst, love can be a raging torrent that takes us so far from ourselves that we can barely find our way back, or even know how to swim. And yet Jamila surrenders to this surf - to every wave and every undertow - because perhaps even the most painful ends can be an invitation that calls her back home, back to the shore, back to herself.