Poet JAMILA WOODS returns with new single/video, and announces a new album

Chicago musician and poet Jamila Woods has announced a new album, Water Made Us out October 13th via Jagjaguwar, her first since 2019’s critically acclaimed LEGACY! LEGACY!.

The album is co-executive produced by Mcclenney and Jamila Woods, and features Saba, duendita and Peter CottonTale. The announcement arrives with a new song and video ‘Tiny Garden’ ft. duendita produced by Wynne Bennett, a twinkling and percussive single that chronicles her efforts to prove her commitment to someone, despite the ways she struggles to make it clear. In the accompanying self-directed video for the track, water remains a constant theme. The shots shift between beautiful outdoor landscapes and the solace of a familiar apartment before they finally become one.

Jamila explains:

“Tiny Garden is a song about the way my heart works, the slow and steady way I love. In my directorial debut I wanted to create a visual representation of how I often feel in relationships, like I’m having huge feelings that I end up expressing in small specific ways. The video takes place across two landscapes, the reality of a shared apartment at the tail end of winter and an imagined “heartspace” where everything is lush and green. I worked with my friend and frequent collaborator Po Chop on the choreography, so that the movement becomes the key to merging these two worlds — everywhere I dance, something is watered, something grows.”

Watch the video for ‘Tiny Garden’ ft. duendita below

The album’s title is a subtle reference to a well-known 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 arc of the album.

While 2017’s critically acclaimed HEAVN found Woods 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. Coming out of her Legacy! Legacy! touring schedule and into 2020’s Covid-19 quarantine, Jamila wanted to challenge herself to write as many songs as possible, and spent several months in a state of deep creativity and self-reflection.

But despite giving herself this freedom to write without worry, she still yearned for a story to tie her disparate songs together. Early songs revealed a simmering common thread: love, relationships, and the hard lessons learned in their wake. Journaling, therapy, and frequent consultations with a trusted astrologer all began to reflect Jamila’s own patterns in love and intimacy back to her. After being connected with LA-based producer McClenney, the album’s story began to take shape, and the two worked together building each song from scratch. What came is an album that reveals a new side of Woods never fully shared with her previous work, making this her most personal album yet.

“Water Made Us feels like the most personal and vulnerable piece of art I’ve ever made. I love creating from source material, diving deep into a subject and extrapolating from what I discover.” Jamila says of the album. “We sat in the house for 2 years and I became my own source material. Shout out to the therapists, the astrologers, the family members and friends who listened, who helped me process and transform my journaled thoughts and questions into this body of work. I hope it feels like a playlist that carries you through the life cycle of a relationship, whatever stage of the journey your heart may be in.”

As a touring artist, Jamila has played in festivals such as Primavera Barcelona and Portugal, Day Inn / Day Out, and Format Festival, andshared stages with Corinne Bailey Rae, Rafael Saadiq, Common, and many others. A Pushcart Prize-winning poet, her work was featured in the Library of America anthology “African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song” (2020). Woods was also an artist-in-residence for the 2021-2022 academic year at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Pre-save/Pre-order Water Made Us HERE

All streaming to ‘Tiny Garden’ ft. duendita HERE