Critics have long labelled female writers, artists and musicians as “confessional”. It was once the case for Kara Jackson’s idol Joni Mitchell and it is now the case for Jackson herself. “I push back against this idea that what I’m doing is diaristic,” she says, suspicious of the gendered framing. “A lot of women are pigeonholed by this idea that they’re confessing. Mitski talks a lot about that. She’s like: ‘I don’t just draw something in my journal and sing it. I construct verses.’”
While each song of the US folk musician’s debut album Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?, sung in her uniquely cavernous voice against somber guitar arrangements, does feel like the distillation of a deep memory or emotion, Jackson is more often a narrator than a protagonist. From dates to funerals, she is a master of world-building and creates landscapes and narratives that feel immersive and soberingly real. As a result, the record has rightly become one of the year’s most critically acclaimed. “As much as people think I’m being so vulnerable, sometimes I listen back to the album and think, ‘I’m actually not really giving away that much,’” she says, wearing pink braids, jeans and a face mask as we chat in her label’s office in Notting Hill, west London.
Born and raised in Chicago, Jackson got her first guitar for her 11th birthday and learned to play piano: “My mom had a rule that we had to play piano before we left the house at 18.” Raised on Jim Croce and Charley Pride, Jackson fell in love with folk music as a child. “Folk has a big history of political commentary,” says the 23-year-old. “My mom works for a labour union so I learned a lot of my favourite folk songs from protesting with her. Pete Seeger [and others].” Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell, she says, are the “blueprints”.
Jackson joined a spoken-word club in high school and began taking part in poetry slams. She released her debut poetry collection, Bloodstone Cowboy, in 2019 and served as the US national youth poet laureate from 2019-20. “I’m not as prolific as a poet now, but I do think that it provided a foundation. I love how concise it can be. How nonlinear.” That poetic foundation seems especially apparent in the rhyme pattern of the album’s striking opener Recognized – “some people get high to be recognised / some people roll dice to be recognised” – that makes it more poem than song. “A lot of people are really struck by the non-traditional structures of the songs. I’ve been accused of not writing choruses, but that’s just me. I’ve never really thought about those formalities.”
Jackson’s refusal to follow the crowd extends to her face mask: “I’d rather be alone and correct than together and wrong.” She’s been vocal on X (formerly Twitter) about mask-wearing and preventing the spread of Covid-19. “People are missing the basic fact that we’re not invincible. [I’ve been] listening to marginalised people, disabled people and immunocompromised people who say: ‘If you get disabled from this shit, it’s not going to be a walk in the park.’”
Jackson believes the lackadaisical attitudes towards Covid-19 in the US are the result of a collective desensitisation of attitudes towards death. “I do think that so much of the way we grieve is formed by capitalism and Eurocentric structures,” she says. Her best friend, Maya, died of cancer in 2016: “I just remember people being like: ‘You gotta get ready for college.’ I was so confused about why time didn’t just stop.” She also lost her grandad when she was just about to announce the album. “There’s not a lot of room to be a grieving artist. I played a show the day after he passed away and people were texting me, like, ‘Can you do this call’ or whatever. There was no sense of: ‘This person’s grieving, this is actually serious.’”
The album’s title track was a place where Jackson could process her loss. She describes it as the thesis statement of the record. “All the songs go back to the question: why are we all here? There are so many types of grief the album grapples with. There’s the obvious grief, and then there’s being in my early 20s and having to date. That’s its own grief,” she says, laughing.
There are many years ahead for this young talent to stretch into, and Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? offers a rich introduction to her vision and voice. Though Jackson tells me her next project is going to be “a little different”, here’s hoping it retains the essence and beauty of folk that she has mastered so authentically. “I come from people in the south. There’s something really spiritual about folk music to me. Where it comes from. The way that it brings people together. The acoustic pulled-back aspect of everything. I’ve always loved the way that it feels to hear someone just singing and playing their guitar.”
• Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? is out now on September Recordings. Kara Jackson plays Kings Place, London, 11 November
