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On her expansive new album Water Made Us, Chicago musicianand poet Jamila Woods shines anew as she asks the question, what does itmean to fully surrender into love? Across Water Made Us, Jamila embracesnew genres, playful melodies, and hypnotizing wordplay, as she wadesthrough the exhilarating tumult of love's wreckage and refuge. While 2017's HEAVN saw Jamila celebrating her communitywithin a lineage of Black feminist movement organizing, and 2019's Legacy!Legacy! Reframed her life's experiences through the storied personas of iconicBlack and brown artists, Water Made Us is self-revelatory in an entirely newway, making this her most personal album yet. Made together with LAbased producer McClenney, and boasting features from longtime friendsand Chicago natives such as Saba and Peter CottonTale, Water Made Us isa sprawling and intimate portrait of self-reflection, cleverly designed to echothe different stages of a relationship the early days of easy compromising,flirtatiousness, and fun; the careful negotiation through moments of conflictor hurt; the grieving of something lost; and the tender realization at the end ofit all that the person who is gone never really leaves, but stays with you as youfind yourself ready to try again, refreshed and reassured. The album's title - taken from a line in album highlight InchGoodNewsInch - is a subtle reference to the famous Toni Morrison quote InchAll waterhas a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.Inch It'sthis sentiment - of memory, place, and returning - that acts as a pillar for thealbum's arc. Water Made Us reminds us that at it's best love is a warm, stillocean. Deep, shimmering, and endless in it's wonder. And at it's worst love canbe a riptide that takes us so far away from ourselves we can hardly find ourway back, hardly even remember how to swim. And yet Jamila surrenders tothis surf - eve
