I can’t remember the last time
I was as hypnotized by a voice.
Or the last time I fell in love with
an album that was, ostensibly, folk.
When Kara Jackson tours, I think,
she’s just a singer with an acoustic.
And while the songs are powerful
delivered in this stripped down way,
this record is sonically complex.
Instrumentally, it’s sparse, leaving
tons of space for that voice and
those words; but sometimes a drum
set kicks in, even momentarily,
or some hand percussion, or bells.
There are strings, pianos, every
once in a while an electric guitar, bass,
and here and there a layering of background
vocals, and some cool and often
spacey production. But that voice,
my god. She has quite the range, but
mostly she’s doing a really strong,
subdued alto, and she can hit these
incredibly low notes, and when she
does that, I kind of swoon. There
are tiny songs on this record that
barely clock in over a minute, and then
there are a few epics, five, six, seven
minutes long. And even though these
longer songs aren’t crowded with
parts and changes, are sometimes organized
around a single riff or two, they are never
dull–in part, because of production
choices that help provide auditory candy
and build the tune, but mostly, because
her lyrics kick ass, as they should:
Kara Jackson had the distinction
of being the National Youth Poet Laureate
for the 2019-2020 year, when she was but
twenty years old. The lyrics on this record
will move you–unless you are cold or dead.
The bridge in the title track, “Why Does The
Earth Give Us People To Love,” where the
speaker tells the story of a childhood
friend dying (I assume) from cancer
is a devastating lyric that gets to me
every single time I listen. And while
the title track and the album title make
it seem like these tunes will be grim,
there is a feistiness here, too, and a humor.
Try on “Dickhead Blues” for starters, or the
opening lines of the short and sweet
“Therapy”–
“Every man thinks I’m his fucking
mother. Good for milk and good for
supper. Never asks if I can be his lover,
special someone when he suffers.
He wants me.
He wants therapy.”
Notes on the vinyl edition: Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love, September Records, 2023, double purple vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 