Kara Jackson’s Plaintive, Playful Folk Songs

Kara Jackson.Photograph by Lawrence Agyei

Poets who write about music, or play music, or simply love music, may sometimes get asked to explain what separates a poem from a song, lyrically, and I have yet to find an answer that satisfies me. But I do return often to a quote by the poet Rachel Long, from a 2020 interview: “The self is in constant flux and I think that lends itself to poetry—the subject can appear the same, but something can have shifted massively just under the surface and changed the/their meaning.” To be clear, Long was not referring specifically to the problem of distinguishing songs from poems. But her observation helps me see that both the poets and the lyricists I love most are patient with their subjects, or interested in breaking down an emotional idea into something that can be turned over, examined, subjected to scrutiny as it changes and the writer changes along with it.

Kara Jackson, a twenty-three-year-old Illinois native, is one such poet and songwriter. A graduate of the esteemed Oak Park and River Forest High School poetry program, Jackson became the National Youth Poet Laureate in 2019, at the age of nineteen. The same year, she published a chapbook, “Bloodstone Cowboy,” in which she wrote about her family’s Southern roots (her father was born and raised in Dawson, Georgia), her capacious experience of Black womanhood, and small moments of pleasure that she made seem larger than life. In one poem, titled “anthem for my belly after eating too much,” the narrator looks in the mirror after eating chips and whittles her mixed feelings into a resolution: if all is expanding, all is possible. The speaker in Jackson’s poems had a presence that was world-weary but not beaten down, cynical but still eager to believe in romance. It was the voice of someone who had lived several lives before the one she was speaking from. Like Lucille Clifton, Jackson told terrible truths with a matter-of-fact touch, truths that arrived and then dissolved but didn’t disappear. One poem of hers that I cherish is titled “the world is about to end and my grandparents are in love.” In it, Jackson writes:

when the world ends will it suck the earth of all its love?

will i go taking somebody’s hand,

my skin becoming their skin?

Jackson is also a singer-songwriter, of raw and inventive folk music, and she has just released her début album, “Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?” In it, she seems to take the central concern of that poem and expand it—the concern, as I read it, being not only “Who will love me while everything around me falls apart?” but also “How will I go on when this version of the world ends?” These are questions of anxiety, and loneliness, and doubt, and so they are also questions that return us to the ever-shifting undercurrents of the self.

Like a four-song EP that Jackson released in 2019, “A Song for Every Chamber of the Heart,” the new album is sparse and acoustic, with Jackson on vocals and guitar. But the sound on the LP is bolstered, more layered and lived-in. (Jackson co-produced it with her fellow Chicago-area talents Sen Morimoto, Nnamdï, and Kaina, all of whom also play on the album.) The album is dedicated to Jackson’s friend Maya, who died of cancer while still in high school. Even without that knowledge, it’s clear that grief is one of the engines behind the project—not only an endurance of grief but a fascination with the forms that it can take as it continues to live within us. When Jackson was starting out as a poet, I got to see her read, and one of her strengths was a deliberate delivery of language, as if she were piecing together a symphony and putting every note in the correct place. That quality remains intact when she’s singing. Her vocals have a distinctive depth that is both biting and tender. Her voice sits as heavy in the ear as it does in the heart, but the feeling it elicits is a good ache, well earned for both the singer and the listener.

The first single, “no fun/party,” is, as the title suggests, a study in two parts. The “no fun” section is slow and melodic, with guitar giving way to gentle swells of strings and faint piano as the lyrics trace a trail of lovelorn lament—though not without some delightfully scathing moments, a smirk to go along with the howl. (“When searching for a reason, he could only find one / He said ‘You’re just no fun, you’re just no fun’ / And if seeing you naked wasn’t such a bargain / It would be a home run, it would be a home run.”) Then “party” arrives late, a little more than four minutes into the nearly six-minute tune. Jackson’s voice sounds more up-close now, and is accompanied only by the strumming of what sounds like a ukulele, in an otherwise quiet room. This lends the song the effect of a home recording, as if Jackson were wresting back some sense of tranquillity, culminating in a line that echoes warmly back through both halves of the song: “Don’t be sorry for missing the party/ ’Cause somebody’s party is missing you, too.” It’s a reminder that even sadness is not only sadness but a machine of many parts.

Other songs on the album unfold in movements, with subtle shifts that reward a close listener. Sometimes the turns are sonic, as in the song “free,” which begins with Jackson laying out a set of boundaries, or “don’ts,” before articulating an ever-growing sense of freedom. As she sings of a life unbound by the expectations of the no-good folks who might drain her vitality (“you could love me the most / but if it don’t show / then i have to go”), the song’s instrumentation also becomes more ferocious in volume, more relentless. A harp arrives, faintly, and then strings, keys, and percussion, until Jackson’s repeated demand of “don’t you bother me” sounds as if it is being seconded by every note accompanying her voice. It is a stunning bit of song structure, spare yet expansive and able to surprise.

Six of the album’s thirteen tracks run more than five minutes, giving Jackson room to display her abilities as a story-maker. There’s something of Tracy Chapman in her way of weaving complex narratives into a single, luminous thread. The song “rat,” nearly eight minutes long, tells the story of a rat heading West (which for me summoned the old animated movie “An American Tail,” though I do appreciate that Fievel was a mouse), but then the rat becomes a boy and the West becomes California, or, more specifically, a sort of stand-in for the place someone goes to dream and then to see their dreams washed away. The song’s conclusion shows little interest in resolution—“at home his woman carves another kind of casket,” Jackson sings. Sometimes anguish comes without the offer of a remedy, particularly when someone leaves a place looking for something else, or something better, or something new. Dreaming along the borders of the unknown can leave a dreamer harshly shaken.

As a songwriter and as a poet, Jackson exhibits a sombre playfulness. The song “dickhead blues” surveys the aftermath of romantic entanglements with men who ain’t shit, and includes my favorite moment of language on the record: “When you are stuck sinking in someone’s lagoon / Like a spoon drowns in a stеw.” Each “s” in that last line is married to the next, until the words collapse on top of one another and become a series of sounds, a wry onomatopoeia for the all-consuming mess of misguided affections. The song ends on a joyfully polyphonic repetition of “if I had a heart / I’d know where to start” over a confluence of drums and piano. Much of what Jackson’s album does well has to do with this sort of repetition, though that term feels inadequate to describe what she accomplishes with the technique. The poets I love—whether they write in verse or in song—know how to hold on to precious objects, and they’re unsatisfied with looking at these things from only one angle. On this album, those objects are sometimes grief, sometimes love, sometimes loneliness. They may seem massive and immovable from afar, but Jackson chips off just enough, just a small piece of the grander emotional monument, and makes it thrillingly her own. ♦