Jamila Woods Quotes
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When you're in a choir, it's about blending into how everyone else sounds.
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I spent a lot time with my siblings because there weren't too many young people on our block. We were our own best friends: making dances to a Stevie Wonder songs and singing with my mom.
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Part of what I like about living in Chicago is it's not easy. The breath of the city, the everyday challenge of it, is good. It forces you to grow and push yourself.
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For me, church was about not only religion but about community. A woman in my grandmother's church helped pay for my SAT classes when I was in high school and drove me there every week.
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Me and my three younger siblings, we sang together in grandma's church, and I was in the Chicago Children's Choir in high school, but I didn't think I had the voice to be a singer professionally.
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My artistic manifesto exists in the world as poetry. So even though most of the things that I've done have been on other people's projects or could be pigeonholed in certain ways, that's not how I perceive myself.
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It's important to immerse myself in one thing at a time to do it well, but I could never do one thing only. I will always be a poet and a singer, because I'm interested in bending genres and pushing boundaries of what is considered a poem, what is considered a song.
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I think of music as creating a space. I like to put things in that are comforting to me and are nostalgic. To me, that's what sampling does in songs; it's making deeper layers for people who know where it comes from, but also referencing another part of my history and my memory or a memory that I have.
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A lot of people get Chicago wrong. I've developed this protective feeling about how we're portrayed, and at the same time, I'm acutely aware of the issues we face and the root causes of these issues.
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I love how music and chants were used in the Civil Rights movement to help people keep marching. How songs were both a balm and a call to action.
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I don't know if it's because I grew up in Beverly or my friends, but I listened to a lot of alternative rock music. I loved Incubus, Weezer and Jimmy Eat World. It almost felt segregated because I loved all of those acts over here, but then I also loved R&B and soul music I grew up with.
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I like to borrow forms and quotes and use a lot of allusions, in both poetry and music.
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For black and brown people, caring for ourselves and each other is not a neutral act. It is a necessary and radical part of the struggle to create a more just society. Our healing and survival are essential to the fight.
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'HEAVN' is about black girlhood, about Chicago, about the people we miss who have gone on to prepare a place for us somewhere else, about the city/world we aspire to live in. I hope this album encourages listeners to love themselves and love each other.
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With lyrics, being a poet gave me a different approach than other people.
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When it's a rapper's album or a singer's album, there's a tendency to want a text-based or theme-based narrative.
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I always loved singing because I grew up in a very musical family. My mom wasn't able to do music professionally because her parents wanted her to get a 'real job,' but she played guitar.
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In some ways, I value specificity. I think that there's power in, once you know who your fan base is, being able to speak to them. I hope to cultivate a fan base of black girls and black people and people of color, women of color, queer people, people who are are marginalized in general.
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I read 'Song of Solomon' by Toni Morrison in college, and it just blew my mind.
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In church, the music is for everyone. People are singing off tune, loud; they're not ashamed - it's for their healing. That's kind of just what I strive for, that feeling.
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They say Chicago is for haters. No one will just sweat each other and say, 'Oh, you're so good,' if you're not. Which is another reason I'm inspired to stay.
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Music is something that is supposed to connect people on a pure level.
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Naming something, putting it on record, in a lyric, feels like affirming people. Ideally, that's what politicians should want to do: to put laws or policies in place that speak to people's experiences, to make them feel heard.
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I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.