In her debut album, Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? 23-year-old Smith alum Kara Jackson grapples with colossal concepts of love, death, and self-worth, delivered with delicate hands and an eternally powerful voice. The prior Youth Poet Laureate has incorporated her skillful penmanship into a new medium, her hard-hitting lyrics underscored by smooth acoustics and flourishing arrangements of guitar, piano, and banjo. Pitchfork awarded her “Best New Album” with a whopping overall score of 8.2, a testament to her impressive musical abilities.
The album begins quietly, but it would be a mistake to describe the record as a whole using the same adjective. “recognized” and “no fun/party” ease us into her world with gentle acoustics and deep, raw vocals, and her words take a dark turn when she sings, “Isn’t that just love? A will to destruct.” She writes about love with sharp wisdom, though her lyrics are not confessional; she is not writing love songs. Rather, her words sound as though they’ve been jotted in the margins of a childhood diary—brutally honest and witty, but somber all the same.
The song “dickhead blues” highlights Jackson’s folk signature and infuses elements of jazz into her sound profile, creating a turbulent composition of guitar, drums, and piano before eventually breaking into a hypnotic repetition of “If I had a heart, I’d know where to start…” Layers of choir and organ-like chimes back her vocals, rebelling from the traditional verse-chorus-verse and allowing Jackson’s poetry to flow freely. Her composition reminds me distinctly of Sufjan Stevens; strong and jarring lyrics supported by an ebb and flow of unique instruments, each track capturing a full narrative. No song feels too long or too short—even interludes like “therapy” serve a purpose in Jackson’s exploration of the meaning behind love. She asks many questions, but does not necessarily provide answers. Why do the men she dates constantly treat her like their mother or therapist? Why does love feel so transactional sometimes? In the end, is it all worth the hurt?
“free,” one of the longer songs on the record, does not feel like the 7 minutes it runs. Cradled by harp and violin, Jackson’s voice stirs the soul. “Can’t you see, I’m free? I’m free. I’m free…” she echoes, some notes turning dissonant and ominous the longer she sings. “brain” delves deeper into the mechanics of Jackson’s mind, recreating the feeling of a sleepless night, kept awake by thoughts alone. Her dreamy, folksy profile is reminiscent of contemporary artists like Weyes Blood—a sense of floating underwater with your eyes open, not quite knowing what’s real and what’s illusion.
My personal favorite song on the album, “rat,” runs nearly 8 minutes. Jackson tells the country tale of a man who is traveling West to escape heartbreak: “He and his woman saw through an awful split / The road his only hope of falsifying it.” Rat is not a heroic character in this story, but one who is cocky, trashy, and refuses to “buy” compassion, choosing to run from his problems rather than face them head on. There is no clear resolution by the end—only the call to come back home to the metaphorical casket his woman has carved for him.
In the title track, Jackson paints her grief against a grim backdrop, questioning the cruelty of death, of paying for “the dirt” in which people are buried. Her words capture both the personal and political, released during a point where we have barely emerged from a devastating pandemic. She demands to know, “Are you saying the dead pay bills?” conjuring screenshots of GoFundMe’s for funeral services, lamenting the financial burden of basic healthcare in the U.S.
But, this titular song takes a turn. Jackson’s focus shifts from large existential questions to the quiet mourning of her best friend, Maya, who died of cancer in 2016. It brings her narrative down to earth, the mournful ballad slipping into something more nostalgic. “We were going to start a band, hijack my folks’ minivan, actualize our silly plans, the lifelines written in our hands,” she sings in the last verse in a sudden burst of optimism, drums and piano re-entering. And despite her grief, Jackson does not end on a mournful note; “If we can ever sing again, you sing those high notes high, my friend. I’ll sing the low notes in the end.”
