On her expansive new album Water Made Us, Chicago musician and poet Jamila Woods shines anew as she asks the question, what does it mean to fully surrender into love? Across Water Made Us, Jamila embraces new genres as she wades through the exhilarating tumult of love's wreckage and refuge. While 2017’s HEAVN saw Jamila celebrating her community within a lineage of Black feminist movement organizing, and 2019’s Legacy! Legacy! reframed her life’s experiences through the storied personas of iconic Black and brown artists, Water Made Us is self-revelatory in an entirely new way, making this her most personal album yet. It is a sprawling and intimate portrait of self-reflection, cleverly designed to echo the different stages of a relationship: the early days of easy compromising and flirtatiousness; the careful negotiation through moments of conflict; the grieving of something lost. The album’s title is a subtle reference to the famous Toni Morrison quote “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” It’s this sentiment that acts as a pillar for the album’s arc. Water Made Us reminds us that at its best love is a warm, still ocean. And at its worst love can be a riptide that takes us so far away from ourselves we can hardly find our way back, hardly even remember how to swim. Yet Jamila surrenders to this surf because maybe even the most painful endings can in fact be an invitation that calls her back home, back to shore, back to herself. Born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, Woods grew up in a family of music lovers. It took a surprise poetry class with a high school arts program for Jamila to finally find her metaphorical and literal voice. “Through poetry, I realized you are the expert of your own experience,” she says. Her poetry studies continued in college and in her professional career with Young Chicago Authors. Music–like poetry– is personal. “It became a way to stop hiding, to actually be the most honest with myself through writing,” she says. “It helps me check in with myself.” And that honesty translated to HEAVN, an album she describes as a collection of, “nontraditional love songs pushing the idea of what makes a love song.” You’ll find the bits and pieces of her past and present that make Jamila: family, the city of Chicago, self-care, and the black women she calls friends. Jamila is an artist of substance creating music crafted with a sturdy foundation of her passions and influences. True and pure in its construction and execution, her music is the best representation of Jamila herself: strong in her roots, confident in her ideas, and attuned to the people, places and things shaping her world.

Independent artist and musician Madison McFerrin has come into her own. Madison holds a fruitful and robust solo career with three self produced EPs and numerous performances and curatorships across the country and internationally. Madison’s distinct vocal and meticulously layered stylings of a capella and self-harmonizing culminate in work that blends the genres of R&B, pop, soul and jazz, all with a sense of softness. Her genre-bending work has led to Questlove dubbing her early sound “soul-appella,” AdHoc to describe her work as “an oasis of serenity,” and The FADER noting how Madison’s “warm harmonies feel effortless.” The throughline of Madison’s work is independence and she is often looking towards a kind of inner liberation. Whether she is writing about understanding one’s intuition and inner beauty or the cyclical violence of anti-Blackness and sexism, Madison explores how to get free and how to care for oneself along the way. In this, Madison works at the intersection of artistry and community building. She often looks back and honors a Black music canon while creating her own unique style, utilizing her voice as a central instrument and drawing upon lifelong inspirations like Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Erykah Badu, Pharell, Missy Elliot, and the Spice Girls. She is in community with other artists, cultural workers, and activists, and has been able to prioritize the work of women and POC in her curatorial tenures at venues like C'mon Everybody, the WNYC Greene Space and the BRIC Jazz festival. The result of Madison's work is an enduring commitment to finding ways to think better, express ourselves honestly, and nurture a sense of possibility.