Kara Jackson – ‘why does the earth give us people to love?’ from ‘Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?’

I wonder sometimes if there ought to be a yearly award for the least unpopular entry in the Unpopular advent. In recent years it would have been won by mainstream artists like The Chicks and Kacey Musgraves, and whilst I make no apology for ranking both of those as favourites of their respective years, neither of them needed any additional coverage from an all but invisible blog to generate more interest.

In 2023, however, as previously noted, the mainstream has passed me by even more easily than usual. I did make another attempt to fathom the interest shown in global phenomenon Taylor Swift but once again came away bewildered. That hypothetical Unpopular award, then, is one thing that will elude Swift in 2023, though I suspect the billions of dollars earned/generated will soften the blow of bitter disappointment somewhat.

Instead, the award that doesn’t, in truth, exist is probably going to Kara Jackson, whose ‘Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?’ lit up the early summer with a blaze of articulate fury and sorrow. A record of sublime natural poetry, as one might expect from a former U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate, much of it recalls the kind of take on ‘folk’ music heard in the records of Hurray For The Riff Raff. To be crassly obvious, this is perhaps due to neither Jackson nor Alynda Segarra coming from an, ah, ‘traditional’ Eurocentric white Folk narrative, and it is their natural warping of those traditions that gives their records much of their appeal. Refreshing too is the way in which Jackson pushes back against that notion of the (female) singer-songwriter being at core a confessional one. It’s a great point that picks up on the way in which an audience might not always see the work that has gone into making something sound the way it does, particularly if that something is pared back and apparently raw, as much of ‘Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?’ is. “I don’t just draw something in my journal and sing it. I construct verses.” she points out. Indeed.

Yet as fine an album as ‘Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?’ is, it is the 6 plus minute title track that sits at its core and commands the most attention. Riven through with reflections on grief and loss, the song is effectively one of two parts, the first of which is a generalised lament to human impermanence within the immensity of nature’s ongoing narrative. It’s the shift in the second part of the song to the immensely personal that makes it all so effective, however. Reflecting on the loss of her best friend to cancer in 2016, Jackson writes and performs with candid, carefully crafted observations. When Jackson sings “the sight of you was vanishing” it is both brutally literal and beautifully metaphorical, whilst her recollection that “we were going to start a band, hijack my folks minivan” and  “actualise our silly plans” is heartbreaking in its simplicity and purity. Finally, Jackson concluding that she will “sing the low notes in the end” is a moment of poetic magic complimented by an arrangement of strings that on one level we know is manipulating the heightened emotion, but that on all others we submit to willingly. This is the art of the great singer-songwriter, after all. They draw us into their worlds and make us feel like we have always belonged. They make us want to empathise and they help us to feel known and heard. And they make it seem easy.