With ‘HEAVN,’ Jamila Woods Writes A Love Letter To Her City

Jamila Woods stays pretty busy. The Chicago singer, songwriter and poet released her debut album, HEAVN, last summer. And when she wasn’t recording, she could be found working with young artists in her community as the Associate Artistic Director at the arts nonprofit Young Chicago Authors and as an organizer of an annual youth poetry festival called Louder than a Bomb. “My community doesn’t feel like an extra piece of what I do — it feels very integral to my creative process,” Woods says. “They’re my first audience for my work and the audience that I care most about.”

It makes sense, then, that HEAVN is about Woods’ personal experience, but also about her city. “To me, HEAVN was about expanding the notion of love to include self-love and love of the city where I come from, which is often talked down upon in media,” she says.

Woods, who came of age in the Chicago arts and poetry scene, left to study theater and Africana Studies at Brown University. As she prepared to graduate, she thought being an artist meant she needed to go to New York or Los Angeles, so she sought advice from a mentor. “They asked me where I was from, and I just talked about … the artistic community that I had come from,” she says, “and the mentor was just like, ‘Obviously, I think you should go back to Chicago. It just seems like you have such a community there and it’s a place where you can grow your wings.'”

So she decided to go home. Woods says that, while working on HEAVN, she thought about the idea of “staying as an act of resistance.” On the album’s title track, she sings, “I don’t wanna run away with you / I want to live our lives right here,” a lyric she says is about both her own choices and the choices of her ancestors.

“It’s kind of a twofold thing,” she says, “thinking about staying in Chicago, a city where a lot of people would say, ‘Oh, that’s not really a city you can be successful in, or build a life in, or sustain love in,’ but also thinking about my ancestors, and how they took …

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