Jamila Woods: 10 Years of HEAVN

You found this. Be the first one here.

A record can arrive at the exact moment you needed permission to like yourself, and afterward you are never entirely objective about it. That one did that for a lot of people in 2016 — an album about Chicago, about water, about being a Black woman and refusing to make that legible for anyone else's comfort, built out of gospel bones and pop hooks and interpolations of songs you half-remember from a car radio. She was teaching poetry to teenagers through a youth writing organization when she made it, and the record still moves like something written to be read out loud to a room rather than streamed alone. Anniversary sets tend to run the sequence straight through, which for this album means the emotional arc actually works instead of being shuffled. The Highland Park venue holds a few hundred and has a balcony that gives you the whole room at once. Music at 8:00 PM. The people who show up to this one already know each other's names from other rooms, and it shows.