Kara Jackson on 'Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?' (Listening Party)

Summary

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All Of It – Kara Jackson on 'Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?' (Listening Party)

Podcast: All Of It (WNYC)
Host: Kushan Avadar (filling in for Alison Stewart)
Guest: Kara Jackson, singer-songwriter, poet, former National Youth Poet Laureate
Air Date: May 15, 2024

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Episode Overview

This episode of All Of It features an in-depth listening party and interview with Kara Jackson, the acclaimed singer-songwriter and former National Youth Poet Laureate. The conversation explores the blend of poetry and music in her artistic work, the healing and community-building aspects of her latest album ("Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?"), navigating themes of love, grief, and humor, and the collective creativity behind her music. Live tracks from her album are played, and the episode highlights the intimate connections between words, sound, and audience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Poetry as Community & Performance

Timestamps: 03:19–05:17

• Audience Participation: On her tour, Jackson invites audience members to submit their favorite poems, which she reads between her songs.
  • "Each night at all of my shows, I've been reading a poem in between songs...things I've chosen if I feel like they're kind of relevant to the city I'm in or, you know, is someone I know or a poet." —Kara Jackson [03:35]
• She describes this as a way to reconnect with her beginnings in poetry, create shared moments, and foster community with the audience.
  • "I'm nodding to my past and my experience as a poet, but also just trying to connect with the audience and with words." —Kara Jackson [04:05]
• Memorable submission: She recalls a standout poem in Portland centered on water as a life-giving metaphor.
  • "It was like their original work, and I just thought it was really beautiful." —Kara Jackson [04:52]

2. Roots: Music vs. Poetry

Timestamps: 05:17–06:22

• Music was her first love, though she was always drawn to lyrical songwriting.
  • "I've always been attracted to songs that have really interesting lyrics and beautiful lyrics. So I've always been attracted to words and language." —Kara Jackson [05:47]
• Her lyric inspirations include Joni Mitchell, Alex Turner (Arctic Monkeys), and Laura Marling.

3. Grief & Love as Creative Fuel

Timestamps: 06:40–08:27

• Kara’s debut album is both an expression of grief—inspired by the passing of a high school friend—and a celebration of love and relationships.
• She reflects on love and grief’s complex entanglement:
  • "I think the really interesting thing about grief is it's also a confirmation of just how deeply you can love someone...It's something that I've learned to, like, lean into instead of being afraid of, you know, the sadness that comes with it." —Kara Jackson [07:07]
• The track "Lily" is highlighted as a rare, straightforward love song on an album filled with more complicated emotional terrain.

4. Storytelling Through Song: "Rat"

Timestamps: 09:19–10:45

• "Rat" is described as one of her favorites—a nearly eight-minute folk epic about chasing dreams, California ambition, and humility.
  • "It follows the tradition in folk music of just telling stories and, you know, having these divine kind of larger than life characters." —Kara Jackson [09:43]
• Influenced by Joanna Newsom’s narrative songwriting.

5. Collaboration and "Collective Weirdness"

Timestamps: 11:49–13:32

• Jackson speaks about producing the album with fellow Chicago musicians (Namdi, Sen Morimoto, Kainia).
• The collaborative process was organic and experimental:
  • "I think the album really sounds like a effort of friends and our just kind of collective weirdness." —Kara Jackson [12:06]
• Trust and long-standing friendships allowed them to "unpeel the layers" and unlock creative oddities together.

6. Evolution of Her Sound

Timestamps: 13:32–14:46

• Contrasts the stripped-back sound of her earlier EP ("A Song for Every Chamber of the Heart") with the lush, layered, genre-fusing production of her debut album.
• Example played: "Pawn Shop"—demonstrates sonic experimentation and emotional depth.

7. Humor as a Coping Mechanism

Timestamps: 14:46–16:33

• Humor is woven into Jackson’s songwriting, especially surrounding romantic relationships.
  • "I think humor has always been a way for me to kind of move through the heaviness of the world and juxtapose the heaviness of the world." —Kara Jackson [14:57]
• Family influence ("my parents are just really hilarious people to me").
• On the duality between humor and seriousness in songs, especially the "blues song" with an unbroadcastable title:
  • "I think there was definitely a level of humor, but I also think it was really real emotions at the same time. So I feel like the funniness kind of allows you to have a nice entry point and to kind of trick people into really just, you know, being down bad alongside you." —Kara Jackson [15:45]

8. New Work and Ongoing Inspiration

Timestamps: 16:33–17:29

• Kara recently covered "Right, Wrong or Ready" by Karen Dalton—one of her staples in live sets and a personal artistic touchstone.
  • "It's from one of my favorite albums [by Karen Dalton]...it just has kind of really become a staple in my live sets and a song that really means a lot to me." —Kara Jackson [16:44]
• No immediate plans for a new LP, but she hints, "you never know."

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On love and grief:
  "Love is a really complex and sometimes devastating emotion to really tend with. And I think I'm always interested in the ways in which love and grief are entangled."
  —Kara Jackson [07:07]

• On collaboration:
  "We would meet up like every week and just kind of dream up different sounds and come up with weird stuff together."
  —Kara Jackson [12:06]

• On humor and vulnerability:
  "The funniness kind of allows you to have a nice entry point and to kind of trick people into really just, you know, being down bad alongside you."
  —Kara Jackson [15:45]

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Featured Tracks & Their Context

• "Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?” [02:02] – The title track, reflecting on life, loss, and longing.
• "Lily" [08:51] – A straightforward, tender song about affection and friendship.
• "Rat" [11:02] – A story-driven narrative about chasing and confronting dreams.
• "Pawn Shop" [14:18] – Showcases the album's experimental edge.
• "Right, Wrong or Ready" (Karen Dalton cover) [17:59] – A heartfelt reinterpretation that’s become a live show mainstay.

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Additional Highlights

• Kara’s creative process is deeply intertwined with community—be it the in-person audience, digital submissions, or studio collaborators.
• The album is alternately heavy, whimsical, direct, and experimental, capturing the emotional spectrum of young adulthood.
• The episode doubles as a listening party, giving listeners both context and emotional entry points into the music.

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For newcomers to Kara Jackson’s work, this episode offers a warm, insightful orientation, echoing the mix of vulnerability, wit, and poetic craft at the heart of her artistry.

Transcript

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[McDonald's Customer]

I'mma put you on nephew.

[Kara Jackson]

All right unc. Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order miss?

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[Kushan Avadar]

This is all of it. I'm Kushan Avadar filling in for Alison Stewart. And here's a song from my next guest, one time National Youth Poet Laureate Katie Kara Jackson.

[Kara Jackson (singing)]

Why does the earth give us people love Then give them a sickness that kills? Then why does the earth make make us pay for the dirt?

[Kushan Avadar]

That's why does the earth give us people to love? It's the title track from Kara Jackson's debut album. The album was released last year to widespread acclaim. Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and NPR Music all named it one of the best albums of 2023. And before her breakthrough as a musician, the Illinois native was known as a poet. She served as National Youth poet laureate from 2019 to 2020, but music and poetry have always gone hand in hand as her lyricism demonstrates. Tonight and tomorrow she'll be at Public Records in Brooklyn. Those shows are sold out, but you can hear her Music now with Kara Jackson for a listening party here. Kara, welcome to all of it.

[Kara Jackson]

Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

[Kushan Avadar]

Absolutely. Thanks for being here. Let's talk about, you know, poetry on tour. As part of this tour, you've been inviting audience members to send in their favorite poems, quotes, short passages. What have you been doing with the poems?

[Kara Jackson]

Yeah, so each night at all of my shows, I've been reading a poem in between songs. So the poems that people submitted are the poems that I end up reading. I've, like, kind of read through everything that people have submitted, and some things I've chosen if I feel like they're kind of relevant to the city I'm in or, you know, is someone I know or a poet.

[Kushan Avadar]

I really love what inspired the idea.

[Kara Jackson]

I was really trying to think of ways to, you know, switch up my solo set, since it's me and my guitar. And I've kind of missed poetry as a performance and something that I used to do on stage a lot. And so I'm kind of, you know, nodding to my past and my experience as a poet, but also just trying to connect with the audience and with words and just kind of take a pause in the performance to just kind of come together and read something and kind of feel something together.

[Kushan Avadar]

Yeah, kind of like also creating community, it sounds like, on stage.

[Kara Jackson]

Yeah, totally.

[Kushan Avadar]

Do you have any poems that you've received that are real standouts for you?

[Kara Jackson]

I read a poem in Portland that used these really cool, like, water metaphors. It was kind of like thinking of the way that water goes into life and it brings life into things like plants and, like, obviously, humans. And I just thought it was really beautiful. It was a poem. Someone who attended submitted. It was like their original work, and I just thought it was really.

[Kushan Avadar]

Sweet listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking to Kara Jackson, who's performing at Public Records tonight and tomorrow, her latest album, why does the Earth Give Us People to Love? You know, Carrot, you were just talking about how collecting these poems is a way for you to kind of access the joy that you felt performing poetry on stage. And before you released your debut album, you were the US National Youth Poet Laureate. What would you say was your first love? Was it poetry or music?

[Kara Jackson]

Music was definitely my first love. I have been listening to music and just obsessed with music for my whole life. I just grew up immersed in it. But I think I've always been attracted to songs that have really interesting lyrics and beautiful lyrics. So I've always been attracted to words and Language.

[Kushan Avadar]

Are there any museum musicians you admire who you also think were or should have been poets like yourself?

[Kara Jackson]

I mean, of course, Joni Mitchell, who I think is a poet in her own right. And I really have always loved Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys. I think his lyricism is really sharp and really strong. I love Laura Marling, too.

[Kushan Avadar]

You know, the Arctic Monkeys is. Is a deep cut for me, too. I'm a big fan of that band as well. Let's talk about your album a little bit here. The album is an expression of grief and loss, but it's also a celebration of relationships. I understand that you dedicated it to a high school friend who died of cancer. How are you grappling with this idea that love can offer so much while also still hurting us?

[Kara Jackson]

Yeah, I think love is a really complex and sometimes devastating emotion to really tend with. And I think I'm always interested in the ways in which love and grief are entangled. And you kind of can't have one without the other. I think that's why people are really reluctant to love and to feel things, because there's this, you know, impeding sense of grief being around the corner, whether you break up or, you know, endings happen or we lose loved ones. But I think the really interesting thing about grief is it's also a confirmation of just how deeply you can love someone or how deeply you were loved. And I think the fact that everyone has the capacity to love someone and to be loved is a really beautiful thing. And it's something that I've learned to, like, lean into instead of being afraid of, you know, the sadness that comes.

[Kushan Avadar]

With it, you know, that makes me want to play the song Lily, which seems to contain one of the simpler expressions of just affection on the album. Before we listen to it, is the message of the song exactly what you hear? Or are there more complicated feelings underneath?

[Kara Jackson]

Lily is pretty straightforward. It's really an admiration and an honor of one of my good friends. So it's a pretty genuine love song in an album where I think is kind of lacking love songs. Well.

[Kushan Avadar]

Well, let's listen to it a little bit. Here's Lily.

[Kara Jackson (singing)]

What your mind can see what your mouth can sing what your hands can weave. Everlasting, everlasting. You and I both know how.

[Kushan Avadar]

If you're just joining us, we're talking to Kara Jackson, who's performing at Public Records tonight and tomorrow from her latest album, which is why does the Earth Give Us People to Love? We're doing a listening party right now. Now, Carrot, there's another song that I want to bring up. It's the song that follows Lily and it's a nearly eight minute story about a character named Rat. Where did Rat come from?

[Kara Jackson]

Yeah, Rat is probably one of my favorite songs on the album because it really was just creative and really fun to write. It, I think, follows the tradition in folk music of just telling stories and, you know, having these divine kind of larger than life characters that kind of feel surreal. I've. I've always been a really big fan of Joanna Newsom and I've always admired the ways that she creates characters in her songs and tells stories and goes on these really long journeys. So I think I also kind of challenged myself to write something in that vein. And yeah, it really became Rat. And it's just really a hero's kind of maybe not a hero story of a man who chases that, you know, dream of making it big in California and is really humbled by the fallacy of that dream.

[Kushan Avadar]

Let's listen to it a little bit. Here's Rat.

[Kara Jackson (singing)]

Take the story of Rat, who's headed west. His buddy once told him he likes the girls their best. Centuries of singers, men who pay their.

[Kara Jackson]

Rent.

[Kara Jackson (singing)]

Waxing poetic of a woman's innocence.

[Kushan Avadar]

You know, Cara Lily. And many other songs on the album feature production from Chicago songwriter Namdi and their fellow Chicagoans, Sen Morimoto and Kainia. How did you lean on your friends while making this album?

[Kara Jackson]

Yeah, so when I finished writing the album, my friends who you mentioned are really who I showed those songs to first, and they helped me just produce the music around them and come up with instrumentation. It was in like 2021, so we would meet up like every week and just kind of dream up different sounds and come up with weird stuff together. And I think it. The album really sounds like a effort of friends and our just kind of collective weirdness.

[Kushan Avadar]

What do you do to. To tap into that collective weirdness together when you're doing sessions?

[Kara Jackson]

You know, I think when you're working with people who you have a rapport with and you've been friends with for some years, and all the people who are my collaborators are people I've really looked up to and I consider the family, you know, so I think we already kind of had a natural just vibe together. And, you know, after spending a lot of time with people, you kind of just start to unpeel the layers of just stuff together. And there's just a lot of weirdness at the core of all of us. So I think just working together kind of allowed us to Uncover that weirdness.

[Kushan Avadar]

Yeah, you know, it's cool to listen to this juxtaposed with previous work from you. Musically, your debut ep, A Song for Every Chamber of the Heart, was of a straight acoustic guitar effort, but in this album, you can totally hear what you're talking about in terms of the layers and the lush sounds and, you know, in a good way, the weirdness and the. And the variety in the sounds. Like, let's play a song like Pawn Shop, which I think is a good example.

[Kara Jackson (singing)]

Wake up, I want to see you Darling, you said to me one morning this is why I'm always broken. You never did end up showing. I'm not a liquidated acid, I'm sharper than a jewel. What kind of minor does that make you.

[Kushan Avadar]

Kara? Another thing that came through on this album a lot is in addition to grief, there's also a lot of humor. What's the relationship between those two things in your mind?

[Kara Jackson]

I don't know. I think maybe I am just a little. I take life a little unseriously sometimes, but I think humor has always been a way for me to kind of move through the heaviness of the world and juxtapose the heaviness of the world. And I think I just come from a really funny family. Like, my parents are just really hilarious people to me, and it's just something that's really natural to us, you know.

[Kushan Avadar]

The funny parts of this album, a lot of it has to do with romantic partners, I noticed. And there's one song whose title we can't say on the radio, but there's another, like, the song Song Therapy. Do you ever make yourself laugh while you're writing?

[Kara Jackson]

I don't know, because I think sometimes I'm a little, like, comedic to a point where I. I start to believe it. Like, there's a certain seriousness to my humor. So, like, a song like, you know, I can't say it on the radio, but the blues song on the album. I have always been kind of interested in how that song came about because I think there was definitely a level of humor, but I also think it was really real emotions at the same time. So I feel like the funniness kind of allows you to have a nice entry point and to kind of trick people into really just, you know, being down bad alongside you.

[Kushan Avadar]

Yeah. You know, so at the end of April, ahead of your tour, you released a new song, which is Right, Wrong or Ready. Where does this song come from? And when did you write and record it?

[Kara Jackson]

Yeah. So Right Wrong already is actually a cover of a song originally performed by Karen Dalton, who is one of my favorite artists. And it's from one of my favorite albums from her. And I had been playing that song at my live shows for, at this point, years, even before the album came out, to the point where it just has kind of really become a staple in my live sets and a song that really means a lot to me. And so since we were getting ready to go on tour, I decided to put it out ahead of the tour.

[Kushan Avadar]

Will it be on another LP down the line? Do you have anything in the works?

[Kara Jackson]

Not at the moment, but you never know.

[Kushan Avadar]

Well, let's go out on it. And before we do, let's thank Kara Jackson, who will be at Public Records tonight and tomorrow night. Her album from last year is why does the Earth Give Us People to Love. And Kara, thank you so much for joining and good luck tonight.

[Kara Jackson]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Kushan Avadar]

Absolutely. Here's Right, Wrong or Ready by Kara Jackson.

[Kara Jackson (singing)]

I could have told him.

[Kara Jackson]

About the.

[Kara Jackson (singing)]

Morning the daylight always dawn and I could have told him that he mute resting on on my mind he stays on my mind.

[Michaels Announcer]

Attention party people. You're officially invited to the party shop at Michael's where you'll find hundreds of new Items starting at 99 cents with an expanded selection of party wear, balloons with helium included on select styles, decorations and more. Michael's is your one stop shop for celebrating everything from birthdays to bachelorette parties and baby showers to golden anniversaries. Visit Michaels store or michaels.com today to supply your next party.

[McDonald's Customer]

I'm gonna put you on nephew.

[Kara Jackson]

All right, unc. Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order, miss?

[McDonald's Customer]

I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.