Kara Jackson

ICYDK, it’s Black Music Month! To celebrate, we talked with a super talented artist about her debut album and musical inspo. Plus, she made us a playlist—lucky us!

I’m super excited that today’s feature focuses on an artist whose music has been playing nonstop in my apartment. Folksy tunes sung by a contralto? It’s like the album was designed in a lab for me. Anyway—Kara Jackson (she/her), musician and writer, just released her debut album this year—and it’s bringing in much well-deserved hype. When asked about it, she says that Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?, dedicated to her best friend Maya-Gabrielle who passed away when Kara was 17, “is a meditation on the ways grief and love are inextricably linked to each other. It’s also an introduction to who I am as a young woman trying to make sense of the heaviness of the world and the strangeness of humans.”

Obviously, Kara’s life is filled with a lot of newness lately, but the playlist she curated for us has a ton of throwbacks—for good reason. “I recently started Jessica Hopper’s Women Who Rock series, which I highly recommend. Listening to women like Mavis Staples and Chaka Khan tell the stories of their artistry and careers has been so enriching for me, a young Black woman who is in the pursuit of taking up space on stages herself,” she explains, “Watching it has also brought me back to the highly informative and nostalgic music of my childhood. I’ve been in a space where I’ve been naming how grateful I am to my parents for exposing me to the music of their time, for raising me in it.”

Her family’s musical influence is incredibly important to her, as is her ability to pursue music when her kin haven’t always been able to, particularly women who have had to sacrifice their craft to pursue domesticity or work. “To be able to say I make music and make the music I want and I have the time, the leisure even, to choose my words carefully and to sing them as loud or quiet as I want… I’m just so blessed. Being a Black artist, getting to practice and nurture my craft and be Black doing it, is the highest honor of my life,” Kara says.

Now that you’ve gotten to know her (and hopefully saved her album), listen to her playlist and check out which songs Kara has on repeat this summer.