Kara Jackson - Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

Although she began collecting awards for her poetry as a teen, including being named National Youth Poet Laureate in 2019, Chicagoland's Kara Jackson is far from a writer who dabbles in music. She started piano lessons as early as age five, has referred to singing as her first love, and released her debut singer/songwriter EP within weeks of the laureate designation.

Even though the EP, a spare acoustic-guitar outing, garnered positive attention for its blunt observations and turns of phrase as well as Jackson's husky, authoritative voice, it may have done little to prepare the music world for the stark theatricality and poignancy of her first album, Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? Parts Daniel Johnston and avant-cabaret show, it demands attention from the opening clatter of a cassette recorder and ensuing dinked-out piano and spoke-sung rhymes of the one-minute "recognized." ("Some people roll dice...Some people look nice...Some people snort lines...Some people tell lies to be recognized.") In an almost sharp contrast but for its continuation of the album's unrelenting starkness, the episodic "no fun/party" adds intermittent swooping strings and ghostly synths to its opening section's broken guitar chords. It then changes tempo, mode, and mood for a mournful B section that interrupts with thoughts like "Every person that I've dated/Tells me I'm intimidating" with a sinking melody.

When the more tuneful A part returns, additional instruments, multi-tracked vocals, and effects are used sparingly for spacey, sometimes startling emphasis rather than band-like accompaniment. From there, the album's unpredictability is another defining trait. As Jackson continues in similar fashion through songs with titles like "dickhead blues," "therapy," and "rat" (featuring Ohmme's Macie Stewart on violin), she continues to reveal intimate details of her own struggles while painting memorable scenes and characters. Appearing relatively late in the track list, the showstopping title track was reportedly the first song Jackson wrote for the album, after a mentor received an identical cancer diagnosis to a friend who had recently died. Alongside the nearly hour-long record's most haunting melody, it begins with the eternal question, "Why does the earth give us people to love, then take them away out of reach?" In true theatric fashion, the album closes with a reprise (of "recognized") and a brief parting song, "liquor," whose mocking, rising-and-falling tune considers self-medicating after being discarded for someone deemed better looking. AllMusicGuide