She is also mourning relationships that died mid-course, or perhaps killed her spirit. Death is a constant specter in Jackson’s work-“lotta people gonna die,” she bellows on “recognized” and its reprise-but her grief is not only for the loss of life. “We’re only waiting our turn, call that living,” she laments. Over the most ominous arrangement on the record, she asks why she was gifted a beautiful friendship if it was only meant to be taken from her. In the title song, Jackson mourns her friend Maya, who died from cancer in 2016. On the outstanding “Dickhead Blues,” her lackadaisical guitar changes shape when layered with frenetic drums and then disappears altogether, drowned by the layered voices of a choir. These songs introduce lusher arrangements-piano, banjo, xylophone-and a few hometown guests- KAINA, NNAMDÏ, Sen Morimoto-into her repertoire, which let her melodies shift and meander just when you think you’ve grasped one, it wiggles out of your fist. On “no fun/party,” she rarely deviates from a five-note lick which cradles her lyrics and maintains the song’s pensive undertones. Jackson is a guitarist whose instrument functions not as an appendage to her words, but the very skin that holds her music together. On the title track, Jackson pitches her voice high and childlike, almost as though her philosophical questioning-“Why does the earth give us people to love then take them away from our reach?”-soars toward the heavens.
“Don’t you bother me,” she warns her ex-lover on the meditative, breakup ballad “Free,” the deep rumbling of her voice adding a menacing edge. On “no fun/party,” she describes the banality and repetition of finding the one: “It’s hard to have patience when you’re waiting on luck, like a postal truck, like a postal truck…” Jackson also flexes her wide vocal range to drive home the emotions behind her words. Her storytelling is masterful, filled with earnest lyricism and a knack for arresting imagery. Where others might posit that it’s better to have loved and lost, Jackson argues that love is loss. The music is neither sweet nor loving many of the songs are harsh and disorienting, probing and uncomfortable. Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? is an album about love, certainly, but none of its tracks are love songs. On her latest record, the singer-songwriter has both refined her musical capabilities and pushed her existential questions into rockier terrain.
That love and suffering often go hand in hand is conventional wisdom by now, and one that Jackson herself tackled in her 2019 EP, A Song for Every Chamber of the Heart.
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