Jamila Woods isn’t just writing songs, she’s writing history, autobiography, and bibliography all at once. Her sophomore album Legacy! Legacy! is structured like a living syllabus: each track named after a Black icon—Miles, Muddy, Baldwin, Octavia—and rooted in a conversation between their stories and her own.
“It started with the Nikki Giovanni song,” Woods told Kyle Meredith. “I just wanted to write a self-affirming song inspired by one of my favorite poems, and I realized having a prompt helped me write. So I started naming songs after people who’ve influenced me—thinking about what I see in them, what I need from them, and how their spirit exists in my own story.”
What began as writing exercises quickly revealed a much deeper connection. On Eartha, Woods channels an infamous interview clip where Kitt laughs off the idea of compromising for a man—“I borrowed her energy like she gave me advice,” she says. On Basquiat, the jazz-meets-chaos production practically sounds like one of his paintings. Muddy started with a Chicago poem exchange. Each track is a self-portrait in disguise, blending Woods' own experiences with those of the icons she reveres.
Woods’ poetry background adds layers of intention to the writing. “In poetry, you don’t always enter through the front door,” she says. “You don’t have to tell the story the same way every time.” That’s clear in the range of styles across the record—from bluesy grooves to cosmic textures—and in how she embodies rather than imitates her subjects.
On Miles, she doesn’t need a trumpet. “It was more about that attitude—just the badass energy of the beat reminded me of him,” she explains. For Octavia, she asked her producer to make the beat “sound like outer space.” The track draws from Butler’s legacy of Afrofuturism, a movement Woods sees as essential. “For Black people, just imagining ourselves in the future is revolutionary,” she says.
Her approach is academic and emotional in equal measure. The album comes with a bibliography, listing books and interviews that inspired each track. “I love when music sends me down a rabbit hole,” she says. “So I thought, why not include my own?”
Even the guest artists—like Nitty Scott, Saba, and Nico Segal—were chosen based on emotional fit. “I’d send them notes or interviews, and let them respond like we were having a conversation. It was important that they added their perspective, not mine.”
This connection to lineage extends beyond the album. Woods is a longtime mentor with Young Chicago Authors, the poetry nonprofit where she got her start. She describes a DIY creative culture in Chicago that prioritizes community over industry. “There’s no big label machine here, so we invest in each other,” she says. “It’s not about who breaks out, it’s about keeping the space alive for the next artist.”
She’s carried that ethos across her whole career. From Heavn, her self-released debut that landed on year-end lists everywhere, to Legacy! Legacy! on Jagjaguwar, Woods has fused activism, identity, and experimental soul into something unmistakably hers.
“Afrofuturism lets us imagine beyond this moment,” she says. “But it also lets me connect backward—to Zora Neale Hurston, to my family, to the past I didn’t live but still feel.”
And maybe that’s the real brilliance of Legacy! Legacy!—it doesn’t just honor the people who came before her. It makes space for the people who come next.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
