JAMILA WOODS HEAVN 10TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR
Jamila Woods the Chicago-based singer, poet, teacher and activist has announced a North American tour celebrating the tenth anniversary of her debut album HEAVN. Kicking off November 16th in Los Angeles the select dates will include San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and New York before wrapping up December 6th with a hometown show at Chicago’s Thalia Hall. The tour will feature special guests along the way, and all markets are offering VIP experiences with Woods to include a meet and greet with the artist and special merchandise. To honor the anniversary, Jagjaguar will release a limited edition vinyl featuring signed prints available exclusively on tour. Tickets for the tour go onsale Friday, August 14 at 10am local time with VIP and artist presale beginning Wednesday, August 12 at 10am local and venue presales beginning Thursday, August 13 at 10am local. Click here for more info.
Released in the summer of 2016 on Chicago hip-hop label Closed Sessions and reissued the following year by Jagjaguwar, HEAVN arrived as a record about, in Woods’ own words, “black girlhood, about Chicago, about the people we miss who have gone on to prepare a place for us somewhere else, about the city/world we aspire to live in.” Built from what she calls a “collage” process – Lucille Clifton’s poetry, letters from her grandmother, a sample of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” on the title track, black girl hand clap games repurposed into a song about police violence on “VRY BLK” – the album introduced a voice who builds rooms rather than verses. “I think of songs as physical spaces,” Woods says. “Writing a song feels like decorating my space with things that make me happy or reflect who I am.” Nowhere is that clearer than on “Holy,” which borrows the structure of a psalm to arrive at self-love: “I wrote ‘Holy’ to remind myself that my worth is not dependent on anyone or anything outside of me,” Woods said at the time. It is an album that insisted, in a year that ushered in anxiety and fear, that “caring for ourselves and each other is not a neutral act. It is a necessary and radical part of the struggle to create a more just society.”
The album was met with immediate and lasting acclaim. Pitchfork named it Best New Music and called it “a singular mix of clear-eyed optimism and Black girl magic,” later placing it among the 50 Best Albums of 2016; NPR included it in its Best 50 Albums of 2016, with SPIN, Consequence of Sound, Esquire, Exclaim!, PopMatters and others naming it to their year-end lists. More than a debut, HEAVN was a snapshot of a city at a crucial moment – one whose music would go on to shape the rest of the country, with contributions from Chance the Rapper, Noname, Saba, Nico Segal, Peter Cottontale, Kweku Collins and oddCouple, a now-celebrated generation of Chicago artists creating together before the rest of the world came looking. HEAVN laid the foundation for what followed: LEGACY! LEGACY! (2019), a highly anticipated follow-up that named its songs for Black and brown icons of literature, art and music, and her 2021 late night debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, performing her Toni Morrison-inspired standalone single “SULA (Paperback).” Her latest album, Water Made Us (2023), traced the life cycle of a relationship and drew universal acclaim, landing on year-end lists at The New York Times, Rolling Stone, TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Consequence, Slant, PopMatters and more.
JAMILA WOODS – HEAVN 10TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR
Mon 11/16/26 – Los Angeles, CA – Lodge Room
Wed 11/18/26 – San Francisco, CA – August Hall
Thu 11/19/26 – Portland, OR – Wonder Ballroom
Fri 11/20/26 – Seattle, WA – The Crocodile
Sun 11/22/26 – New York, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg
Sun 12/6/26 – Chicago, IL – Thalia Hall