When soul singer Jamila Woods sat down to write the treatment for her latest music video, she says she couldn’t shake the image of braids rising from her head and floating in the air. With that first potent visual as a seed, she worked with Chicago production company VAM and director Sam Bailey (VAM’s digital art director) to create the video for “Holy.” The song appears on her 2016 debut album, Heavn, which was just rereleased in digital and physical formats by Jagjaguwar and Closed Sessions.
Woods and Bailey, both Chicago natives, are not just collaborators but also friends. They met during the production of the hugely popular Web series Brown Girls—Bailey directed it, and Woods served as music supervisor. Shot in Chicago, the series was written by Woods’s best friend, Fatimah Asghar, and based in part on their relationship. Woods asked Bailey to direct the video for “Holy” after they worked together on Bailey’s first such job: the video for Daryn Alexus’s “I Ain’t Got It,” also a VAM production, where Woods costarred. Both women’s careers have blown up over the past year, thanks to the success of Heavn and Brown Girls, and Bailey recently moved to LA—but she says there was never a question of whether the video for “Holy” would be shot anywhere but Chicago or involve anyone other than Chicago creatives and artists.
Woods says that’s what “Holy” and its video are about: the freedom to be yourself, to accept where you are, and to unshackle yourself from anything or anyone telling you you’re not good enough or worthy enough, whether it’s outside oppression or your own insecurities.
“The braids lifting and the image of that freeing dance is what I want to do with all of my insecurities and worries and standards and expectations of myself,” Woods says. “To allow myself a moment of life without having those things weigh on me, to preserve myself and allow myself to go through the day a little stronger and more centered.”
