How a “beautiful divide” inspired Baylin’s magical new children’s album
Singer/songwriter Jessie Baylin will be releasing her new children’s album, Strawberry Wind, on April 27. The New Jersey-bred, Nashville-based artist collaborated with longtime producer/songwriter/musician, Richard Swift (The Shins, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Nightsweats, Foxygen). The new record not only delivers on a promise to create an honest album for kids and parents, but it represents what Baylin calls the “beautiful divide,” of juggling family life with her creative life, a difficult task by any measure. Ultimately, the concept was sparked after contributing a cover of Harry Nilsson’s “He Needs Me” from the film Popeye to the Amazon original playlist Amazon Acoustics.
Jessie Baylin:
The divide in me is easy to feel because I invest 100% of myself into my family and often the creative gets put to the side. So when I decided to begin writing for this album it just poured out of me.
The song (“He Needs Me”) has a childlike sense, but the message is very deep. It’s magical, it’s dark, and it hit all the right notes. I wanted to do an album that felt like that. It gave me the bug.
Writing (2015’s)Dark Place began with a premonition of what was to come, and what followed was fear and many challenges that were put on me as a human being, so creatively I completely shut down — and Dark Place was a devotion to my pain. But the beautiful thing about life is that it will force itself on you whether you are looking for it or not, and it pulled me out of the darkness — leaning into my family was part of that and it showed me a new landscape and helped me get back in a forward motion.
Since becoming a mother, I found myself being around the house a lot, and I started gravitating to these wonderful older albums to listen to with my child — The Beatles, John Lennon, Roger Miller, Harry Nilsson’s The Point!, and Carole King’s Really Rosie. I realized that people aren’t making albums like that anymore, and that really inspired me to go down this new musical path. Little did I know while recording Strawberry Wind that I was pregnant with my second child.
~Jesse Baylin
Via Baylin’s official press release: the first track, “Dream Catcher,” — which harkens back to such ’60s songstresses as Dusty Springfield and Nico — got its premiere via Garden & Gun yesterday, and is now available as an instant download with an album pre-order at Amazon Music. “Dream Catcher” is the first song that kicks off an accompanying 16-minute short-film, created by award-winning director/animator Steven Mertens (Regina Spektor, Dan Auerbach). It tells the story of a little girl who goes to sleep only to go on a grand adventure in a vivid, cosmic dream world. In the film — which also includes album tracks “Supermoon,” “Strawberry Wind,” “Same Old Tune” and “I Am a Dreamer” — the dream catcher is an animated cat who guides the little girl through a wonderland of flying fishes, gremlins and other magical creatures, protecting her along the way
JESSIE BAYLIN
STRAWBERRY WIND
Tracklisting:
Dream Catcher
2. Supermoon
3. Strawberry Wind
4. Same Old Tune
5. Sparkle Shoelaces
6. Little Bird
7. Magic Of Your Mind
8. It’s The Summertime
9. I Am a Dreamer
10. Power in Words
11. We Need Each Other
For more information visit JessieBaylin.com
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