Jessie Baylin - Strawberry Wind (2018)

Strawberry Wind, Produced by Richard Swift (Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Foxygen, Damien Jurado) 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. It’s a difficult task by any measure and one that is rarely achieved successfully. “I’m still not sure I’ve found the right balance” says Baylin, “but Roger Miller, Carole King and Harry Nilsson gave me the courage and motivation to make another album.” And, now singer/songwriter Jessie Baylin, who Associated Press wrote that her music “plays on the mind like late afternoon sunshine filtered through layers of gauze” is applying that motivation on her debut children's album, Strawberry Wind, released exclusively through Amazon Music.

The seed was planted for this project after recording a cover of Harry Nilsson's "He Needs Me" from the kids' film Popeye; "The song has a childlike sense, but the message is very deep. It's magical, it's dark, and it hit all the notes. I wanted to do an album that feels like that. It gave me the bug," she says. "Since becoming a mother, I found myself being around the house a lot and I started gravitating to these wonderful albums I remembered in my childhood — Carole King's Really Rosie, Harry Nilsson's The Point!, and Roger Miller's Robin Hood. I realized that people aren't making albums like that anymore, and that really inspired me to go down this new musical path" says Baylin, who is mom to 4-year-old Violet and is expecting her second child with her husband, Kings of Leon drummer Nathan Followill.

The magic of those iconic '70s records she mentions is that they're all grounded in solid songwriting and were never dumbed down for the audience. "Those records felt very honest and that was my mission here. I also wanted it to feel magical and remind people of the child inside of all of us that is filled with a sense of wonder and pure joy and hope."