Album Review/ Folk : Jackie Conn’s ‘Baking Day’
Jackie Conn’s debut album, ‘Baking Day’ comes like a summer breeze. It lightens the atmosphere around you with its calming folk and enriching nostalgia. The themes, the style, the tone, and the mood, everything feels like a letter, a postcard from the past. Listening to it draws you into a journey, through its frames. Some familiar, some personal to the artist. But a meaningful journey nevertheless. Even the thumbnail with its vacant sky blue with a rough sketch of a child rolling out dough feels intimate. You’ll especially feel that call to slow down, to connect and spread out, take up space and time.
Across the collection, you’ll be able to spot the influences of artists like Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Nick Drake, and Leonard Cohen. That naturalistic weave of folk purity, poetic sophistication, openness and an introspective mood. It’s all there, rife for your taking. In tracks like ‘A Robin Calls’, the understated simplicity in unravelling a layered feeling becomes prominent. It introduces the artist’s style with such fluid imagery and vivid frames. Feels like you’re watching an indie movie, scruffy and imperfect but all the more close to the heart because of it.
In the title track, the artist details the routine, the comfort, the rhythm, and the timelessness of ‘Baking Day’. She calls to our mind, the texture, aroma, colors, and atmosphere of the kitchen. Her vocals are so beautifully plain. There’s simple depiction and details, moments that showcase a memory without casting an artistic spotlight on it.
Small town imagery in ‘Uncle Arthur’s Skylark’ and ‘Another Wedding Day’. It’s so human, these songs. Exploring the depth of unglamorous characters and cultures. Like in ‘The Gamekeeper’s Lad. It’s what I’ve always imagined a Ruskin Bond book feels like. All about people, the lives they live, the people they love and the problems they face. In songs like ‘Richard’s Song’ and ‘Emily Cried’ she explores the mundanity of it all. That’s what fascinates this artist for this album. She delves into it and brings out the beauty of it all, shifts the perspective with poetry and fondness.
‘Ghosts of Christmas Past’ and ‘Let Your Light Shine’ are such cozy tracks, melancholic, warm and beautifully blooming. It’s beautiful how she sets the mood and creates the theme with rhythmic nuance. Such a terrific body of work for a debut album! So much potential and presence. Listen Now!
The album is available for streaming on popular sites like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music!
You can listen to ‘Baking Day’ by Jackie Conn here -
