Jackie Connโs debut album Baking Day arrives as a lovingly stitched song-quilt of family history, womenโs voices, and the memories that live in kitchens, coal dust, and old photo boxes. Released this November 21, 2025, this record can be referred to as a musical heirloom because it captures stories that stretch all the way back to her great-grandfather, born in 1832, and carried through generations of Durham-coast life. Produced by Dan Whitehouse and mostly recorded in Connโs own living room, the album feels genuinely lived-in, powered by warm acoustic textures, Chris Cleverleyโs shimmering fingerstyle guitar, and Connโs rich, tender voice guiding us through the decades.
Things begin with โRobin Calls,โ a gentle, heart-first opener where strummed guitars lay down soft earth, and Connโs thick, soothing tone rises above them like a steady morning light. Strings swell underneath, giving the whole thing a quiet, pastoral magic, as though the song itself were breathing through the branches of an old family tree.
Then comes the title track โBaking Day,โ the emotional centerpiece of the album, co-written with Boo Hewerdine. The arrangement stays soft and warm, letting Connโs voice paint vivid, loving scenes of cooking with her mother or watching new creations spin out from the hatch. She sings about treasured objects, a mixing bowl, a rolling pin, the family recipe book, and so on, with a tenderness that hits like memory itself. Itโs gentle, comforting, impossibly alive. The refrain, โAnd itโs Sunday with my mother in the kitchen, baking cakes,โ lands like the closing of a cherished diary.
Later in the record, โEmily Criedโ shifts the tone into darker terrain. The song opens with heavy, rippling instrumentation and firm guitar strums, for a haunting narrative of loss, poverty, and the hardening of a young girl forced into adult burdens too soon. Connโs delivery turns deeper, slower, and more guttural as she sings, โAnd with each falling tear, the ice grew in her heart,โ capturing the way grief and hardship reshape a life forever, and lending a shoulder to those who have had to suffer such socioeconomic crises.
Across Baking Day, Jackie Conn preserves stories as well as animates them, as the album steps into generations of footsteps and finds the echoes still warm.
Review by: Naomi Joan