There is a version of Jessica Baio’s story that reads like a parable of the internet age: a girl from Auburn, California grows up watching American Idol and America’s Got Talent, decides she wants to be a singer, and learns that YouTube might be her fastest route to getting heard. She posts her first videos at ten years old, inspired by the path Justin Bieber blazed before her. At eleven, she wins an online contest to sing for British pop star Cher Lloyd, and her cover of Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” goes viral, racking up five million views, enough to make a pre-teen’s dreams feel suddenly, terrifyingly real.
But that version of the story skips the part where her family drove her to Los Angeles on a tight budget to audition for shows that didn’t pan out. It leaves out the years of voice lessons, the guitar and piano she picked up in middle school, and the first original song she released at thirteen. The internet gave Jessica Baio a window, but she had to do all the climbing herself.
Now twenty-four, Baio has accumulated over 195 million streams, 80 million TikTok likes, and a fanbase that treats her discography like a shared diary. Her 2022 single “Trust Issues” surpassed 51 million Spotify streams. Her debut album, UNSAID, arrived in November 2024 through 10K Projects and sold out a North American headline tour, one that required multiple venue upgrades to accommodate demand and culminated in a performance at Ultra Music Festival alongside DJ Steve Aoki and rapper Trippie Redd. A year later, the first part of her sophomore album, SACRED, is out, and she is preparing to take an even bigger production on the road. The light rigs are larger. There is a video wall now. And somewhere between the spectacle and the setlist, the same girl who wrote heartbreak songs before she’d ever had a boyfriend is still very much at the center of it all.
The tension between lived experience and invented emotion is one Baio has been navigating her entire career. Since she was little, she has been drawn to deeply emotional songs, the kind that make you want to cry because of how well they are written, even if you can’t personally relate. Her recent single “Accident” (a meditation on infidelity) raised eyebrows among fans who know her as happily married to her husband Sam, with whom she has built a second career on YouTube and TikTok. She is not bothered by the confusion. “I have always been an empath,” she says, “which can be a double-edged sword. I feel what other people are going through so deeply, and I think that’s what’s allowed me to write songs that can relate to so many people whether or not I’ve actually first-hand experienced the story the song tells.” She is quick to add that people might be surprised by how many of her songs that sound like breakup anthems actually stem from real experiences, just not the ones listeners assume.
The question of what is real and what is craft dominated her thinking while writing her first album. Comments online accused her of faking emotions she hadn’t earned. She wrestled with it. Ultimately, she landed somewhere settled: “I love creating both and I don’t want to force songs about my life when the timing isn’t right. There are days I go into a season heavy with something personal I need to express, and there are others where I feel like I’ve said everything I want to say about my life for the time being — and I want to write music that might help someone else.” That dual impulse, to excavate the self and to imagine outward, is what gives her catalog its unusual range.
She married Sam right out of high school. It was 2020, the world was shutting down, and the two of them poured their energy into TikTok, turning a friendly competition over who could gain the most followers before graduation into something that would reshape her career. The platform taught her things music alone could not, above all, she says, “just the impact you can have by being a good person and putting out positivity into the world.” One of her favorite parts of meeting fans is hearing their stories: what song helped change or literally save their life, how watching their YouTube videos helped someone through a hard time. Those moments of connection, she says, remind her why she does this and inspire her to keep creating even when self-doubt creeps in. It is not abstract for her. The comments are something she reads. The stories stay with her.
That intimacy cuts both ways. Because so many fans feel they know the contours of her life, they sometimes expect explanations for the songs. She feels that pull, that sense that she owes an accounting. But she has also learned that some songs are simply too personal to annotate, and others protect people who don’t know they’re in them. Privacy, for someone as constitutionally open as Baio, is not a wall but a door she keeps the key to.
Touring has altered her writing in ways she didn’t fully anticipate. She is naturally drawn to heavy, emotional concepts, the kind that fill a quiet room, but a live show demands variety. “It’s so important to have a setlist with variety so your show isn’t boring,” she says, and the push toward uptempo tracks has opened new rooms in her artistry. The production on her current tour reflects an artist who has grown comfortable with scale: a video wall, expanded light design, visual moments she is eager for audiences to experience. The intimacy of her music and the scale of her live show are no longer in tension. They are, increasingly, the point.
The title of her new album is not accidental. SACRED means, she explains, exactly what it sounds like, and then some. Coming from a religious background, the word carries weight about her marriage, about what she chooses to protect in a life that is otherwise extremely public. “It means that no matter how crazy my life becomes, no matter what obstacles and trials I face, nothing could take that love my husband and I share — because it’s something we hold close and won’t take for granted.” The song, and the album, are a longer expression of that commitment. They are also, quietly, a statement about which parts of herself are not for sale.
What comes next, musically, is still crystallizing. She has barely started writing since finishing UNSAID, and the tour has more ground to cover. But she knows the direction she is moving. “I’m manifesting the most true, unfiltered version of myself for the next batch of songs,” she says. After years of navigating outside opinions: the critics of songs she couldn’t possibly mean, the fans who wanted explanations, the industry competition that shapes every independent artist’s calculus, she is arriving somewhere quieter and more certain: “I just feel really excited to hone in on my sound and create music that I personally love and want to play on repeat without caring what other people’s opinions might be.”
There is also the matter of family. She and Sam have talked about starting one, a prospect she acknowledges is equal parts exciting and daunting in an industry as demanding as this one. She is not shying away from it. That willingness to say the scary thing, to speak the next chapter into existence before she has lived it, is, in the end, what has always set her apart. Jessica Baio has never waited until she had the full story to start telling it.
Photographer: Kwaku Alston Stylist: Lisa Smith Craig Assistant Stylist: Essence Carson Hair & Make-Up: Christina Spina Nails: Amy Studer
Shot At: Hollywood Grande
A version of this story appears in the Summer issue of GROOVEVOLT.
