A year ago today I released an album I never thought I would be able to make. It might not seem like a scary thing to you, to write and record pop songs, but for me it was a huge step because it marked the moment I broke away worrying about offending the people around me and started to say the things I wanted to say and be the person I really wanted to be. To celebrate this album's first birthday, I wanted to create a special edition, with 3 new songs and 3 acoustic demos that were originally written for the album but were never recorded. I hope you enjoy these songs, the old and the new. Lots of love, Jay x

About the original album:

Growing up in a conservative community meant that Jay self-censored her songwriting all her life. “I was scared of being anything. Of being my true self” she says. In 2020 she finally made a decision to start writing the pop album she'd always dreamed of writing, a collection of songs exploring themes of empowerment and new beginnings and breaking free of the constructs holding her back.

After being awarded the Do It Differently Fund through Help Musicians, Jay worked with ingenious producer Patrick Jordan (Young Rebel Set, Cattle & Cane) to create the 10-track pop album. The album includes “American Tennessee,” one of the first songs to be recorded, which has since made it to the semi-finals of the International Song Writing Contest out of 20,000+ entries, won Track of the Week on BBC Tees and was in the roundup of BBC Introducing Tees Best of 2021.

Jay has lived quite internationally, spending most of her childhood in Turkey, studying as a teenager in Sevenoaks, UK, taking a year out as a TV trainee in Copenhagen, then back to Turkey for a bit before finally ending up back down the road from Stockton in Middlesbrough. The album has one or two nods to moments of Jay’s past life in Turkey, “One Summer’s Day” a coming-of-age track about a romance that never happened and “Seventeen” journals the feeling of being 17 again through dance-pop lyrical mix of Turkish and English, bringing together Jay’s two cultural identities.
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