Baby Rose is hitting the sweet spot

Sitting around and talking with collaborator Miles James, sipping on hot coffee, Baby Rose — born Jasmine Rose Wilson — pulled out a whiteboard and cracked YEARNALISM’s thematic code. She had a smattering of songs and audio files, but a deep sit-down with James helped her find those deeper connections she’d so far been missing. On the whiteboard, they drew huge circles, at the top of each writing down an idea that felt like pillars of Wilson's essence as an artist — things like God, healing, and the sunroom of her mom’s house in Atlanta, what she says is her happy place.

“Before we got into any song, [Miles] really wanted me to get into the intention,” Wilson tells me. The day of that whiteboard session, she wrote “Sunday,” an aching and beautifully homey cut — that, mind you, does sound exactly like the kind of song meant for a sunroom — that may perhaps be the beating heart of the record. 

Fundamentally, that feeling is what Wilson wanted to both get and give from YEARNALISM – her third record as Baby Rose and a body of work that sees her master the organic and earthy soul sound she began stepping into on Slow Burn, her 2024 collaborative EP with BADBADNOTGOOD. In a time where so much is optimised and automated, Wilson found herself searching for the messy comforts of our imperfect, deep-feeling humanity. Thus, at its core, this record and this era is about maintaining community and connection against the odds.

Born in Washington but raised in North Carolina, Wilson music career kicked off after her mother Joyce McClain — back then working with a DC rapper, and now Wilson's own manager — saw her talents and encouraged her to pursue them. “My mom saw the vision when I was just a little nugget,” Wilson says. “[She was] a single mom but still finding time to take me to the studio and be there with me and encourage me to write my own songs and produce my own songs and taking me to showcases.” 

In some ways, there is no explaining Baby Rose or YEARNALISM without talking about Wilson's mother. It was McClain who took her to her first studio sessions; pushed her to study hard enough to get accepted to Atlanta liberal arts college Spelman, and moved their entire family to Georiga along with her; who – after Wilson's scholarship fell through due to music industry scheduling conflicts – helped her pick up the pieces and forge a new path forward. When McClain got sick during Wilson's early university years, she only found herself motivated to throw herself into music more completely, realising she couldn’t live with having “nothing to show” for all the work she poured into her. And even when I meet Wilson for the first time, years later, in a London pub, it’s still the same — her mother is still by her side, protecting her in an undeniably ruthless industry like a guardian angel. Wilson wouldn’t want it any other way. 

“When I look to my left and my right, and I see my mom and my brother are still right there beside me [...] it just means [so much] for us as a family and having a legacy that outlives me,” she says. It was even — perhaps it only could have been — Wilson's mom who forced her to pick herself back up after getting dropped from her major label deal with Island during the pandemic. That prompting, Wilson says, was directly responsible both for YEARNALISM and the string of massive successes — touring with Olivia Dean, winning a Grammy alongside Leon Thomas, appearing in hit romcom Materialists — that have accompanied it.

“I didn’t move [to L.A.] really by choice. My mom kind of was like, ‘You need to leave,’” Wilson jokes. After her Island deal fell through, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself, didn’t know what would come next. It was genuine loss, and at times she thought she was close to giving up. Her mom wasn’t going to let that happen. “She was just like, no, you need to be in the right place and you still need to be doing this when it’s your turn, so don’t give up. [...] Sometimes it just takes people around you seeing what you can’t see in your heartbreak,” she says of that period. Eventually, her mother heard of a mutual friend needing a roommate, and without so much as consulting Wilson, she’d organized her move from Georgia to California. The transition was daunting — as moving to L.A. always seems to be — but it has since paid dividends. 

It was in L.A. that Wilson found herself able to get back on her feet again. She thought she might only stay a few months but has now been there for years. “It was cool to just grieve everything," she says, “grieve all of the highs and lows and have a moment to really process what was happening and then get back up and start working through it.  In L.A., you're going to find what you are searching for."

For her, it was a cat, it was an entire circle of friends outside of music, and it was the chance to get to know herself away from the spotlight. She started taking mental breaks to think on the beach. She made friends with folks working far outside of music as therapists and accountants and everything in between who couldn’t really care less about streaming and charts. She started volunteering at a middle school, helping young kids hone their musical skills. She got a cat. “I’ve been chilling and, like, really on good vibrations,” Wilson says with a smile.

That personal life reset translated to a creative reset, too. With the encouragement of one of her new label reps – Wilson would like to give a special shoutout to A&R Eddie, wherever he is — she started widening her studio session net, consciously choosing to work with producers and writers she hadn’t linked with before and who could bring her out of her comfort zone. Building up that roster of collaborators, she developed a massive back catalogue of nearly 70 tracks.

Parsing through it — and spurred on by that whiteboard session with James — Wilson began to see connections. Everything, she realised. was on a spectrum of yearning, whether for experience, for someone else, for external validation, or even for greater connection with herself. “Sunday” (that classic sunroom song) and “Friends Again” – which sees her back with Leon Thomas – were, thematically, the two real pillars of the album, and the rest was built out from there. It only made sense, then, for the title to pay homage to that throughline. “I just feel like I’ve yearned throughout my whole catalog of music, like that’s the centre point. There’s not a specific sound or genre you can place me to, but people who are familiar with my work know that my music centres around yearning and desire,” she explains.

With those intentions in mind, Wilson took to the behemoth task of editing down that massive catalogue into a coherent thesis statement. She assembled what she now calls her “wrecking crew,” consisting of co-executive producer Biako as well as collaborators Ryan James Carr and Joe Harrison, and had them all hunker down with her at a house in L.A. in late 2025. “I reached out to each person individually and was like, ‘I want to use these songs and I want to bring them across the finish line, but I need them to be cohesive, so I need to bring post production into my world. Are you down?’ And they were like, ‘For sure,’” she explains. 

From November through to the new year, Wilson and her team were working day in and day out, getting lost in their own world and creating the rich sonic world of YEARNALISM. Everything was about connecting — both to each other and to the music — as deeply as possible. “It was really fun to do that and work together with everybody and have dinners together, order food, break bread together, and then drink coffee together in the morning at 10am,” she says of the experience. 

Above all else, Wilson and her team placed an emphasis on craft. Lyrics and explanation aside, the music and the process behind YEARNALISM speaks for itself and gets its mission across. Nearly everything on the record was recorded to tape using vintage equipment, with evocative first takes prioritised over hyper-processed cherry picking. The appropriate reference points here are Muscle Shoals and old school Nina Simone, the kind of artists who bring to the table a timelessness in their excellence. Wilson, on YEARNALISM, brings that to the table too, pulling from the palette of her predecessors but anchoring that sound with her haunting, lilting signature aalto in a way that makes vintage R&B feel vividly fresh again.

“Without me saying anything directly, the process by which I’ve done this — the fact that we’ve taken so much care and consideration in preserving methods and gear like the E50 and the Echoplex and the tape machine and all of these instruments and vintage keyboards — really speaks to us keeping care and love alive,” Wilson says. 

She fell in love with the ruggedness of the process and of the output of those old machines, favouring them to the semi-soullnessness of modern music software. The way she describes her love of tape, live session studio musicians, vintage recording methods, and first takes almost reminds me of how Bruce Springsteen must have felt recording and advocating for Nebraska. It’s a form of music-making that feels like an endangered animal, one that is so pure you feel the need to protect it at all costs. 

And that ethos, of doing things for passion rather than for convenience, is really what YEARNALISM has been all about. Wilson knows and sees forces in the world that are dividing us rather than connecting us. She’s aware of pervasive trends in culture and technology that suck us into harmful patterns and stimulate us constantly, leaving little time for slowness and expression. 

The songs on YEARNALISM speak to this societal loss, advocating for a pace of life that allows us to sit with ourselves and just be. Wilson's creative process in putting together the record shows she’s willing to practice what she preaches. “Don’t pacify yourself, don’t gaslight yourself into thinking, like, ‘Oh, well, I should just be happy where I’m at,’” she says. “Usually, the cost of greatness is just inconvenience. The cost of reaching community, of being healthy… Those aren’t the most convenient things in the world. It’s way more easy to throw your hands up and feel like you can’t do anything about it. But, I even say it out loud and have to remind myself in every moment that we need to just do the best we can right now.”

By the top of 2026, YEARNALISM was done and ready to be handed in. As I finish my series of conversations with Wilson, she’s two days away from that record finally coming out. When we chat for the last time, she’s phoning me from her car in L.A., running between rehearsals for a massive leg of arena shows with Olivia Dean and a promotional fan event later that night. The Dean shows will be, without a doubt, Wilson's biggest career look to date. 

Wilson and Dean have gone back years, both being fans of each other through the scene and meeting at various shows. For Wilson, working with Dean was always a dream, and last year when she knew the opener slot was available, she sent a hail-mary DM from her YEARNALISM post-production camp asking to be included. Dean responded near-immediately telling her an offer had already been sent out. It was total serendipity. If Wilson had been motivated to get YEARNALISM out in the world before, confirmation of her slot with Dean only added more fuel to the fire. Wilson and her team worked overtime to get the mixes finalised and delivered in time to hit the road. YEARNALISM’s release date, 10 July, fell on the same day as her first slot with Dean in the U.S. 

“I didn’t really account for the level of work and things that were going to rush in [with this],” Wilson admits, acknowledging the pressure of putting together a massive release and her biggest tour to date. “But I’m also very aware of what it’s like when things are quiet… Crickets. So, my heart is just filled with gratitude. A lot of things are just happening.”

Even this tour, she admits, comes back to her mom. We both muse that maybe McClain has a kind of sixth sense, one that will always be guiding Wilson for the better. “She seems to be very much a driving force with a clear vision. She was saying I was going to be performing in arenas when I hadn’t booked anything for the year,” Wilson remembers and laughs. Now, those premonitions are coming true. Very few deserve it more.