Her Story
Still healing.
Still here.
Jessica Valentine Sky Baker — Métis Cree, born in Treaty 8 Territory. Everything below is true, and none of it was easy to write down.
Chapter One
Before the music.
I started singing when I was five years old, because it was the only place that felt safe. I grew up carrying things no kid should have to carry — trauma that didn't have a name yet, in a house where surviving came before anything else.
By the time I was a teenager I'd found a different way to cope, and it very nearly took everything. I spent eight years — starting at nineteen — trying to get sober, and failing. Not because I didn't want it badly enough. Addiction doesn't care how badly you want it.
Chapter Two
The night everything cracked open.
I went into medical detox after the eighth time I tried to end my life. The day I came out, I wrote a song called "Surrender" — I just needed to put it somewhere that wasn't inside me anymore.
Months later, in that same treatment center, someone put a karaoke mic in my hand. I'd never done karaoke before, and I haven't since. Something in me clicked into place — I found my voice in the most broken room I've ever stood in. If that's not kintsugi, the gold that fills the cracks, I don't know what is.
Chapter Three
Selling everything.
In 2020, I sold almost everything I owned to fund my first single, "On My Own." No label, no team, no plan B. Just a song about the exact thing I'd survived, and a conviction that if I didn't do it now, I never would.
It placed in the Top 100 of CBC's Searchlight competition, out of more than 2,500 entries. That's the moment I stopped thinking of music as something I did to cope, and started thinking of it as the thing I was actually here to do.
Chapter Four
Finding my way back to Cree.
I didn't reconnect with my heritage until I got sober. Addiction had taken a lot from me, and my culture was one of those things, even though I didn't fully realize it until it started coming back. Sobriety gave me room to ask who I actually was underneath everything — and part of the answer was Métis Cree, born in Treaty 8 Territory, now living as a guest on Treaty 6 land in Edmonton.
Recording "WE'RE NOT LOST" with the Abraham Lake Singers is still one of the proudest things I've done — not for any chart position, but because it's the first time my music felt like it belonged to more than just me.
Chapter Five
Where the climb took me.
"Better This Way" and "WE'RE NOT LOST" both went to #1 on the Indigenous Music Countdown. Sky's The Limit, my first full album, came out in 2024, and CBC named me their Searchlight Honorary Indigenous Artist that year for a song called "Anxiety" — which is exactly what it sounds like it's about.
In 2025, I was one of four artists chosen nationally for the CBC × SOCAN Reverie Indigenous Music Residency, which put me on a stage at Massey Hall I never pictured myself standing on. "Touchin'" earned an official SOCAN #1 Song Award. "Grievin'" made CBC Music's Top 100 Canadian Songs of the year.
I'm not telling you this to brag. I'm telling you because four years before any of it, I was selling my furniture to pay for a song nobody had heard yet. The lesson I keep learning is that the vulnerability was never the risk. Hiding was.
Why I Make It This Way
Pain is my primary inspiration.
People ask why my music leans so hard into the hard stuff instead of the easy stuff. Here's the honest answer: pain is what I know how to tell the truth about. Love songs are everywhere. Someone telling you exactly what a panic attack feels like, or what it's like to want to use again on a random Tuesday — that's rarer, and it's the only thing I've ever known how to write that actually helps someone.
I'm not afraid to show people I am struggling, that I am human, that I am flawed, and that it is okay to not be okay.
First, Always
Before any of this, there was a stage and a song.
The podcast, the speaking, the merch — all of it came after. If you want to know who I actually am, come watch me play.
Book a Show