In 2014 Jesse Jo Stark was 23 and already had a career in fashion. Her parents, Richard and Laurie Lynn Stark, founded the Los Angeles brand Chrome Hearts; she had designed a punk collection for it, Pete Punk, at 19, and two capsule lines for Vans a year later. “Baby Love” was the song that announced her debut EP, Down Your Drain, recorded in Los Angeles with a producer from the family circle: Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, whose own podcast notes that he has known her since before she was born.
The press notes for the EP listed what went into it: a long fixation on Frankenstein and Dracula, a taste for 1950s innocence, the Cramps, punk and country. “Baby Love” leans on the 1950s. Its story follows Baby Love and Betty Loo to a dance that could go either way, with a boy begging for a kiss and a narrator whose heart and head can’t agree on what she wants from him. By midnight the party is still going, and the song closes on a plea to belong to someone and a flat refusal. According to those notes, it starts on a heavy beat and a clicking guitar. Jones produced all four songs, “Baby Love”, “Teardrop Johnny”, the title track and “Electric Baby”, about 14 minutes in all.
Olivia Malone directed the video, with Drew Bienemann behind the camera, and it went up on Stark’s YouTube channel on 3 September 2014, the day the EP was due. Buzzbands.la, covering the release that week, heard “sultry, bluesy cowpunk” and pointed to the video, which puts her among a crowd of bored delinquents. She told DuJour that one song on it was about love and horror, and that she had worked hard on the words.
The EP had a short life online. Its iTunes page was gone by May 2016, and when “Driftwood” arrived in January 2017, Interview called it her first single. The title track came back as that single’s B-side; “Baby Love” survives mainly through its video. Her later records include the EP Dandelion (2018) and the album Doomed (2022), and in September 2026 she announced a second album, MUSE, for November. The start was a good one: a three-minute sock-hop story with sugar on top and a sting at the end.
