Jessica Baio at House of Blues with Johnny Huyhn
The Voodoo Room at House of Blues holds maybe three hundred people on a good night, and Tuesday it was full of them — most of them young, many of them visibly emotional before the first note played, a few of them in tears before Jessica Baio even stepped to the microphone. That’s the specific kind of audience she’s built: people who found her music in a hard moment and never really let go of it. Whether she’s in front of a live audience, on a microphone in the studio, or behind the steering wheel of her car on social media, Baio puts her whole life on display in her songs — and listening to her resembles the most candid conversation you’ve had with your best friend, where no subject is off limits and tears and laughs are equally welcome. Tuesday confirmed that description holds up at full volume in a packed room on a Tuesday night in San Diego.
Johnny Huynh opened the night as the official support act for The Other Side Tour, and if you walked in late, you missed something real. The Vietnamese American musician from Bothell, Washington makes arena-ready, big-chorused pop of a piece with Imagine Dragons and, in certain moments, fellow Washingtonian belter Benson Boone — and his voice, classically trained from age four, fills a room like the Voodoo Room without breaking a sweat. He ran through “GOOD AS YOU,” “LEFT OF ME,” “HELL ON ME,” and “BLEED MY LOVE” — the latter a stark look at the push-and-pull of a toxic relationship, exploring the dynamic of an intensely all-encompassing situation where it quite literally feels like your love is being drained out of you. The crowd received him with genuine warmth, and when he closed with his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” — notable for its plaintive, layered vocal harmonies that mark a unique departure from myriad covers of the tune — the room went quiet in the way rooms only go quiet when something unexpected and genuinely beautiful is happening. It was the perfect way to set the stage for Baio’s set.
Baio opened with “other side” — the title track from the SACRED II reissue that anchors this entire tour — and the room responded immediately. She moved through “trust issues” and “love me less” in the first stretch, both songs generating the kind of singalong that fills a small room completely and makes it feel much larger than it is. “at least” caught fire with over 19.5 million Spotify streams in 2022, and it landed exactly as you’d expect from a song that has lived in that many headphones — familiar and enormous and a little bit devastating all at once. “he loves me, he loves me not,” “who you are,” and “permanent” followed, each one landing in a room where nearly everyone already knew the words. Midway through the set she sat down at a keyboard and performed “sacred” and “el roy st.” stripped back.
The second half of the night belonged to the SACRED II material that has been living on the internet long enough to feel lived-in even to newer fans. “inferior,” “kiss & tell,” “video store,” and “naturally” had the crowd back on its feet, and the production — cool blues for the reflective moments, warmer reds and purples when the songs opened up — gave the Voodoo Room a cinematic quality that punched above the venue’s modest size. The shows are designed to feel like a journey to the other side of the songs — showing fans what the music means to her now, how the stories have changed, and how they can find something like healing in the lyrics. That intention was visible throughout, but it never felt calculated. She talked between songs the way someone talks when they’re not performing talking — offhand, a little self-deprecating, occasionally funny. When she introduced “at least” as the song that changed everything for her, she seemed genuinely unsure how to describe what that meant, and that uncertainty landed better than any prepared speech would have. Baio even took time to come out into the crowd for a song, sending waves of excitement across the room.
She closed with “made for you” and “bad times” before the lights came back up, and the crowd took a moment to just stand there before filing out. Baio grew up as the oldest of four kids in the small Northern California town of Auburn, learned guitar and piano in middle school, and got her first taste of virality with a Miley Cyrus cover on YouTube. The distance between that origin story and a sold-out headline tour that stretches across two continents is not a small one, and the version of her that showed up Tuesday in the Voodoo Room has clearly figured out the difference between performing emotion and simply having it. If The Other Side tour comes to a venue near you, take our advice: go.
