Jessica Pratt
Over the past 12 years, Jessica Pratt has released a succession of whispery, understated lo-fi albums. Discussions around the Los Angeles folk veteran’s artistry occasionally loop her into the freak-folk movement alongside the likes of Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and others who make experimental takes on traditional folk music.
Here in the Pitch, Pratt’s fourth album overall and first since 2018, is her most lush yet. It sucks you in with its atmospheric blend of influences as she unabashedly toes the line between avant-garde folk and classic pop sounds. Though she sings in a higher register, her vocal tone and delivery conjure divinely feminine singers like Françoise Hardy. Her intricate vocal arrangements gesture toward the freaky father of folk-pop, Harry Nilsson. In the instrumental realm, jangly Pet Sounds-inspired glockenspiel meets the spacious drums you hear on The Velvet Underground’s self-titled LP, all blending into a sound that’s nostalgic but never derivative.
When you go back further in Pratt’s catalog, it becomes obvious that her sound has always lived in this space; this evolution feels as if she’s just unpacked more of her things into it. The writing and recording process began during COVID lockdown and continued afterward — a period characterized by too much time and too much space. So, many artists released records during pandemic lockdown or quickly after, eager to get back to touring. Released in May, Here in the Pitch arrives after that hump, perhaps to its own benefit.
“I feel like the songs make sense together as a cohesive document of the timeframe that I was making it,” says Pratt. “It was a strange time, I suppose. It was a time of a lot of dead air, which was probably a benefit — or a curse. When there’s too much open time, you can feel sort of awash. There was certainly some of that. … There were no immediate deadlines. Nothing felt pressing. In a way that might have let me stretch out creatively, but it also potentially elongated the process.”
Either way, Here in the Pitch is a superb half-hour of music, with production as precious and pristine as Pratt’s soprano voice. She makes a haunted world for herself on tracks like “Nowhere It Was,” an eerie song that could be about a deranged cult leader or a friend who is slipping into paranoia. The reverb-heavy percussion mimics the sound of water droplets in a dark cave. It induces chills, like a ghost running through you.
Jessica Pratt
Here in the Pitch is a collage of universal themes from the pandemic mindset: loneliness, hope, cynicism and transformation. “Life Is” and “The Last Year” bookend the album, opening with: “Life is / It’s never what you think it’s for.” What is life for? Pratt doesn’t answer. She doesn’t force-feed ideals; instead, she explores the contours of human experience through her poetic lyrics, embracing the anxiety and leaving room for resolve, no matter how fleeting. On “The Last Year” she sings: “I think it’s gonna be fine / I think we’re gonna be together / And the storyline goes forever.” There’s not a lot of certainty in these lines, but there doesn’t need to be. The hope that it will be fine is enough.
When asked about her starting point for writing a specific song, Pratt chuckles and says: “That’s the age-old question, right? Where does a song come from?” For her, songs bring together influences that can’t — and shouldn’t — be picked apart. “My songs are a combination of fictionalized ideas or disparate parts of things I’ve read about or learned about, maybe even a character in a movie, combined with my own impulses. And it just comes out as a patchwork.”
To Pratt, the interesting thing is not where a song comes from, but where it leads the listener. “To dissect [a song] is maybe impossible, but I like that the process is unpredictable and not completely easy to parse afterwards,” she says. “As long as it has an emotional impact, that’s the most important thing.”
By writing cryptic and mysterious lyrics that don’t just center her own experience, she’s able to fit a whole world of feeling into her writing. It’s expansive and allows the listener to slot in their experience as well. And more listeners are responding. “I don’t know if it was kind of the right thing for the right time period,” Pratt says, “but it seemed like by the time I put out this record I had gained some fans.”
The past few years have been a time for quiet music that makes you think. In a noisy world, Pratt’s music makes you want to turn down all the other inputs and truly listen.
