The wait between writing the first lines of an album and the moment that album actually sees the light of day can be a long and frustrating one. Every so often, though, it works in the artist’s favor for an LP to have a little extra time to gestate. For Nashville singer-songwriter Katie Pruitt, spending several years with her debut album Expectations not only gave her the chance to craft an LP on which she sounds like herself, but also offered her time to make peace with the deeply personal narratives she crafts in her songs.
“I’ve been writing this for the past four or five years, and it feels like a full-circle type of moment, like the end of one chapter and the beginning of another one,” Pruitt tells the Scene. “I feel like I’m in a good place emotionally to be talking about some of this stuff, and that feels good.”
Expectations is Pruitt’s full-length debut, and it’s out Friday via Rounder Records. The rootsy, rocking, soulful album follows several years of buzz surrounding Pruitt, whose 2018 live session with the Nashville web channel OurVinyl generated significant excitement for both her skillful vocals and vulnerable songwriting. She recorded Expectations alongside her friend and producer Mike Robinson. She credits him for the moment she felt like her recorded music truly matched her artistic vision.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a record for a while,” she says. “I was trying to study, from other people I knew, the right way to do it and trying to figure out what that looked like for me. … I had worked with several producers in town. They were all great, but I never heard myself coming back at me. I heard the songs, but I didn’t hear me.”
Pruitt took the demos she and Robinson had been working on to the staff at Rounder and explained to them: “Look, I understand my friend Mike has literally no experience as a record producer, but I would like him to produce my record, please.” To her surprise, Rounder agreed. They also gave her creative control over the musicians who played on Expectations, despite encouragement at some of those early meetings with producers to choose hired guns over her own touring band.
Together, Pruitt and Robinson found ways to build intricate, hook-laden arrangements that matched the emotional heft of her lyrics without overshadowing the songs’ powerful narratives. Pruitt’s songs deftly and compassionately chart themes like queerness, familial conflict, religion and mental health. On “Georgia,” Pruitt explores the complexities of coming out to loved ones. The song begins with a sparse piano arrangement that builds to an emotional crescendo at the song’s bridge.
“I wrote ‘Georgia’ right after I came out to my parents,” Pruitt says. “They were having a really hard time with it and didn’t want to talk about it, and there was this big, gaping hole in the middle of our world and our relationship. So I wrote it from a place of fear, of never being able to resolve that with them. But we’ve done a lot of work — they’ve done a lot of work — so we’re on the other side of that issue now.”
A standout track from the OurVinyl release was “Loving Her,” which also appears on Expectations. The success of that song was an early breakout moment for Pruitt, who opens the track with a gut-punch of a lyric: “If loving her’s a sin I don’t want to go to heaven.” She wrote the song after an uncomfortable phone conversation with her father, who objected to Pruitt’s then-burgeoning relationship with her girlfriend, on the grounds of his religious beliefs.
“I was talking to my dad on the phone and he basically said, ‘I don’t understand it. I don’t think it’s right,’ ” she says. “That obviously stirred something up in me. We were both really upset, not being able to understand each other’s perspectives on it. … I couldn’t understand why the God that they were putting so much trust and faith in was seeing who I am as completely wrong.”
Pruitt is eager to get her new music into listeners’ ears. All the same, it seems like the time she’s spent with the songs on Expectations has already had a profound impact on her as an artist and as a person.
“They were all songs that I wrote when I was processing a heavy emotion or an intense time in my life. And I still identify with those, but I’m singing them from the other side now.”
