Jessica Pratt - Portrait of an introverted folksinger

It can be easy, almost natural, to file Jessica Pratt under the traditional, and perhaps not especially innovative, folk genre. After all, the American singer-songwriter seems to have all the makings of a perfect folksinger: she writes songs, she has a guitar, she has a voice. But there's something about her, something listeners pick up on right away, that keeps her from being filed away under that label without a second thought.

Jessica can't read music and her guitar playing is rudimentary; she sings her songs in a voice that keeps shaping itself around the notes, often taking on an almost childlike tone, so delicate is it. Pratt manages, strengths and limitations alike, to convey a sense of calm, peace, and melancholy all at once; her songs are like the gentle whisper of a mother singing a lullaby before her child drifts off to sleep. With the simplicity and naturalness that define her, she manages to stir up complex emotions in her listeners.

Many have labeled her just another aspiring Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez: skilled, but lacking originality. She doesn't endorse these comparisons to the two queens of folk, doesn't see herself in them: she wants to blend the past with the present and add something of her own. That's why her music can't be filed simply as folk: there's an elusive extra element, something slightly psychedelic, that gives her that distinctiveness she's so proud of. Perhaps that element is the sense of quiet innocence her songs convey; the innocence we lose in adulthood, but which she still somehow manages to stay in touch with.

Happy to Stay Anonymous

Jessica Pratt is extremely protective of her privacy: she rarely lets slip any personal information that doesn't directly concern her music.

Born in 1987 in San Francisco, she lost her father and was raised by her mother alongside an older brother, four years her senior.

Jessica is an introverted child with a dreamy spirit. Her mother, a music lover, raises her from an early age according to her own tastes, which will go on to shape her well into adulthood. British folk and the music of the Sixties are a key inspiration for her, along with artists like Brian Eno and Leonard Cohen, Donovan and Marianne Faithfull.

She doesn't like school, preferring to study literature, history and art in her own way, free of institutional indoctrination. She has always wanted to pursue her natural inclinations and interests undisturbed. Although she never studied music through any formal method (to this day she can't read sheet music), she has always found herself immersed in it. Not only thanks to her mother, but also to her brother, who at a certain point decides he wants to learn electric guitar and gets himself a Fender Stratocaster as a gift. He strums around the house for six months but soon loses interest, and Jessica, who is fifteen at the time, takes over the instrument, finally discovering her calling as a songwriter. She realizes that music isn't just something to listen to, but something to make.

With far more conviction and dedication than her brother, she genuinely intends to play guitar. At first she writes covers of songs she already knows, such as some T-Rex tracks by Marc Bolan, well suited, with their simple, repetitive chords, to a novice guitarist; then she starts writing songs of her own. Jessica also discovers she has a beautiful voice, made even more captivating by the particular inflection she gives it: never too happy, never too sad, but always deeply expressive.

This young woman's homebound passion continues uninterrupted, despite the changes taking place in her life. Jessica, in fact, drops out of high school, which she's already struggling to attend, and goes to work.

It's in 2007, however, that a first turning point occurs, one that will become the foundation of her future career as a songwriter. Jessica is twenty and has written many songs sitting on her bed with guitar in hand, within the four walls of her room. Even though she always lives it out in private, personal spaces, she devotes herself body and soul to music: for her it's an outlet, a healthy way to express herself and her anxieties. Everyone who knows her is aware of this, and one day a friend of hers, who owns a recording studio there in San Francisco, offers to record a few of her songs. Jessica accepts the offer; not because she's hoping for some kind of stardom, but because the invitation is free and she's curious to try it out.

She records, the itch seems satisfied, and the chapter closes.

The Surprise of Success

Five years pass, and in the meantime Jessica has left her mother's house to move in with one of her best friends and the latter's boyfriend. This young man is Sean Paul Presley, and it isn't long before Pratt discovers he's the brother of Tim Presley, the musician and songwriter who played in The Nerve Agents, Darker My Love, The Fall, and who has now founded White Fence, becoming a key figure in the wave of psychedelic revival that has taken hold of San Francisco.

It's not exactly clear how Tim Presley comes to learn of Jessica Pratt's songs: some say the girl's boyfriend sends him the recordings made five years earlier without her knowledge, others say Tim happens to hear the track "Night Faces" circulating online.

However it happens, the fact remains that Presley is captivated by the young artist's simple, graceful style. His excitement at discovering this talent is such that he decides to found a record label purely in order to produce and distribute her songs.

This is how Birth Records comes into being, and on November 6, 2012, Jessica Pratt is released, the singer's debut album, containing eleven tracks.

Jessica decides not to touch anything from the recordings made five years earlier in her friend's studio, so she simply takes the best songs and puts them straight onto the record.

Tim Presley's fame helps her reach a fairly sizeable audience; moreover, around that same period Tim is collaborating with Ty Segall, a key figure in underground rock, which helps ensure that Jessica's name gets dropped by the right people in the circles that matter.

Jessica Pratt starts to enjoy major success, especially critical success: the right connections allowed her to stand out from the enormous flood of indie and self-released music, but it's precisely the record's roughness and simplicity, the voice that evokes something ancestral or timeless, backed by elementary fingerpicking, that prove the attention is deserved and that the talent is real.

But Jessica wasn't expecting success; at most, she thought she might be appreciated by a handful of discerning music fans. So when requests for interviews, and especially live shows, start coming in, she doesn't quite know what to make of it.

In 25 years she had never played in front of a large audience, and these days her live shows are practically nonexistent. She has always written her music not to share it, but to speak to herself; Jessica Pratt is an album of introspective songs, almost hermetic in their dreamlike writing full of elusive meanings — it's a private diary set out for an audience to read.

Her dusty melodies are recorded live, with no additional overdubs whatsoever. Balanced, almost ancestral, with a faint psychedelic scent lending an antique tinge (never remotely weird) to the author's nocturnal, reflective picking, the songs file past with a gentle, bashful grace, usually striking less through any single moment than through their beautiful, enchanting overall impact.

From the melancholy build of "Night Faces," an opener that leaves its mark thanks to the collection's most incisive chorus, to the drowsy grip of "Bushel Hyde" (with a chord sequence that the latter-day Anaïs Mitchell would surely have loved), to the hypnotic male harmonies framing the soothing unfurling of "Dreams," Pratt charms with the naturalness of an instinctive, nimble approach to melody, with the calm of someone who feels no urgent need to rush through telling her story.

Jessica rehearses for live shows, and her first performances are as support for White Fence and other alternative San Francisco bands. Her name is soon linked to the "freak folk" tag, which evokes the folk singer-songwriter scene of the late Sixties.

Pratt's work is praised by the most important American magazines, and within two weeks of release the 500 copies pressed have already sold out. In 2013 it's also released in the UK, landing in the top ten albums of the year on the Rough Trade chart.

Hermeticism and surrealism

Pratt's music career began almost by accident; she herself had no idea what to expect or what she wanted. But the moment her eponymous album comes out, she realizes this is her path and that she wants to become a full-time artist.

Yet nothing more is heard of Jessica for a full two years. Only in January 2014 does an unreleased track of hers, "Game That I Play," surface online, and already you can sense an evolution, a change in her.

At the end of that same year a single, "Back, Baby," is released on Drag City, the Chicago label specializing in independent music; on January 27, 2015, her second album, On Your Own Love Again, comes out.

It consists of nine tracks, still folk in nature, with Pratt's guitar and voice still reigning supreme.

While on the previous record only two songs were recorded at home on a four-track ("Night Faces" and "Dreams"), this time every track is the product of a solitary, home-recorded session. There is, however, one collaboration: Will Canzoneri, a member of Darker My Love who also joined her on tour, plays keyboards and clavinet on two tracks. This addition gives the songs a fuller, richer musicality.

Pratt's songwriting, both musically and lyrically, has visibly matured, growing even more hypnotic. It's true that her guitar technique is still imperfect and that, aside from a few tracks ("Back, Baby," for instance), she doesn't have a particular gift for melody, but her power of communication is striking. After all, Jessica Pratt is a collection of old songs that she had mostly written when she was nineteen; now that she's 27, it's only natural that her powers of reflection and composition have grown.

In the two years since her debut, several things happened in her private life that, whether directly or not, are addressed implicitly on "On Your Own Love Again": the death of her mother and the end of a seven-year relationship. On top of that, to make the album, Jessica moved alone to Los Angeles, specifically to Silver Lake. Perhaps because she was going through a period of existential crisis over these emotional losses, and because she'd moved to a city where she knew no one, her second record has darker shades, but also a more cathartic effect on the emotions it stirs up.

There's a more psychedelic touch to this album: like the sudden shift in rhythm at the end of "Jacquelyn In The Background" or the surrealism of "Wrong Hand". And it's worth focusing on that surrealism: in her songs, Pratt doesn't tell stories, but describes poetically otherworldly images; she takes elements of reality, people or feelings, and turns everything into abstractions that it's up to the listener to decode and give meaning to.

Unusual tunings, the most overt psychedelic drift yet, a voice that's grown more confident and versatile in its delivery ("Greycedes", with that vertiginous vocal climb, shows off a command of her own voice she can genuinely be proud of), and a recording with a loose, homespun touch: once again, Pratt needs very little to populate her world with a thousand different characters, to conjure a composite imagery that's always adept at avoiding a single unifying emotional thread. Between first-person ballads built in two parts ("Game That I Play", with its surprising diptych structure, pits more measured folk-style musings against a coda that smells of California), tunes with the faintest echoes of blues (the irresistible sweetness of "Back, Baby") and mantras of a sinister, ancestral purity ("I've Got A Feeling"), Jessica needs only the smallest gesture, the slightest shift in tone, to avoid falling into the trap of self-imitation.

Adding to the allure is also the peculiarity of her voice, which seems to come from a dream and shapes her inflections, giving different accents to the words she sings; this way, within the same song, Jessica can sound at times Australian, Irish or American.

Even with this release she achieves good visibility and critical success. The praise doesn't generate the same astonishment as her debut, and she now says her dream is to make music full-time, without having to split her time with other jobs.

Her fears about performing on stage have been overcome, and she's grown comfortable enough to want to try playing not just alone, but with other musicians too. In short, she's open to change.

We can only wish her success in every project she takes on, hopefully with an even greater enrichment and evolution of her songwriting. For a talented artist like her, it's almost a duty to experiment and change, rather than settle into the safety of repetition and well-trodden paths.

Hymns to silence

Four years after her second effort, it's time to get back in the game, and she does so with great style. For twenty-seven minutes, stillness will lay claim to you. It won't do so through bland coaxing or dreamy, enchanting scenery; instead, it will reveal itself in all its force, even silencing you if it deems it necessary. Quiet Signs is indeed a work that amplifies and perfects Jessica Pratt's acute expressive minimalism, in an exemplary exercise of (self-)control and compositional calm, both an intimate friend and an ultimate aspiration. It's a brief but excellent compendium of essentiality that serves as a passport to an entire universe of images and sensations. The word "consecration" has rarely carried greater weight.

While still rooted in the same bare-bones nature of her previous two records, the new project shines with unusual elements, pushing to its furthest extremes a formula that had until then been rather resistant to any kind of change. The overture, "Opening Night", shows a sonic palette that felt the need to move beyond the voice-guitar template, to open up—while keeping the same creative premises—to a more dynamic instrumental range. If the lineup already reflects this changing of the guard, even more significant is the decisive production shift made for the occasion: turning for the first time to a recording studio, Pratt defies her own fears about this new setting and delivers her most transcendent collection, the one that best captures her essence, able to abstract itself from both time and space.

Filtering out (with due discretion) every external interference, the production makes the author's lightning-quick narratives even more diaphanous, giving them an otherworldly texture that dissolves any tie to a specific context. Pratt's character thus emerges here beyond definitions; her voice, thoughtful and enigmatic at once, steers melodic themes, guitar lines and shifting moods with an aura that's both arcane and familiar, telling the intimate and the universal with the same light, distinctive dynamism.

On this third installment of a journey conducted at her own pace—one that lets songs mature like fine wine—Jessica Pratt has built one of the most singular careers in contemporary American songwriting, asserting herself through the force of a distinctive language in all its polished essentiality. If an album like "Quiet Signs" were to become a reference point in years to come, it would hardly come as a surprise.

A baroque dream

When dealing with artists like this, what's striking is the ability to refine the contours without distorting the figure, edging toward a perfection that isn't undermined but rather solidified by the gradual addition of elements. Here In The Pitch, released on May 3, 2024, isn't actually all that different from Quiet Signs: the same ethereal fragility, the same mystical sweetness, the same surreal sense of echoing from another era, as well as the same fleeting length (exactly 27 minutes). And yet, the two albums couldn't be more different: as skeletal and "empty" as its predecessor is, this fourth record is just as baroque and "full".

The covers would seem to contradict this reading: the brazen smile in the car and the sumptuous décor of Quiet Signs give way to the sulky pout tucked away in shadow and the downcast eyes of Here In The Pitch. A darker record, then? Quite the opposite: the Spectoresque drumming of "Life Is" notes with fatalistic resignation that, well, this is the life we've got, bittersweet as the Simon & Garfunkel-style harmonies of the chorus. Next, "Better Hate" promises violence but delivers infinite delicacy with its spidery interweaving of voices, punctuated by baritone sax and vibraphone, to the pointillistic rhythm of a distant clave.

A “World On A String” that, luckily for us, is not the one from “Tonight’s The Night“, accompanied by a delightful video steeped in sixties flavor, is a melancholy elegy in which acoustic guitar and piano prop each other up, embellished with blooms of mellotron and harpsichord. The spare “Get Your Head Out” is more in line with the past, but those closing touches of electric piano confirm a drift away from folk toward a velvety, psychedelic easy listening, brought to completion in the bossa nova of “By Hook Or By Crook”. Something similar applies to the subdued organ of “Nowhere It Was”, which could be an outtake from “Pet Sounds” as much as from “Pink Moon“.

For its part, the nursery-rhyme lilt of “Empires Never Know” sets guitar aside to lean on the graces of a slightly out-of-tune piano, cradled by soft caresses of flute and maracas. The six strings reclaim their den in the minute and a half of instrumental “Glances”, where just enough room is found for a stripped-down arpeggio and a brass arrangement as mournful as the “Disintegration Loops” of Basinski fame. At this point the only artist left to pay tribute to would be Bacharach, and “The Last Year” doesn’t need to be told twice, letting the last traces of its dreamy haze fade out over its gorgeous melodic tapestry. As for us, however reluctantly, all that's left to do is open our eyes again. Finally, is there still any need to waste words on that voice?

The crowning achievement of an artist already crowned with full marks, Here In The Pitch is perhaps just another step in a climb to the heavens that could go on forever.

Contributions by Vassilios Karagiannis and Ossydiana Speri

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