FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Porter for Loud and Quiet
Part Fifty-One: Jessica Pratt
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IN the playlist at the end…
PHOTO CREDIT: Guillaume Belvez
I am going to collate songs from all three of Jessica Pratt’s studio albums. I am going to focus on her current album, Quiet Signs, when it comes to interviews and reviews. Before that, it is worth knowing more about Pratt. For that, some biography from Wikipedia:
“Jessica Pratt (born 24 April 1987) is an American musician and singer-songwriter, based in Los Angeles, California. Her self-titled debut album was released in 2011 via Birth Records, a record label founded by Darker My Love and White Fence songwriter Tim Presley to release Pratt's music. She is often associated with the freak folk movement
Pratt was raised by her mother, who exposed her to a broad range of artists, including Tim Buckley, X, and the Gun Club. She learned to play the guitar around the age of 15, after her older brother gave up playing his Stratocaster. She took his guitar and started practising with the T. Rex album, Electric Warrior. She was soon able to play the guitar parts of the whole record. She eventually began recording songs at the age of 16, using her mother's Fender guitar amp and microphone”.
There are a lot of interesting interviews with Jessica Pratt around the release of Quiet Signs. I wonder whether we will receive any new music from the hugely impressive and engaging Pratt. I think she is an artist who will release more albums and, before long, be seen as a icon – or someone, at least, who is going to inspire and influence a lot of other songwriters.
It is worth going ahead with interviews and discovering more about Pratt and the recording of Quiet Signs. I think that album was one of 2019’s best. Before coming to reviews for Quiet Signs, I want to source from an interview Pratt conducted with Loud and Quiet in 2019. It is fascinating learning more about the incredible songwriter:
“Redding, California – where I’m from – is heavily Christian”
It’s a smallish city, but the greater area… there’s a lot of farmland and stuff. It’s kind of fallen on hard times in the last 15 years or so. It’s a land of misfortune in many ways. It’s the kind of place you either leave or stay and succumb to nothing good. There was a brief wave of a music scene that I was lucky enough to be around when I was coming of age. I moved out of Redding when I was 17 and moved to San Francisco in 2007. I worked day jobs, played music on my own, and when I played (once in a while) it was because my friends forced it upon me. I’d play maybe two shows a year. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in having a career in music, it just didn’t cross my mind that that would even be a possibility.
“There is that frustration when you read the reviews that call you Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell”
It’s funny because I haven’t done an interview in a while, my last record came out, you know, a bit ago [2015’s ‘On Your Own Again’]. That frustration seems like a very old one. But I think that’s the reality of making music that is any way consumed by the public. It will be condensed in a way that you won’t think fully reflects the picture. They’re important figures. But then I have a flute, you know.
“It felt wrong for the new album to be a summer record”
There was a period before ‘Quiet Signs’ was done when it was supposed to come out in the summer and I felt weird about that. It felt wrong. Not that I make music in any way intended to be listened to at only one time, but it felt wrong and I’m happy that didn’t happen. I suppose maybe sometimes that might pose a threat. I don’t know how many times you can plan it that way and have it work out. But I need these darker seasons. Especially living in LA, which is a season-less place. It’s like in the ’80s right now, which is very hot. The autumn and winter are introspective times and maybe more connected to a perceived mysticism than bright, hot summertime.
“This new record feels bare”
I don’t want to say that word, but I have. That isn’t a description of it musically, but it’s more emotionally on the cuff than the last record, which is maybe a bit more gauzy. Emotionally it’s a bit half-in, half-out of reality. On the last record I didn’t have a label until it was done. There wasn’t a label waiting, it was just me making music because I thought that would be a good thing to do. I had a work-orientated work in mind this time. It was a project I had to complete, and that motivated me after a while of not doing anything. I think because I knew it was going to be one big piece in the end I approached it and considered that”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Rachel Cabitt for RollingStone.com
Not only is there a different sound between her second album (2015’s On Your Own Love Again) and Quiet Signs. It appears, as we learn from this interview from Under the Radar Mag the recording method was quite different too:
“My first record was basically a collection of songs that I had recorded at different times that I didn’t intend to put out. And then half of the songs on the last record were things I just made when I felt like making music.”
The method of making Quiet Signs is a major break in tradition for the Los Angeles singer/songwriter, a change brought about in part by the significant amount of time that has passed since 2015’s On Your Own Love Again. That album’s release precipitated a 12-month global marathon tour, something Pratt now admits she would never do again.
“I was a bit mentally and physically exhausted,” she says. “I was also going through some personal things and they had worsened during that period of touring. There was a bit of convalescence that had to happen when I got back home. In 2016, I spent more time living my life than I had anticipated.”
The end product is her most beautiful and affecting music to date, a nine-song dream suite that emanates an intangible warmth that defies explanation. But after her self-imposed break, finding her rhythm didn’t necessarily come naturally. “I really did fall out of practice,” admits Pratt. “There were times when I thought, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, what the fuck is this.’ I don’t think it will ever be as pressured as that again. On some level I was aware of a level of expectation, so that was an aspect of it too.”
Quiet Signs also marks Pratt’s first major foray into a professional recording atmosphere. “I was a little paranoid going into something with that much intention, worrying about how it would affect the spontaneous, mystical energy that happens when you play music.”
Received wisdom may suggest that the switch from home recording to studio would require some sacrifice in the intimacy that the former allows, something Pratt was adamant to avoid. “I was very wary of the typical evolution and the loss of warmth or magic that can happen when it’s a clinical atmosphere. I was very dogged about maintaining the warmth.” She goes as far as to admit that she now occasionally finds songs from her last album a little harsh, such is the tender richness of the atmosphere on Quiet Signs.
Her process of writing songs at home in Los Angeles and flying to Gary’s Electric studio in Brooklyn to record introduced an element of discipline, as well as a sense of collaboration, with both engineer/co-producer Al Carlson and mutli-instrumentalist (and Pratt’s romantic partner) Matt McDermott playing several parts on the album. “It was kind of a relief to collaborate for the first time and have it feel successful, because it was something I had been a little wary of,” she says. “Any new experience can be scary, but it ended up working wonderfully.”
When asked whether this is the now the formula she’ll stick to in the future, Pratt says she’s been asking herself the same question. “I certainly enjoy the ease of recording in a studio. It might be that I go back and forth between the two methods, and maybe another method too.”
She speaks of how she enjoyed taking advantage of the opportunities to explore different instrumentation that a professional studio allows for, with specific reference to the organ and flute parts that Carlson ended up playing. “It’s a bit of a toy store,” she says, both relieved and enthusiastic that nothing of her essence has been lost in the transition.
Like her previous albums, Quiet Signs is noteworthy too for its brevity, an increasingly rare and heroic gesture in an age where the infinite capacity of streaming services has been taken by many as a green light to forego self-editing. “The length of my records isn’t a statement, but I do think it’s a bit of a thing to make super long records these days,” she says. “My aim is to only include the music that I think is essential.”
The album is such a unified, trance-like whole that it is easy to float away with it, unobstructed by Pratt’s lyrics. Indeed her voice is such that her words have become somewhat well known for being difficult to decipher. It doesn’t overly concern Pratt, who admits, “I didn’t quite realize that it was a struggle for people until the last record. But even if someone’s singing in another language, the emotional impact is there and it doesn’t seem to hinder people.
“It’s always a balance for me between words that have deep meaning and suit the song but also that serve a phonetic and melodic purpose, and sometimes it’s a mind-bending task. I never want to distract anyone, that’s a real consideration for me. I want the song to be one gelled piece that you can swallow instantly and dissect later”.
I am going to end with a career-spanning list of songs from Jessica Pratt. Quiet Signs is her at her very best. I am excited to see what comes next and whether, during the pandemic, she has been formulating any new tracks – and if so, what form might they assume? The last interview I want to bring in is from Pitchfork:
“Were you focused on any specific thematic ideas while writing?
I honestly think that I didn't know until the very end. I've always gone into songwriting without really thinking about any major statement. I have notions of things that are important to me and they're generally fairly abstract, but the thematic element is something that arises after the fact, or is only there on some unconscious level as I'm writing. I'm sort of envious of people who can set out a framework for what they want to say and then fill it in—that seems like it would be an interesting way to work. I find that any time I edge towards doing that, it subtracts something really vital from the songs. They usually come out of some spontaneous birth of melody and words, this inarguable process that I sometimes feel like I don't even have much to do with. I've always kept a dream journal, and just based on whatever you were going through at the time, you can look back and see these points of focus that you were processing. I think songwriting is similar. These things bubble up, you know—words just come out from your brain!
PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Porter for Loud and Quiet
Quiet Signs is the first album of yours that was recorded in a studio, but it doesn't lose one bit of your usual intimacy. How you were able to create intimacy in that kind of space, versus your home recordings?
The nature of my music is really quiet and subtle, and that's not something I try to engineer—it just is that way. You have to have that same intimacy in a recorded or live setting, otherwise the vibrations can only travel so far. I was very doubtful as to whether the studio situation would work out, but I tried it because I didn't have any immediate options that made sense to me. I was very nervous. There have been instances where I've tried to record something in a small studio in L.A. and it feels like the song is only half there, and there's sort of a clinical nature to it. I think the key was having a really good engineer who listened and understood what I wanted. Even though I'm very sensitive to my environment when it comes to playing music, I have always been pretty good at blocking things off and just channeling the thing that is necessary. That really came in handy.
You wrote these songs in L.A. and recorded them in New York. Can you discuss the push and pull of energy that exists between the two cities, and how that might have influenced your work?
I've always been very excited by New York but maybe a bit intimidated by it because it's such a psychically wearing place. There's a lot of compressed hardcore energy here. You know, it's like on a really cold day, you're on the subway and people just look beaten down. I know that's a cliché about New York, but it's very true. L.A. can be deceptively dark because it's this very sunny place, but it does have a strange and dark history at times. I used to work in Hollywood and I saw all these mysterious strains running through the city. There's a lot of desperation, too. I think I prefer to live in a city with dynamic energies like that, instead of like a safe, tranquil place”.
It is worth introducing a couple of reviews. There was a lot of critical praise for Quiet Signs. In their review, this is what AllMusic had to say:
“Throughout her catalog, singer/songwriter Jessica Pratt's music all but vanishes into its own shadow, the presence of her murmuring vocals and airy nylon-string guitar so faint that songs melt into each other or simply turn to mist. While vaporous, Pratt's songs are anything but slight, as her songwriting is so focused that she can control a mood or shift the color of her compositions from behind a curtain of spare notes and hanging thickets of reverb. On her first two albums, Pratt subtly shifted the light and temperature of her songs as the albums trickled by, both captured through hissy home-recorded means. Third album Quiet Signs is her first one recorded in a proper studio, but somehow her elfin vocals sound stranger and more obscured, floating out from behind waterfalls of reverb or humming at alien frequencies as on "As the World Turns." Rather than sacrifice some of the intimacy of home recording for more sterile production, Pratt chooses to retain that hushed glow and augment it with ulterior arrangements. "Poly Blue" is a spring-like jaunt that finds Pratt's vocal harmonies playfully dancing around center stage. Deep in the mix, threads of synthesizer, piano, organ, and even bubbly flute wind around the more audible elements. Likewise, "This Time Around" and "Here My Love" both read as stripped-down solo tunes, but barely there synth strings and piano chords appear briefly and recede without a trace. Even when a breeze of flute unexpectedly drifts through the middle of "Fare Thee Well," the album's expanded arrangements never distract but only support the distant magic of Pratt's songs. The running time of Quiet Signs is just under 28 minutes, all but demanding listeners to play it on repeat to catch the nuanced details stitched into the songs. Though earlier albums saw her crafting a strange otherworld, the perpetual sunset hinted at before is painted here in new dimensions, making this set of songs her best and easiest to revisit”.
PHOTO CREDIT: James Emmerman for Interview Magazine
To round off, I want to quote from a glowing review Pitchfork gave to a truly incredible album. They had a lot of compelling things to say about the record:
“The nine songs here follow their own innate paths, often beginning with a simple acoustic arrangement before blossoming into vivid daydreams. On “Fare Thee Well,” Pratt’s gentle strumming and a piping organ give way to a whimsical flute solo—like a bird just freed from captivity, the sprightly woodwind soars higher and higher until it dissolves into the distance. Meanwhile, Pratt’s voice winds its own course, her varied intonations imbuing each song with its own character. Memories of “stolen city sighs” on “Here My Love” swell with the lingering euphoria of infatuation. On “Silent Song” she harmonizes tenderly with herself, imparting the idea that she is never truly alone. When she sings of existential restlessness on “As the World Turns,” her vowels are so round you can trace their full orbit.
Within these acrobatics, insight into Pratt’s poetic musings remains elusive. She warps the typically direct, observational role of a singer-songwriter into something altogether more mystifying. She wraps her words in tightly woven melodies and gauzy reverb, often rendering them incomprehensible. Pratt’s obscuration sometimes sound like a means of emotional protection, as if she is draping her vulnerabilities behind a veil. Motifs that do emerge from Pratt’s cosmos swirl around notions of uncertainty, loss, disenchantment, and, on the bright side, budding romance. When a lyrical impression emerges, it floats to the surface just enough to announce its presence, but rarely offers clarity. Pratt’s method of abstraction is especially affecting because it embodies the ambiguities of the everyday: how words are not always enough.
The clearest moments on Quiet Signs are the centerpieces “Poly Blue” and “This Time Around.” “Poly Blue” is all Laurel Canyon sunshine, as Pratt observes a lover’s mystique. “He’s the undiscovered night,” she murmurs, as flutes flutter around her chords. “This Time Around,” on the other hand, captures a moment of hopelessness, of a profound uncertainty that faith might fail. As the song opens with spare strums, she keeps these fears close to the chest, but they soon begin to spill out. Suddenly, her voice deepens for a startlingly straightforward confession: “It makes me want to cry.” It’s a rare moment of perceptible pain, one that lingers on after the song has ended.
From there, Quiet Signs begins to fold into itself like a daylily facing the moonlight. While “Silent Song” exudes sentimentality, “Crossing” is private to the point of impenetrability, its curlicuing shape suggesting the mysteries of introspection. Both tracks largely do away with ornate embellishments, allowing Pratt’s meticulous plucking to shine. It’s as if she could needle away on her guitar for the rest of eternity, slowly unraveling the biggest questions, one by one”.
I shall leave it there. I have only recently discovered Jessica Pratt, though I love her music and have been making up for a bit of lost time. There are going to be many people primed to hear more music from her. After such a difficult year, an album from her would be a welcomed gift. The Californian-born Pratt is…
A truly amazing songwriter.