Latest news with #JessicaPratt
Glasgow Times
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
'Bewitching' LA singer-songwriter to perform live in Glasgow
Jessica Pratt will play at Saint Luke's on Monday, July 14. The musician, who is known for her 'bewitching' acoustic guitar and vocals, will present her new album, Here in the Pitch, to Scottish fans. This is her fourth album, which was released after a five-year hiatus. From the opening seconds of "Life Is", the album promises to be a unique musical experience. The album begins with a percussion roll, a departure from the usual blend of her vocals and guitar. Ms Pratt said: "In a way, it's kind of a false flag. "But I also feel like it's a statement of intention." READ MORE: 'I hear I got a mention': John Swinney responds to Kneecap Her team for this project included multi-instrumentalist and engineer Al Carlson, keyboardist Matt McDermott, bassist Spencer Zahn, and percussionist Mauro Refosco. Discussing her new venture, Ms Pratt said: "Having done a studio record prior, I learned how to get to the things you want and how to communicate it to people. "The process this time was less about exploration of a new tool and more about taking what I learned and going further." She introduces a diverse range of instruments, including timpani and glockenspiel, baritone saxophone and flute. This is complemented by layered vocal arrangements that deliver an uplifting mood, even in the face of melancholic lyrics. Her inspiration for the album came from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, but she was particularly drawn to the "atmospheric silence" in those recordings. Describing her fascination, she explained: "There are times when you feel like you're just hearing the studio for a moment. "Those were always so intriguing for me as a young person, feeling like you could reach out and touch the texture of the sound in the air." Tickets for her Glasgow show are available online. READ MORE: Scots comedian and Hollywood star join forces as iconic series returns The album explores the darker side of the Californian dream, drawing inspiration from Los Angeles' seedy history and the bleak end of the hippy era. Ms Pratt confessed: "I spend a lot of time worrying and imagining bad things happening. "So maybe the idea of creatively inhabiting a character who wields the power is interesting." The final track The Last Year is reminiscent of classic compositions from the Great American Songbook. The "pitch" in Here in the Pitch refers to both "pitch darkness" and bitumen, a black viscous substance found deep in the earth. Despite the dark undertones, Ms Pratt's optimism shines through in her performance. She explained the album's long creation process: "I never wanted it to take this long. "I'm just a real perfectionist. "I was just trying to get the right feeling, and it takes a long time to do that."
Irish Times
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Jessica Pratt: ‘I'm not in awe of many people's bodies of work in the way I am with Brian Wilson's'
Since she returned from a tour of Australia a fortnight ago, Jessica Pratt hasn't felt quite at home in her body. The California songwriter's shut-eye has been fitful: she sometimes wakes disoriented, and with a sense that things are not as they should be. 'I keep having this thing where I try to go to sleep, and then I'm up until two, three in the morning, and then I sleep until hours that are not my typical style,' she says. Such unusual sensations – the feeling of something dark rising up from a slumber – will be familiar to fans of Pratt's dreamlike confessional pop, particularly her extraordinary fourth album, Here in the Pitch, from 2024. Reverberating with the sort of dark vibrations you might expect to play over a bar scene in Twin Peaks or an especially bleak section of The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock-in, the record elevated the 38-year-old to the higher echelons of cult indie stardom. READ MORE She has guested, alongside her hero Dan Bejar, of Destroyer , on the comedian John Mulaney's Netflix chatshow and been interviewed by Molly Gordon, the actor best known for the Disney+ series The Bear. And she's touring all over, including at Vicar Street in Dublin this weekend. But if Here in the Pitch has brought her into the light in a career sense, its roots are tangled up in the darkest days of the pandemic: the wild, walls-are-closing-in summer of 2020, when lockdown followed lockdown and people were taking to the streets, whether in support of Black Lives Matter or to spread conspiracy theories about masks and vaccines. It was, to put it mildly, a moment – and Pratt taps into that dark fairytale energy on songs such as Life Is and World on a String. 'I want to be the sunlight of the century,' she sings on the former, a yearning for brighter days fuelled by a trilling voice suggestive of a purgatorial Dusty Springfield, while on By Hook or by Crook she comes on like Loretta Lynn with lyrics by the Brothers Grimm. These are extraordinary songs: phantasmagorical, haunted yet poignant and emotional too. Of our world yet somehow beyond it. LA is a weird place, in that it's kind of windless. It's not blustery at all. There's a weird sort of sound-stage quality, where it can be very still 'You may recall the States in 2020 … There was a lot of civil unrest,' she says, explaining that she initially believed wrapping herself up in songwriting would be trivial, given the condition of the world. As time passed, however, she returned to music, feeling that, in confining circumstances, it was a place where she could be free and spread her wings. 'At the end of 2020 I started writing more and feel grateful for that sort of open space.' Los Angeles is a huge influence on her music. She loves the city for its contradictions: how the City of Angels is also a spiritual home of noir, a land of sunshine where shadows stretch long and heavy. The other contrast, she notes, is that, though LA often has a quality of stillness, it can collapse into terrifying natural violence, as the world saw when wildfire swept southern California earlier this year. 'It feels like the edge of something,' she says. 'There used to be this sort of sense of stasis. The winds that caused those fires was not something that I had ever experienced.' At its worst, it was as if the climate apocalypse had come to her door. 'I remember the night that I was sitting in my house – I was alone. I live in an old, small cavity house,' she says, referring to a house whose walls consist of two layers with a space between. 'The walls are very thin. You would have been very afraid to step outside. There was this vicious wind that was unlike anything I'd ever heard in Los Angeles. LA is a weird place, in that it's kind of windless. It's not blustery at all. There's a weird sort of sound-stage quality, where it can be very still.' [ Oasis kick off reunion tour in Cardiff with triumphant, nostalgic gig Opens in new window ] Pratt recalls how a nearby park was constantly catching ablaze during the wildfire, often as a result of arson. 'The city did what they could. But they were overwhelmed. There were fires everywhere. Fires kept starting in this park – and some of the time it was people setting fires. Just complete bedlam. I guess in the classic sense some people just want to watch the world burn.' She grew up somewhere very different. About 800km north of Los Angeles, Redding is a midsized California city straight out of Norman Rockwell – or, for those allergic to evangelical Christianity, The Handmaid's Tale. As the child of a hippyish mother, Pratt has strong memories of feeling like an outsider in her hometown, of knowing her friends and neighbours would be strangers another day. 'I was raised by a single mom with my older brother, and she was a very intelligent person. Not to say that to be religious is to be not, of course. But she was very worldly in a way, and the fact that we lived in this small town ... 'It was an affordable place to live, and it would not have been her first choice in terms of the identity of the city. Nor did she have any friends there. So we were kind of isolated in a way.' They were not completely cut off from the world around them, but nor could they escape the stifling religiosity. 'I went to school and I had friends. Often their parents would be somewhere on the spectrum of fundamentalist Christianity – this thing that we were aware of, but it didn't necessarily affect us in a deep way beyond encountering it in in various spaces. I'd spend the night at my friend's house or something, and be baptised by someone else's dad without really having any interest in that.' [ Debbie Harry turns 80: what next for Blondie? Opens in new window ] Born in northern California and steeped in Los Angeles, its history and its lore, Pratt is, naturally, influenced by The Beach Boys and their troubled-genius musician, songwriter and producer, Brian Wilson , who died in June. 'He seems like somebody who lived a rather tortured life. I hope that he's experiencing some peace now. I wouldn't say I'm in awe of that many people's bodies of work in the way I am with Brian Wilson's.' Pratt is chatty and curious. She wants to know where in Dublin I live and is surprised to hear that people have been priced out of the city and that it shares many of the problems around affordability and arcane planning laws that afflict Los Angeles and San Fransisco, where she used to live. But that hasn't put her off coming to Ireland, and she is looking forward to her first headline show here. She remains quietly astonished that she is a professional musician who tours the world, sharing her songs with friends and strangers alike. 'Playing shows ... there is nothing [like that] in my day-to-day life, or a lot of people's day-to-day life. We don't do that many ceremonial things on a day-to-day basis. And it feels very much like that kind of thing. 'Sometimes I think about the fact that I write songs and play them for people for a living, and that has not ceased to be very odd to me.' Here in the Pitch is released by City Slang. Jessica Pratt plays Vicar Street , Dublin, on Sunday, July 13th
RNZ News
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
California folk singer Jessica Pratt pitches in.
This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions. The music of Los Angeles folk musician Jessica Pratt shimmers. The California native has released four albums in total, including the well-received Quiet Signs (2019). Her latest offering, nine-track LP Here In the Pitch , was released in May 2024 on Mexican Summers. Los Angeles-based folk musician Jessica Pratt Photo: Samuel Hess The album feels like a recontextualisation of psychedelic folk in a modern context. Delicate sonic textures submerge the audience in a haunting soundscape with a vintage flavour influenced by Pratt's crooning, understated vocals. The result is a bristling tension that captures the listener in its world. At times, Pratt's charismatic strumming and lilting vocal melodies invoke Nick Drake's Pink Moon (1972), while tracks such as 'World on a String' and 'Empires Never Know' call to mind the folk sensibilities of 1970s English folk-rock singer Vashti Bunyan. Maggie Tweedie spoke to Pratt on Music 101 this week about Here In the Pitch and her upcoming Aotearoa tour. Catch Pratt on tour this June: June 9 – The Piano, Christchurch June 10 – Meow Nui, Wellington June 11 – Bruce Mason Centre, Takapuna Auckland
The Age
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Despite big-time fans, Jessica Pratt guards her inner world
HIGHJACK is about right. If you search Jessica Pratt on your favourite music streaming service, that title by A$AP Rocky is instantly up in your face. It's a cool jam, even if Pratt's incongruously introspective vocal doesn't feature until two minutes in. Meanwhile, the superstar Harlem rapper's bitch-swipin' bravado offers, well, bracing contrast. 'I get what you're saying,' Pratt says. 'The last year has been a period in which a lot of unexpectedly interesting things have happened. And I think this [collaboration] just fits right into that … It was very surreal to be a part of it.' She's also thinking, no doubt, of Australian pop wunderkind Troye Sivan sampling one of her earliest songs, Back, Baby, for his own mega-streaming hit, Can't Go Back, Baby. Her part in that was more passive: a found object in the voracious churn of the modern pop machine, but the result is an odd twist in her digital footprint nonetheless. HIGHJACK was a real-time collaboration, even if it was made in a 'semi-remote' way fairly typical of today's recording studio assembly process. 'I worked with one of the producers that was working on the record in LA and A$AP was zooming in, but he was there for a few hours, so I didn't feel the remove that much. He was very engaged.' To say the least, 'they're pretty different', she concedes of the colliding worlds she's come to inhabit. 'The music that I make myself is something I treat very carefully, and it's very much born of my own inner world. I've guarded that pretty heavily and tried to do exactly what I wanted to do. 'But in terms of career trajectory and unforeseen events and collaborations and stuff like that ...' The opening line of her latest album, In the Pitch, finishes that thought rather well: 'Life is, it's never what you think it's for.' Softly spoken and thoughtful, the Californian singer-songwriter's conversation reflects the character of her albums. Her fourth dwells in its own echoing, nostalgic world vividly reminiscent, as she eloquently told The New York Times, of 'that micro era of '60s pop music where the production is atmospheric like a snow globe'. The sense of contemplative seclusion, a quiet place frozen in time, fits the image of the nascent artist growing up in Redding, a faded mining and timber town north of San Francisco. It was mostly her mother's recommendations ringing in her headphones – broad in scope, but not least Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Incredible String Band and T. Rex – that made her pick up a nylon-stringed guitar. TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO JESSICA PRATT Worst habit? Cleaning. Greatest fear? NASA G-Force training. The line that stayed with you? 'On high seas, you search of / the sickly sweet milk of selfish love,' from Guided By Voices' Kicker of Elves. Biggest regret? Not buying a Scott 4 LP [by Scott Walker] in 2008 for $40. Favourite book? I find picking favourites too difficult, but I recently read Dickens' Great Expectations and found myself deeply engrossed. The artwork/song you wish was yours? I can't think this way but why not Joni Mitchell's Jericho? If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? Innumerable places and time periods but I'd like to see the Earth in some prehistoric era. Lots of kids hook into their parents' music collections early on, of course. But the ones who grow up holding it dear into adulthood are exceptions to the general rule of teenaged autonomy and rebellion, I venture to suggest. 'I was just thinking about this yesterday,' Pratt says, 'because I have one older brother, and he loves music, but I don't think he got the obsessive gene ... [Music] isn't necessarily treated as this incredibly deep thing for him. 'My mother was a pretty obsessive person, and I am as well. I think I'm similar to her in a lot of ways, so maybe that was part of it. I think that she enjoyed having this resurrection of the experience of discovering music for the first time, via me. Like, going through your adolescent experience of exposure to music a second time.' Pratt's parents had split and her father moved to another state in search of job opportunities when she was five. He was an occasional, distant presence on the phone by the time her self-titled album was ready in 2012. 'He became more and more estranged over the years … so it was a sort of stagnated relationship,' she says. 'I was glad that we were able to reconnect before he passed [in 2020].' Sadly, her mother didn't get to hear much of what her old records had inspired. 'I think that she thought I was creative and talented and all the things that your mother would think about you,' Pratt says with a laugh. 'But there was an eerily timed crisscross between my first record coming out and her passing away. She had cancer, so she wasn't able to see it born into the world. 'I had recorded some things and put them on MySpace Music or something,' she recalls, dating her first modest forays to the mid-2010s. 'But it wasn't like, 'Oh, this is my album. Please listen to it'. I think that I was pretty secretive about that stuff.' By accident or design, she found her feet as a live performer far from home, in the underground surrounds of the fabled Café du Nord in San Francisco. Even then, she says: 'I wasn't trying to play shows with any real disciplined regularity … there were a few instances where I got booked in loud places, and I just tried to avoid those scenarios because it felt pretty pointless to me. 'I've never really been an incredibly ambitious person in terms of status and career heightening,' she concludes. 'I've always just thought about the music. I think that maybe what's happened is I've just been making music long enough … it's resulted in this new momentum that has shifted things slightly.' Whatever its impetus, the momentum has meant a lot more faces pressed up against her snow globe these days. One can only wonder a little guiltily how the escalating attention of a curious media messes with such a carefully nurtured process. 'It's fortunate that ... there's a little space in between,' she says. 'You have this creative process that is very involved, and fortunately, this sort of examination of that process doesn't take place until some time later. Not a million years later, but far enough away from the creative process that it doesn't affect it. Loading 'I don't necessarily think that examining and talking about your art is a strictly anti-creative thing, or something that will make you feel insecure. I try to see it as a thought-provoking sort of task.' OK then. It's one thing to make a modern album that sounds like it somehow happened in a magical place halfway between the Beach Boys' mid-1960s purple patch and the Walker Brothers greatest hits, but how do you make it echo like that when you take it on the road in 2025? 'We had to work at it,' she says. 'You're never going to recreate the exact atmosphere of a record. The best you can do is get pretty close. But we've managed to figure out a way to get within spitting distance of something.'
Sydney Morning Herald
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Despite big-time fans, Jessica Pratt guards her inner world
HIGHJACK is about right. If you search Jessica Pratt on your favourite music streaming service, that title by A$AP Rocky is instantly up in your face. It's a cool jam, even if Pratt's incongruously introspective vocal doesn't feature until two minutes in. Meanwhile, the superstar Harlem rapper's bitch-swipin' bravado offers, well, bracing contrast. 'I get what you're saying,' Pratt says. 'The last year has been a period in which a lot of unexpectedly interesting things have happened. And I think this [collaboration] just fits right into that … It was very surreal to be a part of it.' She's also thinking, no doubt, of Australian pop wunderkind Troye Sivan sampling one of her earliest songs, Back, Baby, for his own mega-streaming hit, Can't Go Back, Baby. Her part in that was more passive: a found object in the voracious churn of the modern pop machine, but the result is an odd twist in her digital footprint nonetheless. HIGHJACK was a real-time collaboration, even if it was made in a 'semi-remote' way fairly typical of today's recording studio assembly process. 'I worked with one of the producers that was working on the record in LA and A$AP was zooming in, but he was there for a few hours, so I didn't feel the remove that much. He was very engaged.' To say the least, 'they're pretty different', she concedes of the colliding worlds she's come to inhabit. 'The music that I make myself is something I treat very carefully, and it's very much born of my own inner world. I've guarded that pretty heavily and tried to do exactly what I wanted to do. 'But in terms of career trajectory and unforeseen events and collaborations and stuff like that ...' The opening line of her latest album, In the Pitch, finishes that thought rather well: 'Life is, it's never what you think it's for.' Softly spoken and thoughtful, the Californian singer-songwriter's conversation reflects the character of her albums. Her fourth dwells in its own echoing, nostalgic world vividly reminiscent, as she eloquently told The New York Times, of 'that micro era of '60s pop music where the production is atmospheric like a snow globe'. The sense of contemplative seclusion, a quiet place frozen in time, fits the image of the nascent artist growing up in Redding, a faded mining and timber town north of San Francisco. It was mostly her mother's recommendations ringing in her headphones – broad in scope, but not least Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Incredible String Band and T. Rex – that made her pick up a nylon-stringed guitar. TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO JESSICA PRATT Worst habit? Cleaning. Greatest fear? NASA G-Force training. The line that stayed with you? 'On high seas, you search of / the sickly sweet milk of selfish love,' from Guided By Voices' Kicker of Elves. Biggest regret? Not buying a Scott 4 LP [by Scott Walker] in 2008 for $40. Favourite book? I find picking favourites too difficult, but I recently read Dickens' Great Expectations and found myself deeply engrossed. The artwork/song you wish was yours? I can't think this way but why not Joni Mitchell's Jericho? If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? Innumerable places and time periods but I'd like to see the Earth in some prehistoric era. Lots of kids hook into their parents' music collections early on, of course. But the ones who grow up holding it dear into adulthood are exceptions to the general rule of teenaged autonomy and rebellion, I venture to suggest. 'I was just thinking about this yesterday,' Pratt says, 'because I have one older brother, and he loves music, but I don't think he got the obsessive gene ... [Music] isn't necessarily treated as this incredibly deep thing for him. 'My mother was a pretty obsessive person, and I am as well. I think I'm similar to her in a lot of ways, so maybe that was part of it. I think that she enjoyed having this resurrection of the experience of discovering music for the first time, via me. Like, going through your adolescent experience of exposure to music a second time.' Pratt's parents had split and her father moved to another state in search of job opportunities when she was five. He was an occasional, distant presence on the phone by the time her self-titled album was ready in 2012. 'He became more and more estranged over the years … so it was a sort of stagnated relationship,' she says. 'I was glad that we were able to reconnect before he passed [in 2020].' Sadly, her mother didn't get to hear much of what her old records had inspired. 'I think that she thought I was creative and talented and all the things that your mother would think about you,' Pratt says with a laugh. 'But there was an eerily timed crisscross between my first record coming out and her passing away. She had cancer, so she wasn't able to see it born into the world. 'I had recorded some things and put them on MySpace Music or something,' she recalls, dating her first modest forays to the mid-2010s. 'But it wasn't like, 'Oh, this is my album. Please listen to it'. I think that I was pretty secretive about that stuff.' By accident or design, she found her feet as a live performer far from home, in the underground surrounds of the fabled Café du Nord in San Francisco. Even then, she says: 'I wasn't trying to play shows with any real disciplined regularity … there were a few instances where I got booked in loud places, and I just tried to avoid those scenarios because it felt pretty pointless to me. 'I've never really been an incredibly ambitious person in terms of status and career heightening,' she concludes. 'I've always just thought about the music. I think that maybe what's happened is I've just been making music long enough … it's resulted in this new momentum that has shifted things slightly.' Whatever its impetus, the momentum has meant a lot more faces pressed up against her snow globe these days. One can only wonder a little guiltily how the escalating attention of a curious media messes with such a carefully nurtured process. 'It's fortunate that ... there's a little space in between,' she says. 'You have this creative process that is very involved, and fortunately, this sort of examination of that process doesn't take place until some time later. Not a million years later, but far enough away from the creative process that it doesn't affect it. Loading 'I don't necessarily think that examining and talking about your art is a strictly anti-creative thing, or something that will make you feel insecure. I try to see it as a thought-provoking sort of task.' OK then. It's one thing to make a modern album that sounds like it somehow happened in a magical place halfway between the Beach Boys' mid-1960s purple patch and the Walker Brothers greatest hits, but how do you make it echo like that when you take it on the road in 2025? 'We had to work at it,' she says. 'You're never going to recreate the exact atmosphere of a record. The best you can do is get pretty close. But we've managed to figure out a way to get within spitting distance of something.'
