Katie Pruitt: Great ‘Expectations’

With her debut album, Expectations, Katie Pruitt makes sense of the internal struggles which shaped her as an artist. Its 10 solo-written tracks are sung from someone on the cusp of self-acceptance — not quite there yet but not turning back either, narrating her journey in real-time.

Released Feb. 21 on Rounder Records, the album follows a successful live EP and wide acclaim from outlets including Rolling Stone and NPR, which named her one of “20 Artists to Watch in 2019.”

“I honestly just wanted to tell my story as accurately as possible,” she says of the release. “I wanted it to sound pretty damn close to the truth. The way things actually unfolded.”  

The Atlanta-born songwriter’s story is one shared by many today — in order to live life on her own terms, she had to venture beyond the social strictures of her culture. For Pruitt, that meant leaving home. 

Expectations is largely an album about what she’s learned since moving to Nashville in 2014, but it’s also a psychic portrait of the girl she was in high school — as she sings in the stark ballad, “Georgia,” in regards to her sexuality, “I thought if I told the world / they would not see me as the same girl / they’d say, I don’t belong.” 

Things take a turn in the final verse, when “I told the world / and they still saw me as the same girl / they listened to my songs / and they made me feel like I belong / oh Georgia, you were wrong.” This is presumably referencing her relocation to Music City. 

“It took until I had definite plans to move to Nashville,” she says of coming out, “to even tell my two best friends … and being here, discovering who I really was as opposed to who I was told I should be, that’s what it’s (Expectations) about as a whole.”

Pruitt started performing in her middle school’s theater program, naturally drawn to the story arcs of plays and musicals. She took vocal lessons — traces of a formal education are heard in her vocal control and open-throat tenor — until high school, when she picked up the guitar and quickly realized she had a knack for strumming, too. 

“I was covering all these songs, and I knew all the basic song structures,” she recalls. “I just thought, ‘how hard can it be to actually give it a shot?’”

She enrolled in Belmont University’s songwriting program, but like many newcomers in the professional songwriting scene, it came as a surprise that many recording artists don’t pen their own tunes. From the outset, her dual composing-singing talents set her apart in a community known for its forced collaboration and artifice. Recognition came relatively quickly — in 2017, after graduating from Belmont, Pruitt signed a co-pub deal with Round Hill Music, followed by stints on the road with headliners like Ruston Kelly and Donovan Woods. 

All the while, she was crafting together a tracklist for her debut long-player — in January 2019, between tours, Pruitt went in the studio to track and co-produce Expectations with Mike Robinson. Five months later, the project was wrapped. 

Rich in themes like mental health, religion — particularly how it works as a psychological force — and love as a means of healing and realization, the album is a coming-of-age story of one teenage idealist-turned-realist; a girl preoccupied with being “normal,” believing there is such a thing, then discovering among the revelations of adulthood that there is not. There is no price to pay, no conforming necessary to feel like you belong. As Pruitt sings in “Searching for the Truth,” “who’s the asshole who convinced us happiness isn’t free?”

Other tracks, like the R&B-spiked “Out of the Blue,” are less complex, commenting on the unavoidable surprise of a breakup, even if it’s long-expected. The title track sheds light on Pruitt’s newfound confidence: “fear is just a false belief, that there is nothing you can do.” 

Bits of wisdom like this, capsuled as sharp idioms, tag every moment of brooding reflection with a glimmer of hope — a lesson learned. As Pruitt puts it: “I feel like this passport into my life is something people need to hear so they know they’re not alone, no matter what they’re feeling.”