Jessica Pratt is consumed by time on her fourth album Here in the Pitch.
Videos by American Songwriter
While many songwriters have written about passing episodes and relationships, Pratt also thinks about deep time and the earth below Los Angeles, the city she’s called home since 2013.
She imagines the human condition as geological layers. Ancient complexity, the unseen hands shaping the present with events from the past. That’s the scale Pratt writes from on Here in the Pitch. So it’s no surprise for the album to sound like a transmission from a distant era.
Light and Dark
“Life Is” opens the nine-song collection with Pratt contemplating time. It’s looking back on one’s life, the missed opportunities, the person you are now or once was. However, Pratt isn’t just thinking about time, she’s confronting it.
’Cause I can feel my luck has turned it all around
And when you’ve fallen out, get both feet on the ground
The curses you keep won’t follow you now
Soon after releasing her third album Quiet Signs (2019), Pratt started writing again. “I am a person who thinks about death a lot,” she revealed to Spin, adding, “Not even in a morbid way but more around trying to go back to imagining the layers of humanity that have existed before us … and will come after us.” The first and last tracks offer a kind of existential cycle to Here in the Pitch.
The album ends with “The Last Year” and begins with the line: Out of luck and out of time / It’s true, the last year ought to have plagued my mind. She writes of closing chapters but assures herself or the listener: it’s going to be fine. Life goes on with and without you because it must.
Is “The Last Year” referring to the previous 12 months or the last year? You can interpret Pratt singing to herself. From another dimension, gathering the many versions of herself.
From Another Epoch
Beginning with Pratt’s self-titled debut in 2012, she’s sounded like an undiscovered artist buried inside a record store bin. Matt McDermott, her partner and collaborator, explained to The New York Times, “The fact that she’s hung around a lot of record stores and is very into the texture and atmospherics of older music means that her stuff appears somewhat anachronistic.”
Pratt grew up in Redding, California, and describes her family as “freewheeling.” She moved to San Francisco after high school, and her recordings caught the attention of musician Tim Presley. Presley has released music under the name White Fence, known for echoing ’60s Baroque pop and psychedelia.
He formed a record label and released Pratt’s debut. She remained a secret of the folk underground but soon found a wider audience in 2023 when Troye Sivan sampled Pratt on “Can’t Go Back, Baby.” Speaking with The Guardian, Sivan once said of Pratt, her voice “could have existed forever.” This year, she collaborated with ASAP Rocky on his single “Highjack.”
Elusive Art
How she sees making an album, Pratt told Variety, “Making a record or a piece of art that’s about something, to some extent, and music about a certain subject, can be one of the more intangible mediums. And then obviously in order to write about something, you have to pull the threads, and it’s a very interesting one to pull.”
Still, Here in the Pitch feels tangible. Like something extracted, a vestige of 1960s soul music. The la-la-la vocals and hazy reverb in “Better Hate” evoke The Shangri-Las on a tune Joni Mitchell or Scott Walker might have written.
I’ve been clear before, what’s the longing there?
What a sad case, I’m nobody’s fool
And you’ve won it all, but your smile’ll be gone
In the end when you’re yesterday’s news
Pratt cuts her enemies with a soft voice and strummed guitar. The bossa nova track also features McDermott and Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco. (Refosco has also worked with David Byrne, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Thom Yorke’s project Atoms for Peace.)
Los Ageless
The album’s overarching theme may be summed up in a refrain from “World on a String”:
I want to be the sunlight of the century
I want to be a vestige of our senses free
It clarifies Pratt’s attraction to vintage sounds. But her albums don’t feel like period pieces. She’s not dabbling in a curious exchange with the past. The obsession with time seems like a desire for timelessness.
Recorded over two years, Pratt described the experimentations and choices she made on Here in the Pitch as “all instinct.” Albums are layers. They are literal “records” of small decisions becoming greater details.
An album is just another archive. A time stamp. And what’s older than instinct?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Photo by Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.