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.
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'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.'
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