“People are only going to pick up on however far their references go, and that’s cool,” says Jessica Pratt over the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “I like surveying the whole range of them, and I’m not offended by any of them.”
She is referring to the endless comparisons that come with the buzz surrounding her sophomore record, On Your Own Love Again, a warm and timeless folk record that dares the lazy journalist to stick “The New [Joanna] Newsom” or “freak folk revivalist” onto her name. But the truth could not be further from it.
A whip-smart, brazen intellectual, Pratt has been carving her own path on her own terms since her early days in the San Francisco psyche scene. Catching the ear of Bay Area stalwart Tim Presley (White Fence), she released her debut album in 2012 on Birth Records, a label he started for the sole purpose of releasing her music. While it received critical acclaim, it was followed by a tumultuous time of transition and change in Pratt’s life: a relationship of seven years ended, and her mother passed away suddenly. Seeking solace, she packed up her things and moved to Los Angeles in 2013 as an attempt to “[embrace] the transitory aspects of it all.”
In other words, she entered a period of intense and isolated creativity, a time that would spawn On Your Own Love Again.
With so much time alone for the first time, Pratt channeled her existential crisis into something creative with the help of her guitar and a four-track.
“You have to get in the zone and stay in the zone, and any interaction with people limits that – at least for me it does,” says Pratt of her lone wolf creative process. “I felt very pressured to finish [this record] for whatever reason, even before I had a label involved. I don’t know if it was a period of creation that was birthed from the new experiences that I had moving to LA, or it was just that I was focusing really hard to do it, I guess I’ll never really know.”
Pratt’s songs have a timeless, warm quality to them, shrouded in mystery and melancholy. It is easy to see why she is drawing comparisons to fairy folk mothers such as Linda Perhacs and Joni Mitchell. But there is more to it than that. Her biggest influences are “smooth sounding things” with an “idiosyncratic edge”.
In “Back, Baby”, she plays with a slight tropicalia vibe, perhaps a result of listening to Os Mutantes in her teen years. “Moon Dude” could easily be have penned by Donovan, and the spirit of Karen Dalton is alive and well on “Greycedes”.
Will Canzoneri, her engineer, added a few additional sonic layers to the record, but it is almost entirely Pratt and her guitar. Her unusual voice carries the music like a strange storyteller from an undefinable era. It’s neo-classic folk, without the pretense or preciousness, coming from the throat of a 28-year-old California girl with blonde hair and an elvish smirk.
Not even a month after its release, On Your Own Love Again has already received praise from every corner, crowning Pratt the new it-girl of folk.
“I would have been totally happy to just have a small collection of like-minded people enjoy it,” says Pratt of the buzz. “It very much exceeded my expectations in a pretty extreme way. The range of people that like it is very surprising to me.”
With a solid tour schedule beginning with a West Coast swing that will bring her to Vancouver on Feb. 21, there is no telling of when she will have time to work on new music, or even have a moment to “dwell in my own universe”, a vital key to her creative process. But this doesn’t phase her. She views the future with more curiosity than anxiety.
“I think you have to feel somewhat uncomfortable to really be driven to make something,” says Pratt of her future. “It’s like the same thing when people move to a city like New York – you have this sudden drive and need to survive, and maybe you do your best work because of it.”
• Jessica Pratt plays with Kevin Morby at Electric Owl on Feb. 21, 8pm. Tickets starting at $12.
