Jessica Pratt’s Timeless Folk Music Is Evolving. Slowly.
Jessica Pratt’s new album, “Here in the Pitch,” begins with avintage drum beat, a gently strummed guitar and a lot of vibey room tone — the kind that recalls a wood-paneled studio from 60 years ago. “The chances of a lifetime might be hiding their tricks up my sleeve,” she sings on “Life Is,” in an enchanting melody that rises and falls with ease. “Time is time is time again.”
Pratt is 37, and over three albums since 2012, she has become known for seemingly bending time. “A friend of a friend was stunned to find out that Jessica is a modern artist,” Matt McDermott,Pratt’s partner and collaborator, said over the phone. “He was convinced that she was a lost private press folk artist from the ’60s or ’70s.”
“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,” McDermott added, amused. “There’s that boomer saying, ‘They don’t make songs like they used to,’ but Jessica’s music argues that you actually can.”
On a rainy March day in New York, Pratt strolled in the Queens Museum and discussed how “Here in the Pitch,” due Friday, has roots in the history lurking beneath another city: Los Angeles, her home since 2013.
“If you want to get metaphysical about it, it’s layers of human experience that may still be reverberating,” she said, thinking about the prehistoric ooze that burbles under Wilshire Boulevard. “That is absolutely the lens through which I see my reality every day, as swimming through these unseen layers of history and energy.”
