A Conversation With Jessica Pratt About Making Quiet Music
A week before her third album is released to high praise, Jessica Pratt eases into a leather couch nestled inside Pitchfork's windowless listening room on the 27th floor of the World Trade Center. It's kind of ironic, being high inside one of the tallest buildings in the world with no skyline in view. But the grey-walled room, with its jarring tranquility, also feels right for the conversation at hand. Quiet Signs is, after all, a record that came alive following a period of self-imposed isolation in Los Angeles, where the folk singer, songwriter, and impressive fingerpicker has lived for the past few years. “It was a convalescing that needed to happen,” Pratt explains, hinting at personal events but never losing her signature mystery.
Over the course of our meeting and subsequent phone conversation, Pratt parses out her words with intense amounts of care and consideration. She describes the way she writes her music like a dadaist or a surrealist from another era: thoughts appeared in her brain, so she acted on them. Sketches of sounds and melodies started to percolate, lyrical fragments began to atomize. Eventually she landed in New York and, for the first time in her career, put the album together in a proper studio, working closely with the engineer and co-producer Al Carlson.
The result is Pratt's most transcendent release to date. Endlessly warm to the touch, Quiet Signs is one of those listening experiences that feels plucked from another era. There is a bizarro universe where Pratt could have been a '60s beatnik writing on a beach somewhere, and her music often gets compared to that of the early-'70s Laurel Canyon folk scene. But Pratt's old soul never feels so out of place or openly nostalgic, even when she's embracing touches of old-school prog or Tropicália. No matter what corner of space and time Quiet Signs lives in for its listeners, one thing seems constant: when Pratt's voice cuts in and turns loose threads into fine vintage silk, it will make you want to cry.
Pitchfork: On the album's first single “This Time Around,” there's this great, surprisingly direct line where you say, “It makes me want to cry.” What were you thinking about when you wrote that?
Jessica Pratt: It's hard. I had not written a lot of songs to completion for a really long time [when I wrote “This Time Around”], so there was a backlog of stuff that needed to be dealt with. The period leading up to this record was a very challenging time for some personal reasons, and honestly I can't speak about it in a public way. But I think the lyrics to that song are useful to the general public because they're very open. People can project their own meaning onto things and take some of the melodic cues to use the material as sort of a coping mechanism, which I think is important.
Were you focused on any specific thematic ideas while writing?
I honestly think that I didn't know until the very end. I've always gone into songwriting without really thinking about any major statement. I have notions of things that are important to me and they're generally fairly abstract, but the thematic element is something that arises after the fact, or is only there on some unconscious level as I'm writing. I'm sort of envious of people who can set out a framework for what they want to say and then fill it in—that seems like it would be an interesting way to work. I find that any time I edge towards doing that, it subtracts something really vital from the songs. They usually come out of some spontaneous birth of melody and words, this inarguable process that I sometimes feel like I don't even have much to do with. I've always kept a dream journal, and just based on whatever you were going through at the time, you can look back and see these points of focus that you were processing. I think songwriting is similar. These things bubble up, you know—words just come out from your brain!
Quiet Signs is the first album of yours that was recorded in a studio, but it doesn't lose one bit of your usual intimacy. How you were able to create intimacy in that kind of space, versus your home recordings?
The nature of my music is really quiet and subtle, and that's not something I try to engineer—it just is that way. You have to have that same intimacy in a recorded or live setting, otherwise the vibrations can only travel so far. I was very doubtful as to whether the studio situation would work out, but I tried it because I didn't have any immediate options that made sense to me. I was very nervous. There have been instances where I've tried to record something in a small studio in L.A. and it feels like the song is only half there, and there's sort of a clinical nature to it. I think the key was having a really good engineer who listened and understood what I wanted. Even though I'm very sensitive to my environment when it comes to playing music, I have always been pretty good at blocking things off and just channeling the thing that is necessary. That really came in handy.
What is the role of quietude on the album?
It's very evident that there's a lot of open, quiet space on the record. I didn't really intend for that. I think it had to do with the state of mind I was in—I was rewriting very seriously, aware of all the time that had passed [since my last record [2014's On Your Own Love Again] and all the time that probably would pass before I was able to finish this thing. I didn't want myself to feel rushed because that is an enemy of creation but I felt, a fire, for sure. I had moved in with my partner Matt [McDermott], and he was gone at work a lot of the time so I had the gift of all this space to work in privately. Then eventually going into the studio [Gary's Electric in Greenpoint, Brooklyn], it was dead quiet and totally subterranean—no sunlight, even. There was just a lot of room to unfold in this very meditative manner, especially coming off a period of frenetic, anxious energy bouncing around inside of me. I was able to channel that into something useful, something with a sense of calm.
You wrote these songs in L.A. and recorded them in New York. Can you discuss the push and pull of energy that exists between the two cities, and how that might have influenced your work?
I've always been very excited by New York but maybe a bit intimidated by it because it's such a psychically wearing place. There's a lot of compressed hardcore energy here. You know, it's like on a really cold day, you're on the subway and people just look beaten down. I know that's a cliché about New York, but it's very true. L.A. can be deceptively dark because it's this very sunny place, but it does have a strange and dark history at times. I used to work in Hollywood and I saw all these mysterious strains running through the city. There's a lot of desperation, too. I think I prefer to live in a city with dynamic energies like that, instead of like a safe, tranquil place.
What exactly were you doing in Hollywood?
It was only for six months in like 2014, but it was a very concentrated six months where I was working for Amoeba Records. The mythos of Hollywood is definitely something that has been in the back of my mind the entire time I've lived in L.A., but very much so during that time when I worked in Hollywood. Going to work was my real social life for the day, and I met some really interesting people, like my partner. On any given day in Hollywood, you're going to be exposed to so many different kinds of people. It was pretty fascinating, observing the world in that environment. In a strange way, it was a nice introduction to the city.
