To listen to Jessica Pratt’s music is to learn the art of surrender.

It is not often that an artist of any discipline achieves complete transcendence, a phenomenon somewhat akin to witnessing a butterfly migration or the breath of the Northern Lights: beautiful, complex, nearly spiritual rarities within a world enduring cataclysmic suffering. That is how I can describe, to the best of my abilities, Jessica Pratt’s masterpiece “Here in the Pitch.”

Her artistry is guided by an exacting and experienced hand, constructing an enigmatic dream state that chases the shadows of old Hollywood glamor and the mysticism of the city of Los Angeles. Pratt spins a web of deceptive simplicity, often employing only a guitar to compliment her bewitching vocalizations, but there is an expert subtleness to her technique. Her narrator inquires about the ebb and flow of time, the convergence of selves, the nameless energy existing from moment to moment: no small feat. It is magnificent, metaphysical poetry exploring the bounds of the intangible. 

“Here in the Pitch” reflects a sensitive soul and a mind brimming with curiosity, and it is unmistakably brilliant. Read an excerpt from my conversation with Jessica Pratt below. 

the above photo was taken by Elena saviano.

Here in the Pitch is truly a beautiful record. It’s been out for some time now; I’m curious how it has felt to receive reactions to it? Have you been surprised by any of the feedback you’ve received? 

JP: Thank you so much. I have been touched by the response. I have been pretty occupied since it came out — touring, promoting the record — so I haven’t had a ton of time to sit back and reflect on everything that has happened. After November, I’ll have a few months off, so maybe things will start to hit me then. It has been a very crazy time and a very crazy year. I can’t say I have ever experienced anything like it. 

How has the aftermath of this body of work felt different than your last? 

JP: I think I just felt like the world that the last record existed in, Quiet Times, was just smaller, and it’s easier to process that. It’s a little less threatening, you know? You have more control. So it feels pretty markedly different, I’d say. 

Yes, I’d love to ask you about the world you’ve created inside this record, specifically about the influence of California mythology. I’m fascinated by those ideas and am interested in what piqued your interest in those narratives and symbols? 

JP: I would say it has probably been something I have been interested in for many years, even going back to being a teenager and reading a lot of books about music. A lot of those things point to Los Angeles, and a lot of my favorite music comes from Los Angeles. I live here, so it’s just a place that I’ve thought about a lot. Just driving around the city, imagination is sparked by certain locations and certain images. 

Can you describe some of those to me? What has felt inspiring about that visual landscape? 

JP: It’s certainly the whole city, from a junky mini-mall to the San Gabriel mountains to the desert on the outskirts. It’s sort of everywhere, and that is sort of how I’ve always approached the world: seeing things through the lens of my imagination and the particular things I’m interested in. It makes life a little more tolerable, I guess. 

Los Angeles absolutely is a city with a million faces. Something that came through distinctly on this record is the self-awareness of the songs themselves. They feel almost mystical. I’m wondering if you had a particular atmosphere or experience in mind for your audience? 

JP: You know, it’s not something I really try to pre-determine. I think that it has always gone this way with my music where I start doing something semi-unconsciously, heading in a certain direction, and things just build on themselves. It’s sort of only in retrospect that you see the body of work clearly, pointing towards something. It feels pretty unconscious to me. Of course I was interested in those things and reading about some of that stuff, and I wouldn’t even say that the record is really concretely just about that one thing. I don’t necessarily always feel like I’m the one behind the wheel. The percentage of whatever else is factoring into how things develop, that mysterious quotient, is something you can’t really control, and it’s also a big part of what makes the work good and interesting. So I’m grateful for the mystery. I tend to just follow my nose. 

That’s fascinating. And when you speak about control in the context of making art, how do you find yourself being specific and intentional and allowing for the music to develop that life of its own without, for lack of a better word, being overly-involved? 

JP: I think it’s very similar to being an athlete. There’s a certain amount of skill and preparation but when you’re actually playing the game, you kind of have to turn part of your brain off. If you try to sit down and explicitly dissect exactly what you’re doing, it might be kind of impossible. It’s a very intuitive process and requires a lot of balance. It’s basically all feel. I think you can feel when you’re over-manipulating something, or when something feels overwrought, but you can also feel when things feel too raw and underdeveloped. It’s trying to find this middle plane. It can be tricky. 

Absolutely. Listening to music can be such an emotional experience and I think in the best music, you can feel all the emotion that went into it. Surrendering so much of yourself to what you’re producing can be taxing. 

JP: I think that honestly, for me, when I’m writing or recording music, I tend to be able to turn off a certain part of my vulnerability or sensitivity, enough to really focus on the matter at hand. You can’t be fully automated because, as you said, it requires a certain amount of emotion, but it’s like a flow state thing. 

Right. It’s almost a weird kind of self-preservation. And correct me if I’m wrong, but Here in the Pitch came out five years after Quiet Times?

JP: Something like that. I believe Quiet Times came out February of 2019.

I’m curious about that pause. There’s a thousand reasons that make stepping back from creation productive, but was there a particular meaning taken from making space to not release music? 

JP: I definitely didn’t intend to take that long. I think there were several contributing factors. I toured for some of 2019, and I wasn’t really focusing on writing during that time. 2020 hit and pretty quickly into 2002 the pandemic happened, and I was finding it pretty difficult to focus for the first half of that year. I think a lot of people felt anxious and that maybe there were more important things to focus on in that time. I felt delayed a little bit. And I do tend to take a long time to gather a certain kind of material. I’m hoping that next time it can be a little bit shorter. I sometimes ask myself that question, honestly. It was also the process of writing and then going to record, writing again, then going to record. I think a lot of people wait to go into the studio until they have all the material in front of them, so that probably elongated things too. With each successive trip, it was analyzing the material and producing the material as we went along. So it kind of broke it up into these big chunks. At the same time, it didn’t feel like that much time passed. 

the above images were taken by Elena saviano.

What even is a long time? Time ebbs and flows and can feel completely different from one moment to the next. Were you feeling any internal or external pressures during that time to produce work at a certain pace? 

JP: I’m really lucky that I have situated myself with people who are really supportive, and they really understand my process. They were perhaps too generous with me on that point, but I wouldn’t change how it transpired. There is also this inner clock that you have, and I feel similarly in the way that I evaluate time to what you were saying: that time doesn’t really feel real. If you can produce something that you really feel proud of and that takes a certain amount of time, it’s likely all worth it. I think time can also feel fairly limited. I have kind of a dark mind sometimes, and I think about the brevity of a human life. I feel the way that a lot of humans have throughout history: that you have certain endeavors that you need to carry out, and that there is a limited amount of time to do that. That is my own personal application of pressure. 

You described your mind as dark. How does that find its way into what you write?

JP: It comes down to something that is very hard to quantify: the energetic feeling and sound made by a person with a certain kind of brain. I think you can get really elemental about it, and it’s something that is very difficult to put your finger on. It definitely colors what I do in a pretty serious way. 

Music and art and the human experience and the way humans interact with the world are all such dynamic experiences. The task of producing something that reflects that in any capacity is challenging and exciting. We work with whatever tools we have, but that idea has always been really interesting to me. 

JP: It’s pretty trippy, man! You can get really lost in trying to make sense of it all. It’s wonderful.