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Jessica Pratt | Clairmont The Second | Emily King | Deerhunter | Panda Bear
Jessica Pratt
Quiet Signs
As a musician, Jessica Pratt is an enigma. She’s a thirtysomething, slight folk singer who grew up on ’80s cowpunk like X and the Gun Club. She’s a wistful lyricist who blends her syllables together in a way that would make Kurt Cobain scratch his head. And on her third album, she’s created her most musically ambitious piece of work that also happens to be her simplest. Beginning with a pair of brief piano tunes, the instrumental “Opening Night” and its vocal-tinged companion “As the World Turns,” Pratt subsequently slides into an additional seven tracks that find the L. A. musician stretching her fizzy vocals underneath a tapestry of tasteful woodwinds, organ and, of course, Pratt’s full-bodied folk picking and strumming. While Pratt’s first two albums were recorded in her home, Quiet Signs was finished in a studio with help from Oneohtrix Point Never and Autre ne Veut producer Al Carlson. But each track still contains an air of tape hiss and a four-track feel to it, only strengthening Pratt’s haunted delivery. Across 29 minutes, Pratt delivers a compact and succinct album solely focused on her vocals and a newfound knack for hook-writing, as verified on tracks like “Fare Thee Well” and “This Time Around.” But these soaring melodies are buried under layers of instrumentation, and it works like a charm. Quiet Signs is a breeze of an album that somehow hits you like a ton of bricks. Just another enigmatic turn for Jessica Pratt. (Mexican Summer)
You seem to pack a lot of ideas into brief songs. Is that intentional?
I play until it feels natural to stop. I’m a big fan of brev- ity, in that, if you don’t have anything more to say, why draw it out further? I think it’s cool that songs can be any length and it’s not unusual anymore, I think I just had to write shorter songs.
Four years passed between albums. Did you spend that time writing?
I don’t think I intended for so much time to pass, but I basically toured for a year. I tried to play in my free time, but there just wasn’t much of it. I have to stay stationary for a long time to write anything of any real merit. I just needed time to not do anything, but in the following year, when I was recuperated, I began writing in earnest. Then I was going back and forth from New York to L. A, recording in these little bursts. It was kind of a time-consuming way to do it, but it was the only way it could happen.