Photos by Colby Droscher
Jessica Pratt's self-titled 2012 debut was a quiet hit—a collection of warm and enigmatic acoustic folk tunes that found a cult following—but the 27-year-old songwriter winces at the thought of people enjoying that material now. "It's really old shit," she says, explaining that the songs on Jessica Pratt were recorded in 2007, when she was just 19. "Having something that's so old be presented as your contemporary self is really confusing—it's like being haunted by your teen journal."
Nonetheless, the album earned glowing comparisons to the likes of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell—which Pratt promptly rejected. "This straightforward, traditional folk shit can be beautiful in and of itself, but I was just a little embittered and chagrined," she says now. "I didn’t want people to think I was just a basic bitch, you know?"
While 2012 marked a turning point for Pratt's career, it was also a tumultuous period—the "Mayan apocalypse bloodletting" for her and nearly everyone she knew. A month before her debut album was released, her mom died. Her years-long relationship ("basically a marriage") ended. Her friends started leaving San Francisco—where she had lived for almost a decade—in droves. So she packed up and moved down to Los Angeles, hoping for a clean slate. But first she had some work to do.
With a guitar and a Tascam multitrack recorder in her tiny room, her emotional baggage got "spewed out" in the songs that comprise her new album, On Your Own Love Again. Structurally, it doesn't stray far from the voice-and-guitar blueprint of Jessica Pratt, but she sounds more confident this time around, and the album's details make it a richer and occasionally surreal listen. Pratt spent the majority of two months working on the record in self-imposed isolation, living off money she scrounged together before she moved. (She would eventually get a job at a local music store.) Since Jessica Pratt's sessions partially took place in a studio, it was her first time focusing on an entire album by herself, and the solitude was crucial to her process. "I need to be able to do something over and over until I get it right," she says.
There were certainly drawbacks to the writing and recording process—she hurt her hands from repeated playing, avoided exploring her new city for months, and she says her mind started "eating itself" after a while. But the exile also resulted in some of her best work to date. "If you can take advantage of that little mental space when you totally shut yourself off from the world," she says, "you can produce a lot of good things."
Pitchfork: Do you prefer the solitude of recording at home?
Jessica Pratt: Yeah, and not even in an emotional sense. I like to get things perfect. It's difficult for me to imagine being in the right mental state to produce the sounds I want coming out of my body when I'm on a time constraint and there's people watching; I would be aware of their judgments or worrying about how I should attack something, while they're probably thinking about the roast beef sandwich that they want to have for lunch.
Conceiving these songs and then recording them all in one space was really important because it's just more of a solid flow—one gesture. Doing shit at your leisure is the ideal setup because that mental freedom allows you to experiment with things maybe that you wouldn't otherwise. A lot of people talk about their process in a similar way—Keith Richards and Panda Bear have said that you’re like this vessel for something that's just floating in the air. There’s no way to predict when it’s going to strike you, but it happens, and then you have to take advantage of it as much as you can—it's this current running through you. Eventually, it will dissipate and you wish it could stay longer. But it's really just about being at the mercy of those waves.
Pitchfork: Has your process changed in terms of songwriting and recording?
JP: Definitely. I didn't really think about all the stuff I used to do very much. It was kind of a knee-jerk thing. That's how a lot of people do things—just because it feels good. And then, when anyone noticed it, I started taking it more seriously, and because of that I've put a lot more effort and time into thinking about it. Recording at home, you get better by leaps and bounds. And I feel a lot older now, literally and figuratively.
Pitchfork: It's been about 8 years since you recorded your first album. Does it feel like it's been that long?
JP: You lose your grasp on time. The older you get, the more aware you are of the transitory nature of time and how easy it is to waste. I have all these friends that just sit in their house and work on music—they pump the shit out. But I don't think I'll ever be able to deliver things that I like in that quantity.
I'd like to aim to be a hermit and I don't care if I have to be really anti-social and introverted to make it happen. It's a life goal, I guess. All I want to do is be at home and make music, but a lot of people can't afford that. The only way you can do it is if you move to Minnesota or something and live in a fucking shit shack and you're OK with not having any other stimulating experiences in your life. It's been a consideration; I've thought about it. I've daydreamed of moving to a small, horrible place to just be alone and try to get shit done.
Pitchfork: You dream of the Minnesota shit shack?
JP: Yeah! In all reality, though, I would probably lose my mind. I need to get some sort of situation where I can have a shit shack timeshare so I can just go there for, like, five months.