Jessica Pratt Discusses Her Breakthrough Album ‘Here in the Pitch,’ Collaborating With A$AP Rocky and the Concept of Time

Jessica Pratt is admittedly fascinated by the underbelly of Los Angeles — not just the mythology of the city she currently calls home, but also how it relates to the passage of time and its ties to the human experience. It’s a shockingly hot day in early September and the folk singer-songwriter, whose stature over the past year has grown from whispers-in-the-know to I-knew-her-whens, is seated in a cafe at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, just steps from the famed La Brea tar pits where the ground has coursed with black sludge for centuries.

“This sort of prehistoric life stuff emanating from the earth, it’s a very moving concept to me,” says Pratt, 37. She’s seated at a long wooden coffee table, her signature black eyeliner wisped at the edges of her eyes, her fingers adorned with rings. “Making a record or a piece of art that’s about something, to some extent, and music about a certain subject, can be one of the more intangible mediums. And then obviously in order to write about something, you have to pull the threads, and it’s a very interesting one to pull.”

That, in a sense, is part of the tapestry of her mellifluous fourth album “Here in the Pitch,” which released in May. The nine-track set feels frozen in time, like a relic of Laurel Canyon lore, that’s as spare as it is consuming. Just shy of a half-hour, “Pitch” traces the hallmarks of some of her earlier work — warm acoustic guitar strums and lullaby vocals — and embellishes them just slightly, invoking the swish of bossa nova and the haunting remove of the Shangri-Las. Her songs are meticulously confected but quietly performed, a beautiful whisper from around the corner.

Across “Pitch,” Pratt ruminates on the concept of time and its dichotomies, of light and darkness, of sunrise and sunset. “I think it’s gonna be fine / I think we’re gonna be together / And the storyline goes forever,” she sings on “The Last Year.” Opener “Life Is” puts it more succinctly: “Time is time and time and time again,” she pontificates, bongos pattering behind her. 

“I suppose I’m at a place in my life where maybe a lot of people start thinking about the previous half of their life and what’s to follow,” she says. “If you’re in a place where you feel like you have wasted some time, that can sort of be frightening to really confront. And I don’t know if I was fully confronting it at the time; some of it leaked out.”

Pratt began working on “Pitch” shortly after the release of her last album, 2019’s “Quiet Signs,” a gorgeous record that was so insular you could hear the tape hiss on every track. She wouldn’t call this a “pandemic” album, per se, “but inevitably, some of that shit is going to leak in. I’ve been a person who thinks about death a lot and what happens after you die, those big, booming existential questions that keep you up at night. I’ve always thought about that stuff. So it’s all in there, it’s all pointing towards the same thing.”

“Pitch” marks the first time she’s truly opened her creative process to the suggestion of others. Her first three albums, dating back to her eponymous 2012 debut, were replete with intimate bedroom recordings that largely featured her and a guitar. But the limitations of playing just one instrument led her to augment her songwriting, inviting musicians including her husband Matt McDermott to contribute ideas. Like with “Quiet Signs,” she assembled the album in a recording studio, and “Pitch” is all the more robust for it — never outsized but rather italicized, embodying the California wash of Beach Boys and coffee shop folk of Joni Mitchell.

It’s also a culmination of steadily strengthening her songwriting aptitude. Growing up in Redding, CA, Pratt began recording when she was 16, moving to San Fransisco where White Fence’s Tim Presley was so enamored by her demos that he formed his Birth Records simply to sign her. In the decade that followed, Pratt felt somewhat like a secret, largely heralded by the critical establishment and cherished by those who understood it.

Only recently has Pratt begun to seep beyond the confines of “freak folk,” or the genre to which she’s largely been designated. Last year, pop singer Troye Sivan, who’s currently on tour with Charli XCX, sampled Pratt on his song “Can’t Go Back, Baby,” a meditative breakup song about accepting the definitive conclusion to a relationship. It was an unexpected moment for her — “I wonder how much crossover interest there is,” she says — but more recently rapper ASAP Rocky asked her to feature on his August single “Highjack,” where their worlds strangely collided.

For Pratt, it was her first “true collaboration, when you’re featured but also not just singing ‘ah!’ in the background.” She heard that he was interested in collaborating and was inevitably invited to record with him and his producer. The whole process was succinct and, admittedly, “very bizarre, very interesting, totally unexpected. It’s part of why it interested me also, is that it seemed very unreal.”

It’s the latest stepping stone to what could potentially unlock the next level of her growing acumen. Last week, she submitted to the Grammy Awards for best folk album and best new artist, and is entered in the respective rap categories for “Highjack.” Two months ago, she made her television debut on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” performing “Life Is.” At her sold-out show at Los Angeles’ Belasco last week, Chris Pine mingled in the VIP section, and tonight, she’ll be doing an interview and performance at L.A.’s Grammy Museum.

She’s already planted the seeds of her next album, though she isn’t rushing the process. In the meantime, she’s touring Europe after an extensive Stateside run, not so much interrogating the continued response to the record but merely content to witness it.

“I wouldn’t even say I had expectations. You just lose all perspective,” she says. “But I think on some level, I felt that it was an interesting record in that maybe people would like it. God, it came out in May and I feel like we’re in a sort of period of the music industry where there’s so much music coming out and so much being promoted that things don’t get that much time to rest in the atmosphere. It seems like people have continued to listen to it. I’m grateful. It’s very gratifying.”