To new listeners, singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt’s third album Quiet Signs may seem a stripped down, bare bones affair. For longtime fans however, the record feels comparatively much warmer and fuller to her previous album, 2015’s On Your Own Love Again.
That said, Quiet Signs retains everything that is special about Jessica Pratt’s songwriting – the altogether otherworldly feeling created by Pratt’s fingerpicked nylon guitar work, her ethereal voice and melodies.
We spoke to Pratt about what it was like recording the album, her first inside a recording studio.
Watch the video for ‘This Time Around’ by Jessica Pratt:
It’s been a few years between records, what was the period after On Your Own Love Again was like?
Pratt: I went on tour pretty much immediately after it came out in 2015, I was gone the entire year. It was eye-opening, and a great experience, but also very exhausting. I was quite burned out at the end. So when I got back to Los Angeles I was also living by myself for the first time, and I kind of just holed up for longer than I anticipated.
I saw friends occasionally, I was trying to work on music. But I think I had been blown out of the water a little from such a long time on the road, and so I had to spend time recuperating.
From the end of 2016 until not that many months ago I was completely entirely absorbed with making this record. It was basically starting from scratch. I had tried to write a lot on the road in 2015 and there were fragments but those are difficult to come back to sometimes.
I returned home with this massive pile of voice memos and I couldn’t really do anything with them, as much as I liked some of the ideas.
So yeah, I started from scratch and went back and forth between New York where the studio was and LA for periods of writing. That was about a year and a half of my life.
When you sat down and started writing again was there a deliberate sense that you were making a record?
Yeah, there was. I think I had to sort of train myself to try not to think of that as much as possible while writing but that was difficult to do in the beginning.
Any time you’re dealing with like, a perceived expectation in an audience it can be really difficult to create without self-editing. It took a few months for me to get to a place where I wasn’t doing that all the time.
Just prior to me really starting to write I had signed with Mexican Summer so it was very fresh in my mind that the efforts I was making towards writing would be eventually part of a record.
Honestly, that was kind of helpful, to have that sort of framework. Because the previous 6 or 7 months I didn’t have that much direction, it was nice to have that structure.
The record sounds very cohesive but lyrically I thought it was really diverse – I’m curious what sort of things you were thinking about while writing this record?
It’s difficult to encapsulate. I think that I write about my life and my experiences and that may come across in a rather abstract way, but due to the nature of my music that’s just how it has to be.
I was processing a lot from the previous years, especially when I was on the road and after that when I was just sort of percolating in my apartment alone. I was dealing with some very intense personal issues. I think whatever your chosen mode of creation is your biggest outlet for that kind of stuff.
Because I had not been writing very seriously that output had atrophied a little, and getting it back was very nice.
Because there was this sort of delay, I noticed when I was writing the songs on this record I was dealing with some older themes too, it wasn’t like everything I was writing about was super fresh, though a lot of it was. I was just kind of sorting through backlogs, you know?
Listen to ‘Aeroplane’ by Jessica Pratt:
This is the first album you actually recorded in a studio, which I found interesting because I think it still retains the aesthetic and the things that made the earlier work so special. How did you approach that?
I was very frightened to record in the studio. A small part of me was excited as well because you have access to things you wouldn’t have otherwise. Best case scenario I thought it could be cool, but I was doubtful, only due to the fact that my experience in the studio had been incredibly limited.
I was just fairly certain I wasn’t going to be able to develop a natural vibe in the studio, I thought it was going to be this clinical environment that would rob the music of its magic or something.
But it definitely did not go that way. I think even the first session, working with Al Carlson, the engineer, we went about trying to develop a sonic palette that wasn’t worlds away from the last record.
It does sound higher fidelity, but I wanted it to remain somewhat murky and have a certain warm hue to it, in the neighbourhood of the last record.
We worked on that and it took not that long really, maybe a day. Al is just very adept and a very good listener, so it was pretty easy once we got a baseline sound down.
On the whole, it sounds very confident, when you listen back does it seem that way to you?
It wasn’t something that I really thought about the time. In retrospect, having to listen to the mixes and masters a million times, you end up absorbing the music in every possible manner. It does feel that way to me. It makes sense.
When I was making the previous record I was much younger and had only just moved to LA, it was kind of a sudden move. I didn’t have a lot of friends in LA and the two people I had moved with, I shared a house with them, they were very busy, they were gone a lot.
It was kind of like being a little kid left alone in the house or something, just having a lot of time to fill. I had saved some money so I didn’t need to get a job right away and I just took advantage of the time making music, but it was a pretty dark period too, again just dealing with some personal things.
I had left San Francisco leaving a lot of cathartic experiences behind, just some transitional life episodes, getting out of a long relationship, I quit a job I’d worked at for six years, my mother passed away the previous year. It was a very intense time and I think I was very vulnerable and kind of felt alone and you can definitely hear that in the last record.
I couldn’t have been in a more different headspace this time around. It’s audible, I think.
Quiet Signs by Jessica Pratt is out now.
Listen to ‘Opening Night’ by Jessica Pratt:
