Every Jessica Pratt album ranked
Jessica Pratt‘s music is as light as a phoenix’s feather, yet you could drop an anvil into it and never hear it hit the bottom. It’s a great deal of contradictions all at once—it sounds sparse on the surface but is awash with a delicate mesh of woven notes and details. It’s humble and unassuming, but in its own classy way, it makes Borolo seem base-level. It’s peculiar and particular, but you could play it at halftime in a football stadium or during a Songkran festival in Bangkok and just about everyone would be pleasantly becalmed by its beauty.
In short, Jessica Pratt’s music makes life better—it takes the edge off. Her songs ask for nothing from you and give everything in return. She’s a selfless star whose star is rising as a result, and the world needs that. After growing up in the small town of Redding, California, she cut her teeth in the music scene of San Francisco and soon met with Tim Presley, who took the easy decision to produce her debut album.
Since that hushed debut in 2012, which featured tracks that she had been writing since 2007—indicating a process of honing that has become her signature way of writing—she has released three further records. Each of these is distinctly different yet unmistakably Jessica Pratt. With a beauteous blend of folk and jazz and perhaps a hint of psychedelia in there, too, she has established a category all to herself that can only truly be defined as beguiling.
So, we’ve waded through the various chapters so far and offered up our thoughts on each. After all, she’s soundtracked enough of our lives to prompt us towards somehow compartmentalising her magic in some way – for our own sanity as much as for anything else. In truth, this is less of a ranking and more of a celebration with the added benefit of reconciling that her albums are actual physical pieces of music and not just mystical gifts from the ether.
Every Jessica Pratt album ranked:
‘Quiet Signs’ (2019)
Quiet Signs could just as easily be crowned her greatest record. Its jazzy tones take you back to the cool studio apartment life in the 1950s that you never actually lived. Her third record saw her lean into this world a little further than she had previously, making folk seem like an awfully clumsy way to categorise her waltzing tunes. Yet, it remains as meditative and cracked as Leonard Cohen at his best.
The familiar tape-hiss departed in favour of a more polished sound as she entered a commercial studio to beef up her approach. None of her beguiling spirit was lost in the process. Producer Al Carlson does a great job staying out of the room, so to speak. Though an array of instruments and fluttering moments enter the mix to rubbish any reports that the music is sparse when held to a microscope might sound, on paper, like you get less of Pratt, in truth, you still listen and picture her peering out of a window to the world below, weaving wistful thoughts into a filagreed stream of life in amber.
‘Jessica Pratt’ (2012)
“Worms mean more than they did before” is not the sort of depth-ridden lyric that you usually find on a debut album. But this doesn’t feel like a debut album at all. It feels like folk standards from an alternate world—the sort of record that Light in the Attic digs up 40 years later, and you wonder whether such a person could’ve really existed.
Craig Gotsill may well have been on production duties, but he did little to interfere with the analogue past of the rickety old songs, some of which stretched back to over five years before she set foot in the studio. That faraway sound is indicative of a reluctance and vulnerability that a lot of the very best art holds—there is beauty to the brilliance that bellies the world it is welcomed into. It’s a record that whispers with more power than wind.
‘On Your Own Love Again’ (2015)
‘Back, Baby’ is a world unto itself. It is a humble masterpiece that summons thoughts of leaf-scattered New York streets that you have never even strolled along, heartbreaks you’ve never endured, and sunsets while sipping Rioja that your life is only adjacent to at best. The album’s vividity and sincerity squashed any thoughts of affectation that her slightly amplified vocal quirks might have imparted.
Any potential pressure from her debut is whisked away on an easy breeze of plucked melodies that have an almost George Harrison tinge to them. Self-produced and pared back, it’s a dreamy piece of deliverance that graciously sidesteps the pitfalls that can blight young stars and offers up a homespun depiction of an artist doing everything they wish. It might not be consistently perfect as some of her work, but it certainly has some of her best songs—songs like ‘Back, Baby’.
‘Here In The Pitch’ (2024)
It’s not just Jessica Pratt’s best release yet; it might be one of the decade’s best. If you like the record, if you fall under its spell, then it becomes one of the rare few that come around that you can confidently bet you’ll be listening to for the rest of your life. It’s an album of sublime sophistication. It’s a summer album in the summer and a winter album in the winter.
It is a humanised gem that showcases Pratt’s steady development since her 2012 debut. There is simply more to it than the others, and yet it has the confidence and assured identity not to overplay that mythical ‘more’. In short, it is a masterpiece that triumphs by virtue of fantastic songwriting—that’s the beauty of it: you can hum and haw over its various facets and strengths, but they all come under the umbrella of seamlessly majestic songwriting. There isn’t a hair of out place.
