Since she returned from a tour of Australia a fortnight ago, Jessica Pratt hasn’t felt quite at home in her body. The California songwriter’s shut-eye has been fitful: she sometimes wakes disoriented, and with a sense that things are not as they should be.
“I keep having this thing where I try to go to sleep, and then I’m up until two, three in the morning, and then I sleep until hours that are not my typical style,” she says.
Such unusual sensations – the feeling of something dark rising up from a slumber – will be familiar to fans of Pratt’s dreamlike confessional pop, particularly her extraordinary fourth album, Here in the Pitch, from 2024.
Reverberating with the sort of dark vibrations you might expect to play over a bar scene in Twin Peaks or an especially bleak section of The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock-in, the record elevated the 38-year-old to the higher echelons of cult indie stardom.
READ MORE
She has guested, alongside her hero Dan Bejar, of Destroyer, on the comedian John Mulaney’s Netflix chatshow and been interviewed by Molly Gordon, the actor best known for the Disney+ series The Bear. And she’s touring all over, including at Vicar Street in Dublin this weekend.
But if Here in the Pitch has brought her into the light in a career sense, its roots are tangled up in the darkest days of the pandemic: the wild, walls-are-closing-in summer of 2020, when lockdown followed lockdown and people were taking to the streets, whether in support of Black Lives Matter or to spread conspiracy theories about masks and vaccines.
It was, to put it mildly, a moment – and Pratt taps into that dark fairytale energy on songs such as Life Is and World on a String.
“I want to be the sunlight of the century,” she sings on the former, a yearning for brighter days fuelled by a trilling voice suggestive of a purgatorial Dusty Springfield, while on By Hook or by Crook she comes on like Loretta Lynn with lyrics by the Brothers Grimm.
These are extraordinary songs: phantasmagorical, haunted yet poignant and emotional too. Of our world yet somehow beyond it.
LA is a weird place, in that it’s kind of windless. It’s not blustery at all. There’s a weird sort of sound-stage quality, where it can be very still
“You may recall the States in 2020 … There was a lot of civil unrest,” she says, explaining that she initially believed wrapping herself up in songwriting would be trivial, given the condition of the world.
As time passed, however, she returned to music, feeling that, in confining circumstances, it was a place where she could be free and spread her wings. “At the end of 2020 I started writing more and feel grateful for that sort of open space.”
Los Angeles is a huge influence on her music. She loves the city for its contradictions: how the City of Angels is also a spiritual home of noir, a land of sunshine where shadows stretch long and heavy. The other contrast, she notes, is that, though LA often has a quality of stillness, it can collapse into terrifying natural violence, as the world saw when wildfire swept southern California earlier this year.
“It feels like the edge of something,” she says. “There used to be this sort of sense of stasis. The winds that caused those fires was not something that I had ever experienced.”
At its worst, it was as if the climate apocalypse had come to her door. “I remember the night that I was sitting in my house – I was alone. I live in an old, small cavity house,” she says, referring to a house whose walls consist of two layers with a space between.
”The walls are very thin. You would have been very afraid to step outside. There was this vicious wind that was unlike anything I’d ever heard in Los Angeles. LA is a weird place, in that it’s kind of windless. It’s not blustery at all. There’s a weird sort of sound-stage quality, where it can be very still.”
[ Oasis kick off reunion tour in Cardiff with triumphant, nostalgic gigOpens in new window ]
Pratt recalls how a nearby park was constantly catching ablaze during the wildfire, often as a result of arson.
“The city did what they could. But they were overwhelmed. There were fires everywhere. Fires kept starting in this park – and some of the time it was people setting fires. Just complete bedlam. I guess in the classic sense some people just want to watch the world burn.”
She grew up somewhere very different. About 800km north of Los Angeles, Redding is a midsized California city straight out of Norman Rockwell – or, for those allergic to evangelical Christianity, The Handmaid’s Tale. As the child of a hippyish mother, Pratt has strong memories of feeling like an outsider in her hometown, of knowing her friends and neighbours would be strangers another day.
“I was raised by a single mom with my older brother, and she was a very intelligent person. Not to say that to be religious is to be not, of course. But she was very worldly in a way, and the fact that we lived in this small town ...
“It was an affordable place to live, and it would not have been her first choice in terms of the identity of the city. Nor did she have any friends there. So we were kind of isolated in a way.”
They were not completely cut off from the world around them, but nor could they escape the stifling religiosity. “I went to school and I had friends. Often their parents would be somewhere on the spectrum of fundamentalist Christianity – this thing that we were aware of, but it didn’t necessarily affect us in a deep way beyond encountering it in in various spaces. I’d spend the night at my friend’s house or something, and be baptised by someone else’s dad without really having any interest in that.”
[ Debbie Harry turns 80: what next for Blondie?Opens in new window ]
Born in northern California and steeped in Los Angeles, its history and its lore, Pratt is, naturally, influenced by The Beach Boys and their troubled-genius musician, songwriter and producer, Brian Wilson, who died in June.
“He seems like somebody who lived a rather tortured life. I hope that he’s experiencing some peace now. I wouldn’t say I’m in awe of that many people’s bodies of work in the way I am with Brian Wilson’s.”
Pratt is chatty and curious. She wants to know where in Dublin I live and is surprised to hear that people have been priced out of the city and that it shares many of the problems around affordability and arcane planning laws that afflict Los Angeles and San Fransisco, where she used to live.
But that hasn’t put her off coming to Ireland, and she is looking forward to her first headline show here. She remains quietly astonished that she is a professional musician who tours the world, sharing her songs with friends and strangers alike.
“Playing shows ... there is nothing [like that] in my day-to-day life, or a lot of people’s day-to-day life. We don’t do that many ceremonial things on a day-to-day basis. And it feels very much like that kind of thing.
“Sometimes I think about the fact that I write songs and play them for people for a living, and that has not ceased to be very odd to me.”
Here in the Pitch is released by City Slang. Jessica Pratt plays Vicar Street, Dublin, on Sunday, July 13th
