Jessica Pratt Shows Us the Shadows of California’s Sixties Sunshine

To the average listener hearing Jessica Pratt for the first time, it’s possible to mistake her for an artist from a different era. Her music sounds decades old, like an obscure artist unearthed from the dusty bin of a Midwestern antique shop. But this is not the Langley Schools Music Project, and Pratt is no Connie Converse. Born in 1987, the Los Angeles musician has been surprising people with her otherworldly indie folk since 2012. And now she’s returned with her fourth album, Here in the Pitch, out May 3 via Mexican Summer. 

On Here in the Pitch, Pratt evokes the past of her city, specifically the dark underbelly of the Sixties and Seventies. She adores the Beach Boys, but she’s also a diehard fan of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. “If you have an attraction to that era of time, generally, a lot of it goes hand in hand,” she says. “My music is often the product of an amalgamation of all of the influences that are going into my head.”

On an afternoon in late March, sitting at an Ethiopian restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Pratt walked us through the music that influenced Here in the Pitch. “They’re perennial tracks that I’ll have in my head all the time or constantly return to,” she says, tugging on some injera. “Everything here is a part of that. I think there is a through line with all of these songs: a sense of longing and a sense of loss. That undercurrent of darkness coupled with the sort of poppier, sunshine top layer. I really like the conflict of those two things together. You’ve got to have the darkness and the light.”

The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds (1966)

I’m pretty immersed in the Beach Boys’ lore. Maybe not in a completist sense, like some people, where really it’s their life’s work. But Brian Wilson is obviously a true genius, and Pet Sounds is probably my favorite album of all time. It’s like, biblical stuff — the sort of atmospheric qualities and the richness of the sounds of the instruments and their spatial relationship to each other. You can hear the space.

Most music biopics are incredibly cringe, and I’m sure you would agree. I would say, 98 percent of the time, they’re really bad. It’s almost like a comedy genre, because they’re just so stupid. But [2015’s Love & Mercy] is actually pretty good, I think. Especially with those scenes in the studio, the attention to detail is very notable, the wardrobe. Paul Dano’s really good as a young, naïve Brian Wilson who’s on the verge of psychosis.

Mamas and Papas, “Strange Young Girls” (1966)

Given my predilection for a certain era of music, I wasn’t familiar with that one until like five years ago or something. The song is beautiful. The clarity of their voices — there’s certain lines that Cass Elliot sings where you can hear the texture of her voice so deeply and it’s just so gorgeous. 

Beautiful tune, but also the lyrics: “Walking the strip/Sweet, soft, and placid/Offering their youth/On the altar of acid.” The song has beautiful lyrics, but they’re also very creepy, given the lore that surrounds some of the shit. It’s kind of dark, you know what I mean? I’m sure there were a lot of girls that were showing up from the Midwest and just getting sucked into the bedlam of that time period.

They were really dynamic songwriters — but they’re not really taken seriously. I would sort of categorize them along with Jefferson Airplane, who also don’t really get a lot of credit. Maybe they’re both bands that had a sense of humor. That’s just a theory. It’s interesting that they’re known more for their voices, and obviously their biggest hits, instead of for being an influence on anything.

Love, “The Red Telephone” (1967)

Aside from [Forever Changes] being one of the greatest albums of all time — universally considered that, and certainly by myself — I feel like “The Red Telephone” is an all-time, paranoid bad trip anthem. It feels really emotionally heavy, rather than some of the goofier stuff that was born of that era. Arthur Lee always comes off as very sage-like. He’s the dude. He’s always foretelling something. He feels very prescient. And there’s a quality of regality in the way that he sings. 

I read the 33 1/3 book on Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans. It’s really good, and he describes the general tone of Arthur on the record as a dignified paranoia, and I feel like that is so apt. The line in the song, “Sometimes my life is so eerie,” has always been like a mantra for me. I’ve always seen the world as sort of like a multidimensional experience where you’re marching through the psychic waves of all of the history and layers of humanity that have come before you. Part of his whole deal is thinking about that stuff — the unseen layers.

Wendy and Bonnie, Genesis (1969)

I hadn’t heard of them until fairly recently. Actually, you know what’s so funny? I only heard about them because what I assume is an older rock-head guy commented on the YouTube video for “This Time Around,” a song off my last record, and said, “This makes me think of Wendy and Bonnie,” and I didn’t know what that was, and I looked it up. Both of their parents were musicians, and their last name is Flower. Wendy and Bonnie Flower. You can’t make that up. 

That album is incredible. They were so young when they made this record. I do feel like there is a connection to the Beach Boys there for me. I think of it as this West Coast naivete thing, where it’s these really heartfelt, heart-wrenching harmonies and melodies. Also the sibling aspect, too. It feels very windswept. It’s also crazy that that’s the only album they ever made and that was it. It’s this perfect document.

Spirit, “Looking Into Darkness” (1975)

Spirit is a little more obscure. Maybe people know about their earlier classic Sixties studio albums a little bit more, rather than Randy California/Spirit’s latter-period stuff [in the] early Seventies. That’s some of the stuff I like the most.

On “Looking Into Darkness,” there’s this flanging, foggy production that gives the music this really ethereal quality. I feel like I haven’t really heard melodies quite like his. They’re very unique and it gives you this strange feeling. He’s sort of a musician’s musician, I guess. And it’s very sad that he died saving his son from drowning.

Itasca, “Nature’s Gift” (2014)

It’s funny because I kind of forgot about that song for a while. I hadn’t listened to it in a long time, so I was really happy that it came up again. What a doomy track. I really like music that has a sort of ambiguous emotion, and even listening to the lyrics doesn’t offer much clarity. It feels very much like something sinister is lurking in the background. It feels very California to me. She’s a really gifted guitarist and also a really cool person. If she’s around in L.A., we encounter each other occasionally. So good.