Jessica Pratt
“Back, Baby”
On Your Own Love Again (out 01.27.15 on Drag City)
Ugh, it’s good to have Jessica Pratt back in our lives. Her 2012 debut is a bewitching slab of mystical Laurel Canyon magick with Pratt’s slinky, plaintive vocals weaving across dusty, fingerpicked nylon strings. It reminded me of a cassette I would have heard in my mother’s Volvo station wagon. You know, the one where the tape inside the plastic had twisted in places and much of the label would have rubbed away: crackling, road-worn, and imperfect. It takes me back to a time when music was most precious and valuable — a little world you could get lost in while your Mom was driving you to the grocery store or wherever. Those transportive properties are on full display here, as she picks over the bones of a broken relationship with the kind of bittersweet melancholy that’s just as timeless as her sound.
