Jessica Pratt: "Back, Baby"
It was 2007 when Jessica Pratt recorded a bunch of songs that would eventually appear on her self-titled 2012 album. At the time, she didn’t have plans to actually release an album—that wouldn’t happen until White Fence‘s Tim Presley somehow heard her record and was so moved that he started a label with the sole purpose of sharing it with the world. It seems logical that Pratt would have that effect on a person. She fingerpicks these gorgeous melodies on her guitar, and in an otherworldly voice, tells elemental, seemingly allegorical stories. “She has followed you from where dark water and fortune run,” she sang on “Mother Big River”.
On the first single from On Your Own Love Again, her Drag City debut, Pratt opens with another simple line, one with instantly familiar emotional heft: “Sometimes, I pray for the rain.” It’s the sort of thing that’s likely been scrawled in teenagers’ journals countless times, but there’s a gentle, earnest quality to her voice that’s perfectly suited to phrases like that one. With the nylon strings of her guitar ringing quietly in the background, it’d be easy for her to repeatedly invoke the elements for more loose imagery that’s fraught with heartache. Instead, her story is incredibly specific: an undefined relationship that left her feeling hollow. “Your love was just a myth I devised,” she admits, and even if there was something there to begin with, she can’t go back. “And sometimes, I pray for the rain,” she repeats.
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