Jessica Pratt

Still, Pratt’s ambivalence towards her last LP is at least partially understandable – if entirely inaccurate – considering the circumstances surrounding its release. Having recorded songs for years at home with a simple four-track tape setup, in 2007 Pratt found herself with a block of free studio time courtesy of a friend. Seizing the opportunity, she laid down everything in her repertoire. Even then Pratt had doubts about the material’s strength but it was an opportunity not to be wasted: “I wasn’t crazy about it but I was like, OK, we’re here, so let’s do it.”

Happy enough with the recordings but with no real ambition to take them forward, she sat on the tapes for years and wilfully consigned herself to obscurity in the process, to be filed alongside the likes of Sibylle Baier and a clutch of folk’s other singular lost talents. “I honestly didn’t have any intentions of putting it out,” she insists. “I didn’t really regard it as something I thought was like – not that it was bad – but it wasn’t the best of me, you know?”

Enter Tim Presley, a fellow San Francisco native and the lo-fi garage whiz behind the White Fence moniker. “I had recorded Night Faces, which is a song I really like because it was recorded in the same fashion as the second record and was a song I was totally proud of; it was very unlike the other songs on my first,” Pratt explains. “I used to make shitty little YouTube videos for my songs with just, like, compiled footage or whatever and my boyfriend I was living with at the time, I think he was frwiends with Tim on Facebook and he posted that song on there. Tim saw it and, like, freaked out. Then the next morning I woke up to a message from him saying, let’s put it out.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Presley set up Birth Records, a label tasked purely with releasing Pratt’s recordings and in 2012 – nearly six years after being recorded – Pratt’s debut full-length finally saw the light of day. “I really see Tim as my guardian angel,” she says. “It was very strange the way he kind of came out of thin air to do that and you know, he had never done anything like that before. I feel like it was some kind of pre-destined thing with him.” If finally putting out an album kickstarted Pratt’s career in earnest, a number of other factors around the time of its release also played their part. Easily the most significant of these was her mother passing away; a deeply traumatic experience but one which also galvanised Pratt with an urgent need to make music. “It did make me automatically unconcerned with worrying about shit” she says. “I don’t know, everything becomes really petty-seeming in comparison. So I became really deeply motivated and unquestioning in my need to make music all the time.”

To really set about working on album number two in earnest though, Pratt needed to escape the confines of San Francisco. Her mother had passed away, her friends were leaving in droves and now Pratt found herself left behind in a – surprisingly – creatively stifling environment. “There’s no music scene in San Francisco,” she laments. “I mean, there’s a little garage music and psych stuff which is OK but it’s kind of got this reputation for being a dead city in that way. Maybe some of that has got to do with how no one can afford to live there now. You know, if you eradicate the people who make cool shit then your city’s going to be less interesting.”

On arriving in Los Angeles, Pratt got back to work, although new album On Your Own Love Again hardly seems to have absorbed very much of her fresh surroundings. It’s still very much introspective music for time spent under cloudy, rainy skies as opposed to the sun-kissed boulevards of the City of Angels. This is doubtless because the new LP was recorded entirely at home by Pratt, with additional instrumentation like organ and clavinet delicately scattered across the record’s 31 minutes of dreamy melancholia. The lyrics, previously hazily implied are now directly poignant: “I often try to leave my thoughts of you behind,” Pratt intones, referencing her deceased mother, ex- boyfriend or possibly both.

It’s an absolutely beautiful record and yes, it’s full of sadness, yet it’s also one Pratt can at last be truly proud of. “In a lot of ways I feel like this is the first record for me,” she says. “I mean, as far as creative satisfaction and feeling like I’ve really channelled something pure and real into a bulk of songs that represent me and a period of time in a cohesive way. I feel much more confident in the songs and the lyrics and I’m better at using my equipment that I record with. It’s nice to feel 100% confident in something you’re presenting to people.”