Jessica Pratt

Yeah, we just got back from a two-week southern [America] tour and we've had some time off. At the end of May we'll be going to Australia and then other places after that. We’ve got a little bit more downtime this year in between tours.

Well, it already feels like it was a long time ago, at least the release of the record and the working on the record part of it, which surprises me because it was all I was really thinking about for a long time. I think that playing so many shows since the release has kind of helped me process it. I'm already excited to write songs again and I guess that's maybe something that artists are familiar with, the process of putting all of this work into something and then you're sort of ready to move on from it in a fairly short period of time.

I think it's difficult to pin it down to one reason. It's kind of a combination of various factors, in the end, it's just me being very careful about every aspect of making a record and that inevitably takes more time. I would like to try to start a little earlier and maybe not take so long because, I don't know, it can be tough to be in that space for an incredibly extended period of time. 

When I make decisions like that, they're usually pretty intuitive, it just felt like the first thing people should hear. Energetically, it felt like an accurate representation of the whole record if you took all of the qualities and put them into one song.

Yeah, I think it’s a genre that I listen to and also, I think that the era of music that I favor, music from the 1960s and sometimes the 1970s, was influenced by bossa nova. Like certain rhythmic patterns, styles of guitar, vocal melodies. I feel like I listen to so much of that stuff, you know, like Burt Bacharach or whatever. it just kind of bleeds into you.

I don't bar anything from happening in terms of influence. I mean any sound is viable that feels interesting to me. I’ve only made two studio albums so far in a legitimate way. I feel like I’m only just beginning to sort of experiment with certain sounds. Not to say that I think that each record will be exponentially more layered with instruments and stuff like that, but part of the joy of making records is coming upon unexpected textures and sounds and I definitely will keep doing that.

It’s kind of all of it, it's a gradual process. I write the guitar melody and the vocal melody kind of at the same time and that's where I start, but the feeling has to be right. Once that feels secured, it’s usually sometime later that I go into the studio with the song and it's the same process repeated, but there. I record the vocal and the guitar as the foundational tracks and then you never know exactly how that's going to come out. Sometimes the feeling of the, for lack of a better term, demo and the feeling of what you come up with in the studio just even for the vocal and guitar are slightly different in mood. Once you get those two things down in the studio then you can kind of read the particular version that you have like it's concretised in this way and it dictates where you go in terms of production to some degree.
Obviously, you can produce a song whatever way you want, but for me personally there’s a limit with that. You can only force a song to try to be a certain way to such a degree. I feel like the innate mood of the song in the studio points in a direction and I try to follow that and then sort of build around it. Some things are obvious maybe even when you're writing the song at the very first because you might have an idea for instrumentation or arrangement, but a lot of that stuff can get reshuffled as soon as you redefine things in the studio.

Things are going to be shifting always in terms of promotion and social media and the Internet and virality are always probably going to exist now with music promotion. I don't think about it super deeply in terms of my own career. I mean obviously I utilise some of those things, I guess I would say you almost have to these days. It’s tricky because I don't necessarily like it, I don't think it's a good thing for artists to feel that they have to promote themselves with the consistency that social media requires, but it's kind of just what it is. Artists feel like they have to juggle multiple skills in order to stay in the public eye, but there are probably ways to do it less than we think. It'll be curious to see where we're at in like ten years.

There's really no way to predict what will come down the pipe, you know, the A$AP Rocky thing was absolutely the last thing I would have predicted happening. I’m open to anything that I think sounds interesting.

I’m glad that you think that, that's good! There’s a certain way that my voice sounds when I’m at my most comfortable and I try to do that as much as possible. It can be difficult to get the texture of your voice live and get it to sound the way you want, but I’ve worked for some time trying to figure that out especially before we took the Here in the Pitch songs on the road. We knew it was going to require some amount of acclimation and learning to try to get the sounds that we had achieved in the studio or something close to it. We did manage to do that somewhat working with very talented people who know about gear that can help to get the certain textures that you get in a studio with vintage equipment and stuff. I’ve been lucky enough to work with them.

No, it’s my first time and I do like it, but I haven't been there as much as other places. Most of the time on tour you're just really in and out, so you're catching these glimpses of the cities. In places like London, I’ve been to a million times and I’ve spent weeks there, so I’ve had time to get more of a sense of a place, but there are a lot of places that I really like going to that I just haven't been able to explore in the way that you would want to. You know you get into the venue, you set up, you play, you stay there until late, then you go to the hotel and then you leave the very next morning. I believe that it was that when we played in Madrid. We literally flew out the next morning, so I hope I get to spend more time the next few years.

I have to say that I don't often think about other artists in terms of me wanting to collaborate with them, but I would say that a lot of artists that I know do think about that stuff a lot. I certainly have many artists that I admire. I think like everybody else I’ve been completely engrossed by Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee. I would love to just be a fly on the wall for the recording of those songs.

We have the Australian shows and we're back to Europe in June and July, which I’m excited for. We get to make up some shows that I had to cancel in the UK last year, which was very sad. More shows will be coming. In terms of next year, I don't know yet. There might be some shows, but I am also excited about writing some songs, so I’m going to try to do that.