“I’ve always been pretty attached to my dreams,” says singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt. “[Dreams have] consistently been this means of receiving symbolic information that feels important. They do feel somewhat connected — the mental space that I’m in when I’m writing and the way that I feel in certain kinds of dreams. Sometimes you have a dream where it feels very loaded and weighted in this way that you can’t really argue with, and I look forward to those. And sometimes it’s the same with songs, where you just get hit with something and you don’t know where it came from, and it feels like there’s no work involved, like it’s just sort of this thing that is delivered, and then that’s when you get really lucky.”
It was a pleasure to have this conversation with Pratt, whose gorgeous fourth full-length, Here In The Pitch, is one of my favorite albums of this year, and has rightfully been among 2024’s most critically lauded LPs. Given how often folks describe the album as dreamlike or hypnagogic, it was fascinating to hear Jessica talk about the similarities between her dream life and her songwriting process — one of the many subjects touched upon in this episode.
I was also fascinated to hear from Jessica about how, growing up in the same household as her great-grandmother influenced her toward an early affinity with a bygone era of film and fashion, while her mother’s adventurous taste in music inspired her own artful leanings toward “if you know, you know” type albums by Captain Beefheart or Nazz, at a time when other kids her age were probably listening to things like Eminem or Justin Timberlake. She also talks about how her songwriting process has evolved over the years and how her approach to making music continues to follow from intuition rather than ambition.
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