Life Is— Jessica Pratt
#365Songs: February 22nd
Time is time and time and time again
Jessica Pratt has always been a minimalist, a throwback voice with a soft guitar. Listen to a song or two in her catalog and you’d be hard pressed to guess she was from anywhere other than coastal California. A voice out of time, from that golden Laurel Canyon era — don’t let that touch of Karen Dalton’s late ’60s, early ’70s Greenwich Village vibe throw you off.
Across her first three albums, not much changed: intimate, moody, restless yet dreamy songs that unravel gracefully. I first heard her self-titled album in early 2013, shortly after moving to San Francisco. I spent a lifetime yearning for California, and suddenly here it was: that contrast between fog-drenched nights and expansive natural Bay and city beauty with the dystopian tech gold rush. Sitting on a luxury bus headed from the Mission to Menlo Park, and while the engineers coded around me I sat reclined in my leather seat daydreaming out the window — contemplating the surreal privilege that I’d somehow landed here, in the sort of job I’d always been told I couldn’t get, all while fearing I was on the wrong side of the window, knowing that this bus and everything in it represented the problem—pushing out the artists and blue collar workers with whom I resonated with on the deepest level. I first heard Jessica Pratt on one of the shuttle rides, the perfect soundtrack for the moment: a voice at odds with the atmosphere in which it thrives.
Life is, it’s never what you think it’s for
And I can’t seem to set it off
And lately I’ve been insecure
The chances of a lifetime might be hiding their tricks up my sleeve
Used to be the greatest, now I see
Time is time and time and time again
(And what would you say if you can’t get out of here?)
Time is time and time and time again
(To make your escape you’ve captured the captor’s fear)
I’ve kept up with Jessica over the years, and though I can’t totally distinguish one album from the next, I was thrilled to hear her name pop up on new releases last week. The new track, Life Is, feels similar, but different, more layered: she even added a drummer. And like in most of her songs, she’s contemplating time in the song. There’s a Beach Boys-ish atmosphere to Life Is, a playful breezy vibe set to existentially at-odds lyrics.
A lot has changed since I last heard her voice. For one, there are fewer shuttles since the pandemic and people like me have likely been laid off. That last tech wave left and moved across the country as fast as the virus that shuttered the Bay for a few years; wildfires were replaced with monsoons; Fascism gained stream, funded by many of same white men who frazzled San Francisco’s soul for so many years.
Contrary to popular belief, the Bay Area is not an apocalyptic wasteland. Yes, crime is up; poverty is high; far too many people are unhoused, and the local political structures fail time and time again to solve systemic problems. But after every boom there is a bust, after every bust a boom, and it’s never the same twice. Artists are coming back, slowly, and no matter how hard they tried the tech bros couldn’t fully push out the queer community, the punk kids, activists, weirdos, and hippie freaks. The soul is still here, it’s always been here, and it always will be here. It just takes time.
Jessica Pratt’s voice conjures a time and place for me, but also summons an era that predated me — a siren’s call to California’s murky yet dreamy backdrop of endless possibilities and broken promises.
I’m thrilled to now be on the other side of that window.
’Cause I can feel my luck has turned it all around
And when you’ve fallеn out, get both feet on the ground
The cursеs you keep won’t follow you now
And so I try to be myself
It’s the same as always I get tricked up
And each and every time it takes me away
I’m often livin’ on just to be outside these walls again
It’s the age of what’s to come and baby, you’re on
Time is time and time and time again
Time is time and time and time again
