Before a hushed audience sitting at candle-lit tables, a songwriter on a softly illuminated stage sings her troubles while finger-picking and strumming an acoustic guitar. It’s the kind of scene you could have witnessed anywhere, from the coffeehouses of 1960s New York to, these days, a venue in just about any city in the world, any day of the week. And yet something beyond cosy familiarity is drawing listeners deeper into Jessica Pratt’s strange, dream-like performance.
“So you’re running ’round the world, with your head above the ground,” the San Franciscan sings on ghostly opener Wrong Hand, her gentle finger-picking embellished by deft brushstrokes of electric guitar from sideman Cyrus Gengras across a song that drifts through ethereal themes of memory and mortality. “People’s faces blend together like a watercolour you can’t remember,” runs the opening line of the beautiful Game That I Play, and even the bar staff stand silently transfixed.
The bewitching, sometimes surreal lyrics in Pratt’s delicately handcrafted freak-folk songs are matched by the way she delivers them: with the calm, naturalistic flow of Nick Drake or Vashti Bunyan, and a peculiar, almost childlike mannerism akin to fellow Drag City artist Joanna Newsom. Dressed all in black, with choppy blond hair tumbling past her shoulders and a long fringe down to her kohl-rimmed eyes, Pratt could be a character in a French New Wave film. She barely speaks to the audience throughout a short set, but then there’s little need for formalities when you’re singing songs as intimate as a whisper in an ear. Her latest album, On Your Own Love Again, was recorded at home, after all.
Moon Dude is a kind of out-of-body meditation on isolation, imaging an outsider looking in on “escalators … pulling you from nothing but your loneliness”. Strange Melody – an apt name for many of Pratt’s songs – has a chant-like quality, as over a circling two-chord sequence she fixates on the phrase “run around, run around”, as if fascinated by the simple texture of the words.
Cheered back on stage for an encore, Pratt finishes with two solo numbers. The second, Titles Under Pressure, is a heartbreakingly sad song about quitting a bad scene and “people who drink”, because “I cannot make more mistakes”. With no green room available to retreat to, she huddles with Gengras in the back corner of the venue as the crowd crane their necks applauding for more – her most radio-friendly song Back, Baby remains unplayed – but there’ll be no second encore. Pratt’s spell is cast.
• At St John on Bethnal Green, London (020-8980 1742), on 8 April; Bleach, Brighton (01273 682 839), 9 April. Tour details: dragcity.com
