“I’m very sorry for the delay. Thank you for your patience,” says Jessica Pratt as she sits down in a chair center stage at the Music Hall at World Café Live this past Friday night. The show – the Los Angeles-based folk singer/songwriter’s first headlining performance in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection since her May 2019 date at Boot & Saddle – has been sold out since March, but had the headliner taking the stage thirty minutes late after technical issues had venue lights flashing on and off for more than an hour prior to her set. “Sorry, yall! We got the poltergeist in here, I think,” the artist offers a couple songs into her hour-long set.
World Café Live — which has had Pratt’s latest, Here in the Pitch, in heavy rotation since its May 3rd release on Mexican Summer — was filled with perhaps more millennial hipsters than it’s ever previously housed since opening in 2004, resembling a VICE Magazine holiday party circa 2007. However, no one in attendance bothered vying for the room’s attention, as it was clear that that would all remain securely on Pratt, from the dimly lit stage, where she remained seated for the duration of the relatively brief and to-the-point set.
The performance kicked off with “World On A String,” the second single off of Here in the Pitch, Pratt’s fourth full-length, a dreamy lullaby which prompted Stereogum to say, “The music that Jessica Pratt makes is so instinctual, so self-possessed that it’s no wonder that some songs come just like that. ‘World On A String’ seems to be one of those, an acoustic guitar warble that would maybe sound slight in someone else’s hands but feels weighty in Pratt’s.” Next up was arguably the album’s strongest track, “Get Your Head Out,” a jazz-infused number, whose sound Pratt admitted in an April chat with The Ling of Best Fit was inspired by attempting to achieve an organ sound akin to, “a haunted Victorian house in San Francisco,” the artist’s hometown.
While the set featured a medium handful of tracks from 2019’s breakthrough LP Quiet Signs (including singles “This Time Around” and “Poly Blue,” which were played back-to-back mid-set) and a small handful of tracks from 2015’s On Your Own Love Again, whose title track closed the show, the focus was decidedly on Here in the Pitch, an album inspired by Pratt’s decade living in her current LA home and an ode of sorts to the darker aspects of the city’s history, and the audience was more than okay with that.
Jessica Pratt has been establishing herself as one of our generation’s foremost singer/songwriters for more than a decade, and that fact that she can entrance the audience of a packed, yet decidedly understated performance with a set that largely ignored the first half of her catalogue proves that she is just that, an ever-evolving artist and musical muser whose admirers would far prefer to live in her present than her past.
