Jessica Pratt is only 27 years old, but still her music carries the footnote that it was ever-so-close to being lost in time forever. As modern rock tales ought to go, it was one of the San Francisco garage scene's leading local weirdos, Tim Presley, who saved her from relative obscurity. Though Pratt was born in Redding, Calif., her poised, homespun folk songs feel beamed from another time and place, specifically hippie-era Britain; as a teenager, Pratt says, she honed her craft by playing along with T. Rex's Electric Warrior glam riffs and singing early Marianne Faithfull melodies. When Presley stumbled upon a batch of her recordings from 2007, he allegedly dumped his life's savings into releasing them as her 2012 debut. And yet, it took something more for Pratt's spirit to truly be found.
Pratt's gorgeous Drag City debut quietly rejects tradition. For all its folk touchstones, Pratt is more an aesthete than a poet—she sings of bleeding watercolors, blue geraniums—and accordingly On Your Own Love Again plays like acoustic dream-pop. Its warm, home-recorded atmosphere is more dramatic and distinctive than Jessica Pratt: finger-picked psychedelia, lucidly layered harmonies, hissy tape effects, an overcast haze. But Pratt's songwriting is more cohesive and concise, her whispered secrets more alluring. The record's cyclical nature gives On Your Own more momentum, as she sings sticky rock'n'roll hooks learned from Brian Wilson or the Hollies. (Pratt says she listened to Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle while at work on the album, like her Drag City labelmate Joanna Newsom did when making Ys). Her soprano is hard to pin in a folk context—it variously recalls the high-pitched eccentricities of Kate Bush, the grave depth of Nico—but she ultimately sounds like Vashti Bunyan or Nick Drake as found in the sleepy subconscious of Ariel Pink. "Sometimes I pray for the rain," Pratt repeats near the end of this wintry album, which feels designed to soundtrack the slow-falling snow or any steadied act of nature.
Much of what Pratt communicates is abstract, elliptical, or wordless. Sometimes her crystalline guitar strum sounds like a harp, each note falling quick and elegant like one of said snowflakes; sometimes the songs melt. On the astral "Moon Dude", Pratt makes chord changes evocative as neo-psych time-travel, like Tim Presley's own White Fence project. On Your Own Love Again was made in sunny West Coast terrain, but it captures the somber shades of isolated urban life. Pratt worked on the record in the wake of several difficult endings: a move from San Francisco to L.A., the end of a longterm relationship, and the death of her mother. Occasionally, it sounds like Pratt is plaintively, playfully singing stoned "da-da-da" tunes just to drown out the sorrow or numb the chaos. On "Game That I Play", for one, she imbues, "I often try to leave my thoughts of you behind," but her wish is left hanging; there is no resolve. And on "Jacquelyn in the Background", Pratt similarly drifts, struggling for the right words: "Deep inside my lonely room/ I cry the tears of never knowing you," she sings before a stream of vocalizations. On Your Own Love Again has more earnest moments, but its unadorned emotional uncertainty is profound and relatable.
Elsewhere, Pratt's austere meditations conjure confusion, wrongness, illusive realities. She sings of lonely outsiders and starry-eyed boys she wants to love but audibly cannot. Pratt understands her own flaws and so seems to better understand those of others; it's humanizing. She might call out a guy's disloyal tricks and lies, but she also points to her own: "I don't wanna be changing the game that I play," Pratt sings early on, "But I see that you're leaving, so what can I say." She doesn't airbrush her faults. The title track, a 95-second epilogue, appears last on the record, and it's the album's most confessional song—"I try to believe in you somehow/ But every time I do I get down and out"—as if, after working through her clouded thoughts, she's emerged from the fog to think clearly. The "love" in On Your Own Love Again could be a noun, pointing outward, or a verb, pointing in, but it regardless has a way of romanticizing aloneness, as the album does throughout in more impressionistic terms.
But there is a vessel to that clear-headed solitude: "Back, Baby" is the record's penultimate track, the brightened moment at which everything becomes focused, giving physicality to the record's wandering spirit. One would expect "Back, Baby" to come at the end of a film as the credits roll—closure at the end of an ill-fated romance. There is an understated power to it, not just because Pratt is cutting off a person who no longer serves her, but because she is staring at the open space to become someone new. Fifty years after Dylan sang pop's greatest "don't look back" moment, Jessica Pratt offers an even more emphatic "can't go back," but she belongs to no one. On Your Own Love Again spends its 31 minutes in dialogue with the past, but it plays in perpetual motion forward. As with all break-ups, its end is a beginning.
