Jessica Pratt sings in a voice as gentle as unspun wool, but her stories feel deeply rooted, like they were born from a collective subconscious to reveal fundamental truths about human longing. Experimental pop musician Asher White gets at similarly heady ideas: leaving your city to seek reinvention, wondering whether your fate is predetermined. But where Pratt works primarily in the folk tradition, White’s approach is decidedly contemporary, drawing from Palberta and 100 gecs’ internet-laden glitchiness. Her music has the jangling, intentionally constructed commotion of an artist who synthesizes new sounds to understand something essential about the world she lives in.
As timeless as Pratt’s songs have always been, she's followed a clear evolution since 2012’s self-titled debut that’s led her to glimmering pop songs like 2015’s “Back Baby” and the haunted bossa nova of 2024’s “By Hook or by Crook.” It makes sense that an artist as dynamic and freewheeling as White would be drawn to revisit Pratt’s earliest work, when these ideas were first taking shape. On a track-by-track cover of Jessica Pratt, White leans into the spontaneity of this music with the jubilance of an ardent fan who sees the project as “an album of American standards [in which] every single song is a true classic.”
White fell in love with Jessica Pratt on the cusp of her 21st birthday, walking the streets of Providence in the blistering cold. Fittingly, there’s a fluorescent sense of momentum to her renditions. Pratt’s “Night Faces” is a song of remembrance. The guitar twinkles like the notes from a grandparent’s music box, and Pratt elongates her words until they feel like a chant or a spell. Pratt didn’t incorporate drums into her music until her fourth album, but White hits the ground running on her version of “Night Faces.” A drum kit and chugging bass lead in a guitar line as colorful and bright as a handful of marbles catching sunlight in your hands. Her layered vocal harmonies come in at acute angles that are just as odd as they are appealing. White’s energy moves the song into the future—the chorus, “cry no tears,” becomes a rallying cry.
White’s arrangements don’t always sound so euphoric or neatly resolved. “Hollywood” is a song about the simultaneous allure and decay of Los Angeles and the singer’s coming of age as she realizes a world she once idolized is less rosy than it seemed. The modulated, drooping vocals on White’s version evoke melting Dali clocks and the unsettling psychedelia of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” It’s the sound of a worldview dissipating. But the propulsion is there, too, in the way the synth pulses and glimmers. When White sings about Hollywood tumbling down, she relays the sense of freedom, in knowing that change is inevitable no matter how uncomfortable it is to witness or experience.
At times, the grandiosity of the arrangements can feel distracting. On the original version of “Casper,” the restraint of Pratt’s delivery feels inextricable from the emotion she conveys. Over just a fingerpicked guitar, she sings, “You know I walk the streets of gold/And I can’t find my baby’s bones.” Her voice gently warbles and dips, carrying the ache of a woman “blossoming down” into her deepest sadness. I’m reminded of Hannah Horvath’s lip quiver in the final season of Girls during a scene where she realizes the relationship she dreamed of no longer aligns with the person she wants to become. It’s a moment of a loss so searing that a quiet gesture is the only way to represent it. The meandering guitar that begins White’s version works beautifully alongside her falsetto. But halfway through, the song erupts into a vortex of reverb and electronic screeching. It presents the heartache too explicitly, overwhelming the subtle devastation of the lyrics.
White tells the story of making this album with characteristic irreverence—she jokes that she started the project as a means of procrastinating on other work and then exaggerated her progresses to label representatives. When asked to present the songs, White spent a frantic month finishing them. The results do sound chaotic, and at times haphazardly created, but they also allow White’s best qualities to shine through. Her sprawling imagination, sense of self, and creative ambition push these covers into captivating forms. It’s also a testament to the durability of Pratt’s melodies and ideas that they resonate so well in a completely new environment. “I am calling out to you/From another place” she croons on “Bushel Hyde.” White sings from another place too, and it’s one she’s made all her own.
