Jessica Pratt

Jessica Pratt has a voice that is at once soothing and somehow familiar, welcome like a warm blanket on a cold night. She is a singer-songwriter hailing from San Francisco with a voice that belies her years. Her debut is an impressive offering of eleven tracks, that are easy to keep on rotation, growing more beautiful with each listen.

Pratt and her acoustic guitar are mostly unaccompanied, and there are occasional imperfections-- buzzing strings, the faint crack of her voice-- that add to its atmosphere of unvarnished intimacy. Her chord progressions are neither neat resolutions nor mournful elegies, which is to say that her songs traverse that vast, somewhat under-explored territory between happy and sad.

For Fans of Vashti Bunyan and Karen Dalton.