While technically correct, to merely call Jessica Pratt a singer-songwriter is to only skim across the surface of her music. Across her brief discography, Pratt plays nylon string and sings her song with a lemony whisper; it’s airy yet as exacting as a jazz singer. Listen closer to Here in the Pitch, her fourth and most opulent album to date, and the earmarks of the form become unfamiliar — choruses never quite arriving, verses that unspool and widen, to where you realize her muse is actually time itself. Or as a quote in a recent Times article put it, a friend “was convinced that she was a lost private press folk artist from the ’60s or ’70s.” 

Pratt might evoke songwriter martyrs like Judee Sill or Margo Guryan or other forgotten folk artists, but her songs make you question time and the past in subtle ways. Yes, the reverb drums and strings that open “Life Is” could be a brick pried from Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, but as Pratt’s voice dissolves into a distant echo, she makes it all feel ethereal, just beyond grasp. The album strikes a careful balance between the California sunshine that can bring to mind ‘60s Beach Boys on one hand and the more shadowy elements of that time (think Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem). “Empires Never Know” and “Nowhere I Was” are her most haunting songs to date, ones that question the seemingly settled past in our present moment. As war and student protests rage again, Pitch might make you ponder that old Faulkner quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”