To understand this mysterious Pratt song, one must submit to his dream logic. He's one of the few songwriters who, I think, prefers the verse over the chorus. There is no release of tension or fulfillment of a promise when it reaches something resembling a chorus. Instead, her choruses gently turn you around and lead you back to the verse, where Pratt's vocal melodies play and swirl around the venue. The timbre of her voice is like a breathy saxophone, like a breezy Paul Desmond bossa nova tune. It's reedy and precise, understated and surprisingly technical. Nobody could just sing the melody to the verse of “Get Your Head Out,” right? You can hear how much consideration goes into each note, each one sung with its own unique interpretation of American vowels.
One of my favorite moments in Pratt's catalog is in the song “Jacquelyn in the Background,” from 2015 Again with your own love, where it sounds like she's freakishly detuning her guitar as she plays it. That melting sound was an unsettling moment of deception for an artist whose elemental rawness was integral to her draw. There's a more subtle use of post-production effects on the dizzyingly blunt highlight “Empires Never Know,” a rare piano song that features some backmasking on the vocals. You only hear it for a few seconds, but it's critical. Like Cindy Lee's recent hypnagogic pop record, Diamond Jubilee, the way Here in Pitts he uses the studio to bend and strip the instruments making it sound more like a broadcast than a recording. These albums feel beamed from far away or far back, so that fantastic distance the music travels makes each song feel much bigger and more important than if it had been produced as a Tiny Desk gig.
“Empires Never Know” also becomes the closest thing to a self-titled track when Pratt sings, “I never was that they say me in the dark” — if you take the “pitch” in the title to mean darkness and not pitch black . The phrasing of this line is typical of the Pratt song. Uses odd tenses and conditional grammar to comment on the past or foretell the future. These lines come across as riddles and half-thoughts: “I used to want what your desolation hadn't come,” or “Soon I'll know what's left,” or “It only lasted a while.” Pratt's narrator constantly asks about emotional states, searching high and low for the right phrase to evoke an emotion that is difficult to name. This time shift and fantastic writing do Here in Pitts it feels steamy at first, but it soon becomes its own inspiring language, a magnet that makes your inner compass jumble.
