These days Jessica Pratt's rubbing shoulders with rappers and A-list comedians, but we remember way back when she dropped her delicate, sparsely beautiful self-titled debut album in 2012. So does Asher White, the Brooklyn-based Artist To Watch who makes great guitar-forward pop music that tends to be much louder than Pratt's. For seemingly no other reason than her justified admiration of Pratt, White dropped a track-by-track covers rendition of Jessica Pratt today. She nailed the artwork and everything.
Here's White's lovely explanation for how her Jessica Pratt covers album came to be:
if you know anything about the immensity of the human heart & its labyrinths & aching mystery then you probably know there’s no set of songs that plumbs it more thoroughly and tenderly than this classic album. it’s a collection of simply perfect songs, rendered in very opaque, sparse, occasionally forbidding ways. i became a real believer in this record almost exactly 5 years ago, on my 21st birthday, when i first really felt the cold winds of time rippling at my jacket. without realizing it i ended up engraving the songs all deep into my brain and whenever i’d be at work or taking a shower i’d find myself imagining all sorts of speculative arrangements and reconfigurations of them.
this past october i told my record label that i had completed this full-album-cover project years ago and had been idly sitting on it. this was a lie (i was tipsy…. on wine!!!!) they said oh wow that’s great, let’s put it out in february. this was problematic because while i had indeed attempted to cover a few of these songs in 2022, i did not actually have a deliverable album by any means . so i spent november and december really getting into it and now here’s this artifact.
And White really did get into it, turning songs like "Mountain'r Lower" into a rousing rock number. Straightforward, faithful covers are great and all, but there's something really profound about an artist taking an existing song they love and making it entirely their own. (Or, in this case, 11 songs.) Stream Jessica Pratt by Asher White below.
