“I wrote about getting trapped inside a fish and I had to fend for myself inside a fish [laughs]. I was writing whatever, it was really fun for me. I used to do neighbourhood performances. I would perform all my songs on my neighbours’ front porch because they had a better front porch than we did.”
A breakout star of 2015, Prass has gone from the porch next door to playing some of the finest venues in the world – a surreal transition by anyone’s measure. “If I think about it too much, I get freaked out,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Oh yeah. Of course I’m going to Australia. Yeah of course. Duh.’ I’ve been wanting to go to Australia forever. When I was in college in Boston I had a piggy bank that was an Australia fund. I would buy books on Australia because I was so miserable and cold.”
Prass even convinced a close friend to make the infamously long trip. “I said, ‘We can go to school in Australia. Fuck Boston, let’s go to Australia.’ She actually went. I went to school in Tennessee and she actually did it. She’s still there and she’s going to open for me in Sydney. I’m just over the moon. Like, finally, I’m going.”
Prass’ odyssey truly began when she found herself living in Nashville, eager to break into the music industry. “I was just trying everything out. I was like, ‘I want to be a musician, I want to be a songwriter, so I’m just going to do everything that I can until I can figure something out or something sticks. I really want to figure out where I fit into that world’,” she says. “I was naive and so eager, so hungry to do it. So I wrote a lot for other people and I wrote for commercials and stuff and just anything that I could.
“I quickly learned if I’m doing that too much, where it’s not personal and doesn’t really mean anything to me, it doesn’t feel good to me. I feel kind of dirty or something, writing this music, because it doesn’t feel genuine. I just found out pretty quickly I didn’t like it. So I was like, ‘OK I really want to write my own music, from me. I want to make it work.’ Because that’s when I’m the happiest: that’s when it feels right, when I feel good.”
And so Prass began to pitch her vision for her debut album. She quickly learned, however, that she was going against the grain. “[I was] going around to producers, like, ‘I want to make a Dionne Warwick record,’ and this is when electronic music was just starting to get really cool. It was like, ‘No – when you record a record it’s just you, or you and one other person.’ I had done that kind of thing too and I couldn’t get the sounds that I wanted. I knew I wanted a lot of players. I knew I wanted this kind of throwback but still modern sound, and everybody in Nashville was just like, ‘Are you crazy? Hell to the no. You want to make a Dionne-who record? What are you talking about?’”
Eventually Prass found herself reunited with an old ally, which helped to get the ball rolling. “A mutual friend hooked me and Matthew E. White back together again. He didn’t write me back right away. It really took until he saw me play live and he was like, ‘We really need to make this record work.’ I shared the same musical values. We were raised on the same music, which was pretty cool. We write from the same place and listen to the same kind of stuff. It was just really easy.
“I sent him a ton of stuff and he was the one that put the songs together. He produced it. He needed to pick songs that he thought he could do his best on as well and that he connected with. I had an idea of what I wanted, and Matt just took it to places I would never have imagined with his arrangements.”
Ultimately, Prass’ self-titled debut album took the form of a breakup record. “I write about my stupid love life all the time. It’s not all I write about, but I write about it a lot. It just so happened those were all the songs [White] picked.”
Prass is set to tour Australia throughout February and March, and has already spent plenty of time on the road preparing for her next project. “I’m writing a lot for the next record now, that’s my main focus.” What of her songs of tulips and fish – material for an experimental third LP, perhaps? “Maybe,” she laughs.
BY NICK MASON
