Katie Pruitt

Katie Pruitt is living proof of music’s power to transform the way we experience the world. Soon after the arrival of her acclaimed debut Expectations—a 2020 LP on which she documented her journey in growing up queer in the Christian South—the Georgia-bred singer/songwriter/guitarist heard from countless listeners that her songs had impacted their lives on an elemental level. “A lot of people told me how the record helped them navigate their relationships with family—I even had some parents tell me that it helped them understand their children better,” she recalls. With her sophomore album Mantras, the Nashville-based musician now looks inward to explore such matters as gender identity, self-compassion or the lack thereof, and the struggle for peace in times of chaos and uncertainty—ultimately arriving at a body of work that speaks to the strength in undoing harmful self-beliefs and fully living your truth.

“One of the big themes of this record is the idea of building a home inside yourself rather than seeking it in others,” says Pruitt. “Over the past couple years I’ve tried to change the way I speak to myself and turn my negative internal dialogue into a kinder voice, because that ends up influencing everything: the kindness starts with us and ripples outward into the world. Mantras is about finding that light within ourselves instead of falling into the trap of chasing validation from our parents or friends or religion or social media.”

Mainly produced by Collin Pastore and Jake Finch (both known for their work with boygenius and Lucy Dacus), Mantras delves deeper into the empathetic storytelling and incisive self-examination that defined Expectations—an album that earned Pruitt a nomination for Emerging Artist of the Year from the Americana Music Association, in addition to drawing praise from major outlets like Rolling Stone (who hailed Pruitt as a “dynamic new presence”) and Pitchfork (who noted that “[h]er songs are patient but determined, navigating serious subjects with quiet familiarity”). This time around, Pruitt sets her lived-in lyricism to a folk-leaning sound informed by her love for the more experimental edges of indie-rock, stacking her songs with plenty of propulsive grooves and overdriven guitars. “Most of this record came from Collin, Jake, and I tracking everything in their studio—this tiny little shed filled with a whole bunch of fun musical toys,” says Pruitt, who also created the album with musicians like string arranger Laura Epling (Orville Peck, Spencer Cullum). “We built the tracks from the ground up as opposed to cutting everything live, which gave us so much more room to let the songs evolve and become what they needed to be.”

Although several songs took shape with the help of co-writers like singer/songwriter Ruston Kelly (Bethany Cosentino, Amanda Shires), Pruitt wrote most of Mantras on her own and imbued her lyrics with an expansive element of autobiography. In penning the album-opening “All My Friends (Are Finding New Beliefs),” she mined inspiration from a Christian Wiman poem of the same name, dreaming up a fuzzed-out and summery track etched with both self-aware reflection and sharp-witted observation (from the opening lines: “Gold cross on your first communion/Got stoned at the school reunion/Moved away and unfriended the Jesus freaks”). “I wrote that song thinking about how everybody’s trying to find the thing that grounds them and gives them clarity and purpose, like how all these ex-Christian kids I know are getting into horoscopes and astrology,” says Pruitt. “Maybe in some cases you don’t agree with or understand someone else’s beliefs—but if it makes them a kind, happy, loving person, then what’s the harm?”

Next, on “White Lies, White Jesus and You,” Pruitt shares the song that set the tone for the album’s sonic direction: a hazy yet frenetic meditation on hypocrisy in religion, graced with bristling guitar tones and Pruitt’s soulful piano work. “I went out to Kentucky to see my friend S.G. Goodman and showed her that song, and she had some ideas that really guided the sound of the record,” says Pruitt. “We were very intentional about not locking it into the Americana grid, which influenced how we approached everything all the way down to the picking of the guitar parts.” And in composing the song’s lyrics, Pruitt tapped into her intense frustration with conservative Christian ideology. “As someone who was raised in the church but ended up breaking away from religion, I have a feeling that Jesus wouldn’t agree with the way Christianity is often used to isolate and shame people,” she says. “To me religion is meant to build compassion for others and treat them with love and kindness, instead of holding people down or gaslighting them for political reasons.”

A profoundly introspective album, Mantras turns the lens on Pruitt’s own inner life with songs like “Self Sabotage”—a gloriously cathartic track whose graceful convergence of acoustic and electric guitar work deftly magnifies its emotional tension. “It’s a song about struggling with negative thought loops, and bringing all that darkness and all those fears out in the open so that you can work through them,” she says. Meanwhile, on “Blood Related,” soul-stirring strings, lush mandolin, and tender piano form the backdrop to a raw but poetic rumination on how family can sometimes feel like strangers (“Time it flies and fire dies like candles on a cake/College debt and cigarettes, and all our shared mistakes/It’s a vicious cycle that nobody can escape/Blood-related and trying to relate”). “Even though my parents now accept me and my sexuality, our political views are still absolutely on opposite ends of the spectrum,” says Pruitt, who enlisted her mother as a background vocalist on “Blood Related” and embedded the track with audio recordings of her father and brother from old home videos. “But as time goes on, I’ve realized that I can have difficult conversations with my parents and still feel love and compassion for them. It meant a lot to me to have the voices of all four of my immediate family members on that song.”

While Mantras often pushes into emotionally heavy terrain, its songs frequently echo the radiant sense of joy and discovery that defined the album-making process. On “Naive Again,” for instance, Pruitt adorned the track’s melancholy contemplation with the bright and dreamy tones of glockenspiel and xylophone. “I wrote that song in the middle of the night, thinking about how as you grow up you no longer see the world through the protective veil that your parents put in front of you—you see things as they really are,” she says. “It’s almost like a wish to go back in time and unlearn things, and it’s also about the heartbreak of my parents getting older.” Next, on “Worse Case Scenario,” Pruitt shares a defiantly hopeful track whose soundscape includes a serendipitously captured bit of audio. “As we were recording that song, Collin was messing with some gear and somehow picked up the signal of an AM radio station where they were talking about an underdog baseball team that no one had expected to win the game,” Pruitt explains. “The announcer said something like, ‘Nobody cares if nobody watches, but people did care and people did watch’—which felt like a relevant addition to a song about calming your anxiety & surrendering control of future outcomes.”

Looking over the tracklist to Mantras , Pruitt notes that a certain narrative thread emerged almost without her intention. I didn’t realize it at the time but the through line for this record ended up being my own personal journey of letting go & learning how to love myself again. The record begins with tension, frustration & fear & resolves to a place of acceptance, surrender & stillness,” she says, referring to the album’s quietly luminous closing track “Standstill.” “I hope when people hear the record, they feel what I felt after writing it, which was a sense of trusting myself and trusting that—no matter how bad things look—there’s always hope where there’s fear. I know that so much of the time we feel alone in our pain, so hopefully these songs help everyone to see that they can work through those big life changes and end up loving themselves a lot more.”

Jess Nolan

When Jess Nolan began writing her third album at home in Nashville, she'd been on the move for years, balancing an acclaimed solo career with her work as a harmony-singing keyboardist for Jenny Lewis, Katie Pruitt, and Joy Oladokun. Living alone for the first time ever and looking to prioritize her downtime, she began writing new songs that bridged the gap between intimacy and expansiveness. She'd already explored the softer, meditative side of her music with her previous record, '93. This new material was something different: darker, autumnal, nocturnal, and playful. It felt right to record the songs in the same place she'd written them, so Nolan turned her house into a makeshift studio and got to work. Joined by co-producer Megan McCormick and a small cast of bandmates and friends — nearly all of them female — she tracked the album in a matter of days, avoiding overdubs altogether and letting childlike curiosity lead the way. The result is an unfiltered view into Nolan's past and present, with songs that turn personal details into something communal and cathartic.