Written by Susie Salva
Earthy, hopeful and fundamentally optimistic Tristan Prettyman releases her third album Cedar + Gold on Capitol/EMI records. After a hiatus from her second release where she questioned whether she would songwrite and record music again…Prettyman took a jaunt to Europe traveled the globe, had surgery to remove polyps on her vocal cords, got engaged to her long-term boyfriend, dealt with the pain of his ending the engagement, and eventually questioned whether she even wanted to be a musician at all.
Prettyman has documented a relationship with hipster Jason Mraz that after some time together ended badly. This new album Cedar + Gold explores her intimate feelings about love and loss with tremendous introspection. After that seeming tragedy she found herself really burnt out and uninspired.
“I decided to take some time off,” Prettyman says. “I went to Bali, Australia, and Europe and kind of went crazy. Life went from all these obligations to eating good food, meeting amazing people, and flowing with the wind. Then when I got back and tried to sing again, we found the polyps, so I had surgery and had to recover. Through it all, I was one foot in and one foot out of whether I wanted to do music at all. I had periods of time where I was numb and immune to feeling. My walls were up really high and I was on my guard. Then this fairy-tale picture of what my life could have been was set on fire. That brought all my walls down; it was a relief to finally feel something again.
Prettyman chronicles the experience on her new album, the raw, emotionally charged Cedar + Gold, which finds her sifting through the wreckage of her relationship and emerging stronger on the other side. “I started writing songs from a place that was so deep and honest, where I didn’t hold anything back,” she says. “It felt so good. I was like, ‘This is what music is about — being able to release what is trapped inside of you.’ Whenever anything ached or caused me pain, I’d tell myself, ‘Save it for the record.’”
With an artistry that lies in her finely etched lyrical details and intimate vocal performances, Prettyman spares no one, including herself, on songs like “Say Anything,” “I Was Gonna Marry You,” “Come Clean,” “Glass Jar,” and “Never Say Never,” which ends a heartbreaking spoken-word outro: “You can’t start a fire in the pouring rain.”
Prettyman can be compared with a long list of female artists that aren’t afraid to expose themselves openly and intimately such as Sheryl Crow, Fiona Apple, and Sarah Mclachlan and feel free enough to be completely transparent. Her relationship with Mraz has been chronicled and Prettyman had to develop some tough skin to have the relationship so open for public consumption.
Prettyman met Dave Hodges and after a session their pairing yielded the completion of the album’s opening track “Say Anything” — an open-hearted tune about finding freedom in letting go. The second session resulted in the no-holds-barred “I Was Gonna Marry You.” “It was like, ‘Wow, I’m getting really transparent here and being really specific,’” Prettyman recalls. “But once I walked through the door of honesty there was no telling where I was going. I’d never spoken out before about the way it really was, but I found myself saying ‘Screw it, I’m going to tell the whole story.’”
This album gives you the sense of hopefulness and offers the inner workings of Prettyman’s broken heart and how she can mend it again. The disc offers a variety of musical styles which the San Diego surfer girl puts forth. You can feel the pain and agony Prettyman was dealing with but hoping she can come out unscathed.
There is the earthy Never Say Never, the country twang with the steel guitar Deepest Ocean Blue and a little bit of alternative music too. Her passion and her own distinctive vocal tracks is very tactual.
With an artistry that lies in her finely etched lyrical details and intimate vocal performances, Prettyman spares no one, including herself, on songs like “Say Anything,” “I Was Gonna Marry You,” “Come Clean,” “Glass Jar,” and “Never Say Never,” which ends a heartbreaking spoken-word outro: “You can’t start a fire in the pouring rain.”
As intense as some of the songs may be, the mood is tempered not only by playful, lighthearted tunes like first single “My Oh My” (“about someone still having their hand on you and you playing that game with them because it’s fun, even though you know it’s not good for you and it’s going to backfire”), “The Rebound,” “Quit You,” and the sexy, smoldering “Bad Drug,” but also by the album’s warm, earthy sound, which Prettyman created with her producer Greg Wells (Adele, Katy Perry), who plays piano, bass, drums, and some guitar on the album. “Greg told me he was not going to hold my hand through this; I had to convince him I wanted it,” she says. “He forced me to step into really being a musician and owning what I do. Once I did that, I got super creative and the songs started coming from a different place. It was a very intuitive process.”
Cedar + Gold (whose title refers to both the cedar walls and ceilings in the home where she recovered from her heartbreak and the gold she spun from her situation in the songs) is an album that manages to be both deeply personal, but highly relatable to anyone who’s had the ground collapse under them and fought their way back to healing. “It’s actually a very hopeful album in a lot of ways, which I think is a common theme in all my records,” she says. “The idea that ‘things may be a bit crappy right now, but let’s make the most of it’ is very reflective of me as a person and my outlook on life. I always try to look at the bigger picture of why something is happening. And I love that I was able to go so deep and dig around in places I never thought I could access and still remain hopeful at the end of the day.”
