Nashville-based singer-songwriter Katie Pruitt doesn’t shy away from vulnerability. With every crooning vocal line and emotional lyric, she ropes the listener in.
Her newest record, Mantras, came out in April 2024 and examines themes of self-compassion and healing. With songs like “Blood Related,” which reflects on rocky relationships with people across party lines, and “All My Friends,” which alludes to her changing community, Mantras feels particularly relevant for this moment in time.
In early October, Pruitt released a stripped-down acoustic version of “Standstill” with Ruston Kelly. The two are longtime collaborators, often examining each other’s work and offering feedback. In this track, delicate piano chords accompany Pruitt and Kelly’s warm harmonies. This song, in particular, highlights Pruitt’s musical intuition. Though she can easily belt high notes and show off her range, it’s her emotional restraint that’s so moving.
Pruitt is wrapping up the Mantras tour, where she plays her heartfelt anthems to fans who need the musical medicine. I spoke with Pruitt during her recent appearance at the Austin City Limits Music Festival stops to learn more about her musical collaborators and recent revelations.
What is your mantra these days?
A big one for me and when I was writing the album is ‘love is the absence of control.’ So just trying to release the outcome of certain things. Whether that’s people and relationships or whether that’s just for myself. But just stop trying to cling so tightly to things and let them pan out the way they’re supposed to be. It just makes me feel a little lighter about things. [There’s] so much uncertainty in the future, and that can be overwhelming. So it’s like you don’t have to have every […] little thing planned out.
This record has lots of themes of self-compassion. What do you do when you feel like that inner critic in your mind just won’t shut up? It’s a pretty universal experience.
It’s absolutely a universal experience. And you know, these songs have reminded me of that even more because people have been like, ‘You know, this has helped me, and I feel less alone.’
I feel like for me personally, I just have to let myself validate that feeling and be like, ‘Okay, I’m being critical, but also, let me zoom out for a second.’
We live in such a grind culture, where it’s like […] you have to be productive, you have to be the best version of yourself. But I feel like the best version of myself comes out when I’m lighter and kinder to myself, and I’m not so […] anxious all the time. I just feel like talking to myself like a buddy would talk to me, or like a best friend.
Yeah. It sounds like a really healthy way to do it, because you would never say those things to a friend.
Yeah, you would never be like, ‘You idiot!’ Right? You probably wouldn’t be friends anymore. Like, that would be a pretty toxic friend to keep around. I want the friend, or the person or the voice in my head, to be somebody I want to keep around and live with for a while.
One song that really I keep coming back to is “Blood Related,” and I feel like that’s really poignant. Do you have friction with your family or people in your community? And if you do, how do you work through that, especially when the tension is really high?
Definitely. I mean, my parents are very Republican, and it’s obviously about to be election season, so we’re about to sort of go through that all again. I felt it become really intense in 2020, and that’s when I wrote the song.
But I don’t know. It’s kind of the same thing. I have to be like, ‘Okay, we disagree.
Give those feelings. It’s valid that we both feel this way.’ But at a certain point, you’re not going to get anywhere by fighting. So I sort of, when I’m having conversations with my parents about things that frustrate me, instead of being like, ‘I can’t believe you think that way,’ I’m like, ‘Well, why do you think that way’
Ask them questions. Turn it on them. And if that doesn’t get anywhere, I’ll be like, ‘All right, this conversation is going nowhere.’ I got to walk away and come back, and we got to change the subject.
I was at a wedding, and my parents were there a week ago. And my dad’s not in great health. He’s getting older. And I was just sitting out there on the patio with him, and I was like, ‘Dad, I don’t want to spend the moments that we have together left fighting about some billionaire who doesn’t give a shit about us’
When you put it that way, and you zoom out, it’s like […] I don’t want Trump to be a part of our relationship. It doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to just be Trump.
Any other issues. You can separate, sometimes, the personal from the political. It’s hard, but you can.
It seems like you build really beautiful communities at your shows. What’s a memorable fan moment from one of your recent concerts?
I think last time I played Austin, a headline show, a girl came up to me and tried to explain it in words, but then wrote it down on a napkin. I kept the napkin.
And it’s like, ‘you helped my relationship with my parents get better. You helped my brother be less homophobic.’ All these things, I’m like, that’s wild.
It means the world when I hear stuff like that. Because that’s the point of the music I make. The music that I love, I feel like does that.
I want to put stuff out into the world that hopefully makes people think twice or gives people another perspective. So that made me really happy. Every time that happens, I’m reaffirmed in what I’m doing.
Yeah, I can see that for sure. I saw that you’re adding Wilco’s “Sky Blue Sky” to your set. Why did you choose that song, and what is it about Wilco that really inspires you?
They’re one of my favorite bands. But that song, I don’t know, I feel like every fall, I get way back into Wilco again. It’s a fall vibe. It’s just the guitar tones, the lyrics. That one in particular, I feel like it was “Sky Blue Sky.”
I love the chorus where it’s like, I survived, or I didn’t die, I survived. That’s good enough for now. And it’s like, I don’t know, there’s a lot of destruction around us all the time.
And we’re scrolling through our phones and we’re watching some really intense destruction around us. And it’s like, yes, that’s horrible. And we can try to show up for those people and donate and do what we can.
But I also have to be like, well, I’m here right now, too. And I want to be present in this moment and enjoy my life and be here while I am. Because we don’t know what’s going to happen.
So I love that song. I feel like it’s all about being present and being where you are.
I saw that you are doing a giveaway campaign, and one of the prizes is a tarot card reading with you. How did you get into tarot?
I never considered myself a witchy girl. But I feel like I have a lot of friends that are super into it.
Especially getting my tarot read by close friends, it just sort of brings things to the surface that I know are there, but are just little things that I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ve noticed this in my body. I’ve noticed this feeling. It’s kind of a consistent theme.’
I feel like it sort of helps you hyper-focus on those consistent areas that you want to focus on emotionally. Because there’s a lot going on, and it’s hard to take a second and be like, ‘Okay, how do I feel right now? What emotions do I need to work through?’
I feel like tarot kind of reveals that in this really beautiful, symbolic way. The way the cards are laid out. My friend pulled a death card one time, and I was like, ‘This is terrifying.’
And she was like, ‘No, it’s the death of an old version of you. It doesn’t have to be death. It’s based on your interpretation of it.’
So that’s helped me. I vibe with it. I like tarot.
Do you ever feel like tarot influences your creative process?
Oh, yeah. And the visuals of it. I love how it’s kind of ancient and kind of a practice that people have been doing forever.
It’s a way to tap into your spirituality without being this heavy, organized religious thing. So I think for me, as somebody who was once raised in this hyper-religious background, having tarot is like, ‘Oh, this is a way to tap into my spirituality, but it’s not an obligation of me having to go to church every Sunday or under the guise of what I was raised to believe.’ So it’s nice.
One of my other favorite songs on this record is “All My Friends.” I know this was inspired by Christian Wiman’s poem “All My Friends are Finding New Beliefs.” What was it about this poem that made you want to write a song about it?
I just feel like 2020 was just like a shift for me, where I was kind of approaching my late 20s, and my friends were just changing their minds about things. It’s kind of inevitable that when you grow up, you sort of drift with people that start to […] go on a different path. The poem, where it leaves off on, which I didn’t include in the song, goes on all these different paths of different beliefs, different religions, different ways of life. And then at the end, it’s like, ‘My beautiful, credible friends.’ All of those are credible. All of those are valid.It just depends on the way you use them.
I thought that was really beautiful. I can still love this person, and maybe we don’t see each other every day, or maybe we don’t see eye to eye on this issue, but I can still send them love.
I think that’s a really beautiful sentiment, and it makes me kind of be able to, like I said, let go of an outcome a little easier. It doesn’t have to be a sad thing. It can just be like, alright, we’re drifting, and you believe that, and I believe this, and that’s the way it is.
Where else do you draw inspiration from?
Nature is a big one. I’m such a Pisces, so any river, body of water, it brings me peace and inspiration. It just kind of makes me feel small, which kind of adds less pressure to the creative process, because it’s like, what’s the worst that can happen?
If I write a song and I don’t like it, whatever, it was for me, you know? So I think that’s kind of a nice reminder that creating is supposed to be a fun thing. And the way that nature flows and a river flows, it’s not fighting anything, it’s just flowing.
I feel like that ties back to your mantra, too. You’ve got to let go of control and just let it happen. What is your musician community like? How are the people around you influencing your music and supporting you?
I love Nashville for this very reason. I feel like it’s really nice to have other artists that are doing this and out touring, and also just other songwriters that I’m really inspired by. Ruston Kelly is one of them for me. Courtney Marie Andrews is [another] one for me.
It’s nice to be like, ‘Hey, what do you honestly think about this song?’ And you send it to another songwriter, and they’ll kind of redline your work and be like, ‘I really like this, what do you mean by this line?’ I think that’s really important, that honest feedback. David Ramirez is another one of friends that I just really trust his input. So yeah, it’s beautiful.
And then on top of that, it’s kind of a crazy career to have, so it’s nice to commiserate about how tough this industry can be sometimes, and bouncing ideas off of your friends.
How did that collaboration of “Standstill” with Ruston Kelly come about?
We wrote the song a couple years ago, and I kind of brought him the idea, and then he sort of helped me kick it to the finish line, which was fun. And yeah, I was like, ‘Dude, I cannot believe we’ve never recorded our voices together.’
And I wanted to do kind of a deluxe edition of the record, so I figured, hey, let’s do a piano ballad duet of this song, and he was very into it. So yeah, we knocked it out, […] and I’m happy that it’s out in the world.
