Katie Pruitt’s “Look The Other Way” Confronts Complaceny

All 10 of the tracks on Expectations were solo writes for Pruitt — and that’s something of an anomaly for an album made in Music City, with its robust songwriter industry. But Pruitt says that writing alone isn’t just her comfort zone: It’s always what made the most sense for this particular set of songs, which are extremely specific to her experience and tell her coming-of-age story over the course of several years.

“These songs are probably the 10 songs out of the past four years that have all sort of felt like personal revelations in my life,” the singer explains. “And songs that came to me in a crucial time, when I needed them and was going through something and needed to talk about it.”

One song on Pruitt’s new album, “Loving Her” sounds pretty different on the album than it does when she performs it live: “When I’m singing “Loving Her” live … I’m kind of screaming the whole time,” Pruitt says with a laugh. “Well, not screaming. But it’s a different delivery live than it is on the record.”

That makes sense for the song’s subject matter, which is an open declaration of love for her girlfriend — and a kiss-off to anyone who’d rather she not sing about gay relationships. For all its cathartic power, though, Pruitt says she wanted the song to have a more conversational feel in its recorded version. “Because also, it’d be nice for it to reach and get across to people who don’t agree with me,” she points out. “I felt like delivering that song in a more reined-in kind of way might even reach people who would disagree with me.”

Over the course of Pruitt’s childhood and early adulthood, she often found herself in scenarios that felt unnatural to her. She didn’t fit in at her Catholic school in her hometown of Athens, Ga., but the hookup and partying culture of her college experience didn’t feel quite right, either. She reflects on “normalcy” — and how it changes based on your surroundings, in her song “Normal.”

“I’m sort of visualizing certain scenes in my life and trying to put people there, saying, like, ‘This was normal when I was at Catholic school. You kneel, you pray, you do the sign of the cross,'” she says of that song. “And then, in college … there’s fraternities, sororities, everyone’s going out at night and the hookup culture … that was normal. And in both instances, I felt very out of place.”

Another big instance of feeling out of place, of course, came from being a gay woman growing up in the South with a family that had a hard time coming to terms with Pruitt’s sexuality.

Pruitt didn’t always feel as though she heard stories like her own in the music she listened to back then — and that’s why she felt it was so important to be specific and honest about the things she was singing about. “I think it’s important to represent and be really transparent about those issues, especially in the South. Because, I mean, growing up, I didn’t really feel like I had that artist or that record. Or, like, when I really needed it, I didn’t feel like I had it,” she explains. “I had amazing songs, but I didn’t have that one thing that was like, ‘God, this is something very specific about my life, and someone’s talking about it.'”

These days, a lot of country listeners stream songs one at a time or skip around in an album’s track list to find the songs they like. Pruitt says she understands the appeal, but she hopes some listeners will still listen to her album in the order of the track list.

“I know some people don’t sit down and listen from Track 1 to Track 10, but I do,” she muses. “So order is important to me, and making sure that it’s cohesive, sonically.”