Tristan Prettyman gains rejuvenation, illumination from Burning Man, Bali

By Mikel Toombs, SDNN
Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Tristan Prettyman (Courtesy photo)

A year ago, Tristan Prettyman seemed to be surfing the waves of the music business quite nicely.

Even if her career hadn’t yet crested, the two-time San Diego Music Award-winner for Best Acoustic performer followed up “Twentythree,” her Virgin Records debut (she’d recently turned that age when the album came out four years ago), in the spring of 2008 with the similarly well-received “Hello…x,” which was recorded in London.

And then the Del Mar-bred singer-songwriter said “goodbye.” Oh, Prettyman played a couple handfuls of dates in Portugal and the U.K., but that seemed more an excuse to hit the local beaches and test the waters. For the most part of the past year, she’s stayed out of the public eye.

“I’ve always just followed my gut and instinct, and I’m pretty in tune with my body and my mind. I was getting into a very centered place and it just felt like the right thing to do. In the midst of my last record, doing a lot of touring with all this promo, it got to be overwhelming. It became more promo and more business than actually playing music,” Prettyman said.

“I’d been touring for five years straight and I’d done two records, so it was kind of like, ‘I need to step back. I want to be 26 and 27 and be like normal for a minute, and hang out with all my friends, check in with myself and figure out if I’m on the path I want to be on.’”

While Prettyman’s path didn’t involve touring, there was still plenty of traveling. Her road to self-discovery, which could be said to end at her show Monday night (Dec. 14) at the Belly Up, led her from Bali to Burning Man.

“I really lucked out,” Prettyman said, “because all these opportunities came up to travel without spending a terrible amount of money. So I got to go to Bali with a friend who goes every year. That was amazing. I spent three weeks in Bali.”

Bali would seem an ideal destination for a bliss-following type. On the other hand, the Burning Man Festival, the hedonistic “art event” held annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, might not.

“That was definitely life-changing. That totally rocked my world,” Prettyman said. “My brother has been going for the last seven years. And I was always like, ‘I don’t run around naked and I don’t actually do drugs,’ and thought that was what it was about. Which is funny, because it actually gets labeled that, and that turns a lot of people off. In reality, there are a lot of elements of that there, but it’s definitely not what it’s about.

“There was so much creativity from art installments, paintings, music. There’s so much stimulation there,” she said, “and a real sense of an amazing community that takes place for that week, that you really feel that you’re a part of something much bigger than you get to experience in your day-to-day life.

“And in taking my year off, I was, not searching but feeling that I needed to experience something that was way beyond anything I’d ever experienced. And that was definitely kind of what I was looking for. I let go of everything, and it was awesome.”

A “rejuvenated” Prettyman is “ready to get back to work,” she said, starting with her Belly Up show Monday. She’s asking fans to bring toys and gifts for foster kids and disadvantaged youth as part of the Promises 2 Kids holiday gift drive to the concert, which will be opened by friend Kate Earl, an Alaska singer-songwriter who moved to Southern California (hmm).

Of course, Prettyman hasn’t exactly been idle artistically during her sabbatical year.

“I’ve been writing a ton and getting together with some different co-writers, from different genres of music. Like electronic, like country, like people in Nashville, people in New York, people in L.A.,” she said, not yet willing to name names, other than creative (and supposedly onetime romantic) partner G. Love. “There definitely is a plan to make another record and we’ll start recording probably in the springtime. But there’s no real rush at all.”

Prettyman is “definitely a lover of all kinds of music,” she added, “from Beats Antique, kind of down-tempo electronic stuff, to Wilco, to Hank Williams. I love everything.

“I’ve been doing this songwriter circle with a bunch of other artists, like seven or eight other artists. We get a topic every week and we have to write a song about it — the topic has to be in the song some way. That’s been really fun, because I can raps, or do total country or Moroccan.

“So it’s been fun to experiment in that. But I think I’ll always stick to a singer-songwriter simple, less-is-more kind of approach.”

Event info
What: Tristan Prettyman, Kate Earl
When: 8 p.m. Monday, Dec. 14
Where: Belly Up Tavern, 143 S. Cedros, Solana Beach
Tickets: $16 ($18 day of show), 21 and up

We four Kings of Bachata are: One might wonder how Michelangelo Antonioni’s art-house classic came to be playing Saturday at the San Diego Sports Arena (8 p.m.; $36-$106). Only the film is “L’Avventura” and this is the band Aventura, although that wasn’t always the case. The Bronx foursome, who style themselves Kings of Bachata (K.O.B., for short), began playing the Dominican Republic-spawned dance music 15 years ago as teenagers, calling themselves (you guessed it) Teenagers. No longer the new chicos on the block, Aventura is now the hottest band in Latin music, having serenaded the Obamas with “Su Veneno” during October’s Fiesta Latina at the White House and picked up an American Music Award two weeks ago.

Mikel Toombs writes weekly music column for SDNN.

Tags: Aventura, Belly Up Tavern, Kate Earl, Kings of Bachata, L'Avventura, Mikel Toombs, Promises 2 Kids, San Diego Music Awards, SDNN, Tristan Prettyman

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