So I had never heard of Tristan Prettyman before I saw an annoucement come across Amazon’s events mailing list. I read a little bit about her and decided to attend her event. I rode the shuttle down to Uwajimaya and grabbed lunch and walked on over to the building where it was happening. She was a bit late arriving, but things eventually got underway. She talked for a second, looked mildly nervous and then started to play. She was really good, had a great and interesting voice, was a decent guitarist and the songs where pretty interesting and fit her really well. It kinda had a Jack Johnson feel two it, perhaps not quite as deep as far as lyrics go, but a good soft voice with character and melodic and interesting songs.
She played two songs off of her soon to be released album and then finished with a cover of a Britney Spears song, of all things, which at the time I took as a joke, but was a hint of the dissapointment to come. There were pre-release copies of her album availiable. I didn’t manage to snag one, got there too early and they weren’t out as I came in, but one of my friends did. We listened to a bit of it (annoyingly DRM’d and bundled with a crappy/crashing player, but we managed to get them to play through MS media player, iTunes would not.) I was extremely dissapointed with it. After hearing her live I was expecting something much better. Her album was genric, like everything else on top-fourty raido, but not quite as catchy. It was way over produced, loud and pop-rock like, Avril Lavigne without the edginess that makes her slightly interesting. I was extremely dissapointed, I heard her play live and acoustic to boot. She’s good, I can’t help thinking that she’s a victim of the rubber-stamp top-40 record industy, she has the potential to be a lot better than what they made of her. I have to hope she’ll get a second chance and make better use of it, until then I’m going to move along and hope to find something better, I guess I’m just not in the record company’s target demograic.