“Ohio/After the Gold Rush,” Katie Pruitt

By Sydney Miller, Associate Editor

A little more than a month after she graced our ears with the fiery passion that is “Look the Other Way,” Katie Pruitt released the greatest Neil Young covers I’ve ever heard.

Pruitt’s takes on “Ohio” and “After the Gold Rush” feel urgent and timely. The sound is crisp, clean, and deliberate. In “Ohio,” Pruitt makes stunning use of her voice as the instruments bottom out and she shout-sings the iconic “four dead in Ohio” to bring the song to a powerful close. 

In “After the Gold Rush,” an acoustic-driven track much like the ones on Pruitt’s debut album, “Expectations,” she leans into the emotions, putting together her own beautiful reincarnation of Young’s track. Her voice slips easily into a haunting howl in the latter half of the song, creating such an evocative harmony between her voice, the guitar, and the piano that it seems almost as if this song was written for her.

The reasoning behind covering “Ohio” seems pretty self explanatory, given what’s going on in the world around us, but Pruitt gave an explicit explanation for why she also covered “After the Gold Rush.”

“I recorded ‘After the Gold Rush’ as tribute to my best friend’s father who passed away last September,” Pruitt said in a Tweet. “The night before he passed, Neil Young opened the show with this song. I believe it was a sign of his peaceful passage to a new home in the Sun.”

If the raw energy and pure talent Katie Pruitt puts into these covers are any indication of what she’ll do in her next original project, we’re in for a hell of a treat.