This serenity girl is sitting pretty

Singer-songwriter Tristan Prettyman is the female Jack Johnson.

With her slightly freckled face, a surfing and modelling background, and a knack for writing a good song, Tristan Prettyman is a marketer's dream.

You can just imagine the record company executives rubbing their thighs with glee when they heard her demo recordings. And saw her photo.

So, to steal a marketing tactic to describe this 23-year-old singer/songwriter from San Diego, she is the female Jack Johnson.

But sitting across from Prettyman at Wagamama restaurant in Auckland, she comes across just a bit too casual and laid-back to be a marketer's dream.

"I don't know what's going on, really," she laughs. "It is very much in my personality to say, 'Oh yeah, that's cool, let's just see what happens'.

"But I don't want to just sell records because I'm attractive. My approach and my plan for all this is to be very grass roots.

"I want to feel like people are discovering my music and [it's] not just being shoved in their face. Because I think that happens. Record labels do make girls into pop tarts, but if the music is strong enough then that will get you by."

Her new album, Twentythree - her second after recording an independent album that she sold at her early shows - is happy, uplifting and joyous, in a mellow sort of way. In fact, the only forlorn moment on it is the reflective Song For the Rich.

"A lot of my old stuff is like that and I have no idea how this record got so happy. I'm totally perplexed because everyone used to say, 'Tristan, are you ever going to write a happy song 'cause you're such a happy person?' "

Song For The Rich was written about a friend of Prettyman who got into a bad way because of drugs.

"I played that song for him one night and he totally lost it and broke down, and it was the one thing that got through to him. And that's when I realised how powerful music can be."

It was earlier though, at 15, when her music taste changed forever after hearing Ani DiFranco's 1993 album, Puddle Dive. "Her tape still sits on my desk," she smiles.

Before DiFranco she was a Vanilla Ice and Ace of Base girl. "I'd never heard music that had been stripped down before. There was something so special about hearing a voice and a guitar, and it being so powerful and honest."

But before music, there was surfing. Prettyman competed in surfing contests at high school and considered making a living out of it.

"Then I realised the thing I love about surfing is that it is so relaxing and it's something you can do by yourself. I get more out of it in that way, like it was something I just wanted to enjoy rather than make into a career. Music is that thing I made into a career.

"But music and surfing are similar, I guess. Every wave you ride is different, and every song you write is different, and they're very much the same in that way, they're like this endless thing that goes on and on - you can never stop learning about them. I'm definitely still learning a lot about music."

She called Johnson - a fellow surfer-turned-musician - when she considered doing music full time and his advice was simple: make sure you're happy doing what you're doing.

"The thing that's been important for me is that if I'm not happy doing something then I have to stop. I have to get back to what I need to do and not what everybody else wants.

"Because I took the long route, and was patient, and although it hasn't been that long, I like to feel as though I'm in control and have a pretty good idea of how I want my music to be."

She grew up playing guitars at home, at friends' houses, and at barbecues in the Southern Californian beach town of Del Mar so it's no surprise there's a casual, natural sound to Twentythree.

"For this record I said, 'We're going to play the songs three times and move on to the next one'. They may not be perfect, and you can hear the guitar go [wonky], but doing it spontaneously like that captured me in a spontaneous way rather than me being bored with the song.

"It's like when you're playing a show, and if you're in a bad mood and you don't want to be there, the audience knows. That is something I learned very quickly. That's how I wanted the album to be; not perfect, but capturing the vibe and trying to get the songs as close to when I first wrote them."

Johnson has sold thousands of albums in New Zealand and we seem to love that laid-back surf music, so what's Prettyman's take on why we're suckers for hers and Johnson's music?

"I think any place surrounded in water has a certain thing for it. I think living on a coastline is definitely about a way of life and you even see it in the US, which is such a big place.

"On either coast you have those small beach cities, and that's the environment I grew up in. There's something about being so close to the ocean and having that serenity right at the end of your fingertips."

That'll be it.

Who: Tristan Prettyman
What and where: Twentythree, out now