Album Review: Petra Goes to the Movies by Petra Haden

Petra Haden's one-person, all-vocals take on the Who's album The Who Sell Out was a crazy stunt she completed on a dare, but also a stunning artistic statement that showed what determination and crazy vocal skill could do to a classic album. Turn it inside out and make it small enough to fit in your pocket, basically. A decade later, Haden decided to do the same thing to a collection of her favorite themes from the silver screen.

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Petra Haden is best known as a vocal artist, less well known as a former member of the band That Dog or daughter of Charlie Haden. But she’s not in the vein of vocal sculptors like Meredith Monk or a word jazzbo like Thomas Nordine. Haden is, first and foremost, an interpreter, which means that she specializes in fairly ambitious covers of popular songs rendered a cappella.

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It seems to me that you’d want to be Petra Haden or at least someone like her. She is a musician—a singer and a violinist—who plays creative music with a wide range of amazing people and seems to follow her whim as she feels it. She has played with Beck, The Decemberists, and jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, for example. Her dad is the legendary jazz bassist Charlie Haden and, as one of triplets, she has a musician sister who happens to be married to actor Jack Black.

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Petra Haden The expansive interiority of a great film score — as properly experienced, in the flickering dark — might seem like strange territory for a vocalist working unaccompanied. But then Petra Haden happens to thrive best in strange territory. “Petra Goes to the Movies” (Anti-), due out on Tuesday, features her a cappella versions of more than a dozen movie themes, with her vocals meticulously multitracked.

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