Petra Haden in her own (non) words

I have a little feature interview with Petra Haden up at Blurt today. She’s pretty cool…half of the Petra Haden and Miss Murgatroid duo I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, friend of Mike Watt, collaborator with Yuka Honda and daughter of the bass god Charlie Haden…

Here’s a bit:

In her latest, Hearts and Daggers, a collaboration with Miss Murgatroid (aka Alicia J. Rose), Petra Haden loops baroque swaths of vocal sounds around the twining drones of violin and accordion. There's melody, emotion, depth and complexity there...but almost no words.

"Anytime I write a word, I hate it," Haden admitted in a recent phone interview, adding that she has only recently, in collaboration with Yuka Hondo called If By Yes, begun to experiment with lyrics. Still, she is not using words in the conventional way, to tell a story, to get a point across. "When I say a word, it's just something that I think fits. I'm not even thinking of a theme. I'm just, the note that I'm singing, in my head, sounds like the word 'silhouette.' And that word ‘silhouette' sounds like the note."

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Here she is covering the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”


Embedding is disabled on this video of “I Can See for Miles” but you can watch it at YouTube by going here: