Petra Haden Quotes

My grandparents on my mom's side played in a mandolin orchestra. So when I hear mandolins, I automatically think of them.

When we were on breaks from recording and touring, I was kind of moping around, like not knowing what to do. It was hard to adjust back to normal life after being so busy.

I've already done two cover albums. I don't know, maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to do another, but I just did the Led Zeppelin song for fun, and I thought I could do it kind of quick since songs that I love a lot I can do fast.

I played violin from when I was about eight to thirteen, so I could read a little bit, but if you put a piece of music in front of me now, I would probably know the notes, but not the timing, how they're supposed to be played, and I just don't know how to read chords. If I'd stuck with it, I'd probably have more jobs.

Our dad played us a lot of old country songs by The Carter Family and he would sing along to it. I loved listening to him sing.

People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all.

I never punched in anything when I recorded Imaginaryland. Where the title came from is a whole other story.

The first song I wrote was "Look Both Ways Before You Cross" from Imaginaryland. I started the song by singing a bass line, "hoo hoo hoo hoo."

I didn't know who Meredith Monk was, and I knew about Laurie Anderson but I didn't know her music that well.

The Conversation was a movie I saw probably for the first time in the early 2000s. I immediately loved the piano and just how simple it is.

I just recorded in studios, you know, people pressed the buttons for me. So I just started recording the bass lines and guitar parts with my voice, covering classical pieces, or just making up melodies so I could learn how to use it.

I always related my favorite music to the movies.

I remember watching Looney Tunes cartoons and having the music stuck in my head.

Everyone knows about The Who, but I didn't. I knew the popular songs like "I Can See For Miles." So that was the first song I worked on because it was the catchiest and easiest.

Eventually I had so many little melodies and ideas that, you know, that they were all songs to me and I threw in a few cover songs like Enya's "Watermark," Bach, and my dad's song, "Song for the Whales."

You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics.

I thought about what I wanted to do besides playing violin and singing backup in a band. Don't get me wrong, playing and singing in That Dog was really fun, but I wanted to work on other musical projects and sing more. So I started a vocal project, i.e. Imaginaryland.

It's my favorite movie score and because I had such a crush on Christopher Reeve. The music made me love him even more. You know when you hear music in a movie and it makes you fall in love with the characters? That's what happened.

I got a new 4-track cassette recorder a year or so after high school. For a while I would just stare at it thinking, how am I going to do this if I don't play guitar or keyboards? How am I going to write and record a song if I don't know how to play any instruments? I mean, I played the violin, but I didn't know anything about how to work a 4-track.

I put out Imaginaryland, I heard a lot of, "Oh she's copying Laurie Anderson," and I was like, wait... but I don't know her music! Maybe - didn't she have a song called "Superman"?

Harmony has always come very natural to us because we started singing harmony at an early age. We heard a lot of different music growing up.

I like things that start depressing and dark and end up romantic, and thats what I really loved about King Kong.

I didn't know how write a song, (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, bridge, verse), etc., and I didn't know how to write lyrics, so that's when I thought, well, I don't have to write a song with all those verses and choruses or lyrics. I can just sing everything the way I want to. So I sang all the instruments with my voice and just went with it.

I love the Bach Prelude No. 2 in C Minor and had that stuck in my head: why don't I put this on Imaginaryland? So I brought it to my friend Tom Grimley who recorded That Dog's first record. I played him all my a cappella pieces, and he said, "P, you should really make a record, it would be great! You can record it at my studio and I'll put it out!"

My forte is playing along and singing along to music I love. I mean, who knows, maybe I could develop that knack or develop that ability to write, and I do actually co-write with people and friends, which is fun, too, because then I don't have to worry about writing lyrics, because for me writing lyrics is impossible.

People want to hear clean sounds; they don't want to hear coughing in the background, pages turning.