Petra Haden, daughter of jazz bass legend Charlie Haden, has made a brilliant a capella facsimile of The Who’s Sell Out album and you need to hear it. Here’s what Pete Townshend had to say about the 2005 album…

”I was a little embarrassed to realize I was enjoying my own music so much, for in a way it was like hearing it for the first time,” Townshend said in a lengthy e-mail interview. ”What Petra does with her voice, which is not so easy to do, is challenge the entire rock framework: the traditions, the processes, the decor, the accessories, the entirety of the established dynamics of traditional pop-rock. ‘I Can See For Miles’ is powerful not for the restrained electric guitars and suppressed and distant thundering drums of Keith Moon but for the torturously sustained vocal harmonies that John Entwistle added over my fairly conventional four-part. Petra is the first analyst who heard the vocal harmonies as they were written and reproduced them properly. When she does depart from the original music she does it purely to bring a little piece of herself — and when she appears she is so very welcome. I felt like I’d received something better than a Grammy.”

Here it is. Dig it! And many thanks to Willard over at the fantastic ‘Never Get Out of the Boat‘ blog! Listen and then go buy some other Petra Haden stuff.

Filed in Album Roundup, Dig This!, Music on Wednesday, December 5, 2007 · 3 Comments »