Petra Haden

She was born in New York City on 11 October 1971 and raised in Los Angeles. Her father had grown up singing on the radio with his family’s country harmony group, the Haden Family, and played those recordings for his daughters, who heard the music again on childhood visits to their grandparents in Missouri. The sisters sang in harmony from an early age, and Petra took up the violin.

In the 1990s she and Rachel played in the Los Angeles band that dog., formed in 1991, and in the Rentals, adding close harmonies to their power pop. Her own first album, Imaginaryland (1996), was followed by a duo record with the guitarist Bill Frisell, Petra Haden and Bill Frisell (2003), and by Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out (Bar/None, 2005), a complete a cappella re-creation of the Who’s album, recorded at home between 2000 and 2003. She played with the Decemberists in 2005 and has recorded and toured with Frisell, Green Day, the Foo Fighters, Mike Watt and others; later solo albums include Petra Goes to the Movies (Anti-, 2013), a set of film themes, and Seemed Like a Good Idea (Sunnyside, 2016), songs by Jesse Harris.

Her father’s country-roots album Rambling Boy (2008) brought the family back to the songs of the Haden Family, with Petra, Rachel and Tanya singing close harmony on the Carter Family’s “Single Girl, Married Girl” and other tracks. The three sisters then sang the Fates on Anaïs Mitchell’s folk-opera album Hadestown (2010). Through Ry Cooder’s son, the drummer Joachim Cooder, they met Ry Cooder, who produced The Haden Triplets for Third Man Records in 2014, with songs from the Carter Family, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers and the Louvin Brothers; Petra sang and played violin on it, alongside Ricky Skaggs on mandolin on three tracks. The Triplets’ second album, The Family Songbook (January 2020), included four songs their grandfather Carl E. Haden wrote in the 1930s.