Petra Haden and Jesse Harris: Seemed Like a Good Idea: Petra Haden Sings Jesse Harris

This is a peculiar and kind-of-wonderful recording, but one that even the most kindly disposed of listeners will have to warm up to. It is an album of a dozen pop songs written by an excellent songwriter (who is better known for being behind the scenes than for his own solo work) delivered by a singer who has made a career of disappearing into her material. The two leaders on this date, then, are both ghosts of a sort, beautiful but ethereal, easy to miss in the light of day.

The result is a beautiful but somewhat too-cool set of tunes, carefully constructed and arranged, that never really take flight the way pop songs ought to. But give it a chance and it just might haunt you.

Jesse Harris, who wrote (or co-wrote with Haden) the songs, is best known for penning “Don’t Know Why”, the mega-hit for the kinda-but-not-really jazz singer Norah Jones. Before that, he was in a couple of legendary but little known bands, Almost Blue with singer Rebecca Martin and The Ferdinandos with Tony Scherr, Tim Luntzel, and Kenny Wolleson. Harris, then, has a long history of working with jazz-ish musicians who also operate in that oh-so-grown-up zone of folk-pop/Americana/World Music. Starbucks music, you might call it if you were feeling grumpy. Harris also has ten or more solo albums, but his biggest successes have paired him with a cool, jazzy female vocalist.

Haden (incidentally, the daughter of legendary jazz bassist Charlie Haden), is that kind of singer, though that’s not all she is. She also plays violin — for example, with no less a band than the Decembrists — and she has collaborated in one way or another on records with Beck, Green Day, Foo Fighters, and jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. Weirdly, then, she’s probably more famous for her… weirder solo projects, such as Petra Haden Sings the Who Sell Out, an a cappella recording she made at home while recovering from an auto accident. What Haden often creates (or contributes to creating) is a layered, dizzy sound that displaces your listening from expectations.

On Harris’s songs here, there are no expectations, of course. You don’t know them. But nevertheless, the sound here is atmospheric and elevated, a kind of beautiful hovering above the space of the song itself. Take, for example, “Either Way”, a popping folk-pop tune build on a hook that combines distorted electric guitar and a finger-picked acoustic lick. Haden and Harris harmonize on verse, evoking Simon & Garfunkel partly because the chords remind us a bit of “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)”. And on top of all that, the hippest moment in the tune is two minutes in during an instrumental break when the guitars, bass, and a Wurlitzer electric piano all collapse into each other in a gentle tumble to the last verse. The song is like a gorgeous miniature thing, a wonder maybe but not a rush.

“How Could I Have Known” (co-written by Haden and Harris after the death of Petra’s dad) has a similar chilly beauty. Haden’s vocal is ethereal, doubled or chorused, and the arrangement contains a variety of elements that make it formal, almost orchestral. The music pushes the vocal up on a cushion of air. And there’s a verse of just “Dummm-dah-dee” singing too, like the tune is wafting in from a 1960s pop past that knew a thing or two about the adjective Bacharachian. “All the Leaves” is more playful in tempo and groove, but it’s “formal” too: with a decidedly descending melody and guitar lick echoing the tune’s name and theme. People in the song “don’t know you name”. “They don’t see you looking for / What you never had before / There’s nothing more.” A downward trajectory for sure. Then a clinically lovely but melancholy bridge appears before the verse returns with “All the trees are frozen bare”. It’s a gorgeous machine of a song.

What’s the song that here that could have been a hit? “Sometimes You’ve Got to Choose Sides” had a sunny chorus that makes it two-and-a-half minutes of joy, like a particularly Xanax-ian Juliana Hatfield song from the 1990s shot through with chimes. As a Hatfield fan, it made me happy.

“Fool’s Paradise” is my favorite song here, a simple six-note melody that sticks in the mind, repeated twice, then altered, sung and played over an equally simple set of strummed chords. “It’s time I should go / Onward, I don’t know / It’s my own advice / But I need my fool’s paradise.” It’s not a love song, not a break-up song, not really clearly any kind of song. “Likely when I’m back / Wonderin’ how to act / I won’t be thinking twice / Will I? In my fool’s paradise.” The layers of the arrangement (a small string group, some simple keyboard, bent-string electric guitar) collect and the wonder of it builds. It buzzes inside you long after it’s through.

There are a couple of songs here by others, both curious. “It Was Innocence” is a John Zorn (!) melody given words by Harris, and it comes out as a classic, mournful pop song that happens to have an unusually wonderful, expansive second melody. “Where Have All the Flower Gone”, of course, is by Pete Seeger, and it seems like the antithesis of the rest of the record — wordy and preachy where everything else sees the world through an arty gauze. Huh.

And so it is that Seemed Like a Good Idea transfixes and perplexes at once. (It’s worth noting that the title, combined with a cover photo featuring decidedly uneasy expressions on the faces of the two leaders, hints that the whole project is intended to be taken as a kind of question mark.) The songs will not rock your world but, rather, nudge you to interrogate it. The performances (even as supplemented by jazz pianist Aaron Parks and rock super-creative-producer Jon Brion) are as aloof as they are gorgeous.

This is exquisite chamber rock. It is organic, free-range, artisanal pop music. If kale salad were to take on the character of jazz-inflected songwriting, it would be Seemed Like a Good Idea. Me? I keep coming back for more.