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“Don’t Stop Believing” – Petra Haden
(Words/music: Jonathan Cain, Steve Perry, and Neal Schon, available on Guilt By Association, Engine Room 2007)

“Don’t Stop Believing” makes people lose rational thought.  I don’t mean this as a dig on the song (to the contrary) but rather as an observation.  This is the kind of song that given the right setting – behind the wheel at a traffic light, a bar ten minutes before closing time, or that part of the brain where daydreams come from – turns otherwise average folks into air guitar heroes.  It’s a song that transcends personal listening habits and generational boundaries.  Perhaps it comes from that perfectly played piano intro, or maybe it earned points for the now iconic final scene in The Sopranos, but “Don’t Stop Believing” offers one of the surest bets to get a room singing along.   If pressed to name a primary culprit, I think it’s the song’s epic scale that seduces listeners.  Everything – Steve Perry’s voice, the lead guitar, the unabashed optimism in the story – sounds the way that a panoramic photograph of a city skyline looks. 

Petra Haden’s a capella take on “Don’t Stop Believing” respects this grandeur yet puts its own spin on it.  Every sound comes from Haden’s voice (as she’s done with The Who Sell Out and “God Only Knows”) layered on a multi-track, yet the final product sounds like a choir of (admittedly similar sounding) voices.  Whether intended or not, Haden’s interpretation captures both the shared public experience of singing “Don’t Stop Believing” with a bunch of other people as well as some of the more nuanced individual “responses” to the song.  She interprets each part of the arrangement as different “characters” with different inflection.  These characters include the faithful a capella purist flawlessly recreating the piano parts, the air guitar fiend who would recreate the sound while furiously finger-tapping an imaginary guitar, the detached hipster who hides genuine joy behind an ironic spoken-word interpretation of the pre-chorus, the karaoke singer who just slightly over-annunciates the end of each line in the verses, and the joyous masses belting out the chorus at the end of the song.  If it’s true that pop songs belong to the public once released, Haden has most of our parts covered for us.  All we need to do is stop thinking and join in.

More on Petra Haden: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm