|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
Also this issue: Summer Monster Golden S.O.M. Festival Less Than Jake Elk City |
|
|
|
|
 |
|||||||||
August 1- 7, 2002
music
 ITās A SHame about juliana: Hatfield figures itās about fucking time she made a great album. |
|
Juliana Hatfield has a strange idea of what it means to take her time. Coming off a short-lived Blake Babies reunion, she decided to take a break before her next proper album. In the meantime, she’s recorded an out-with-the-old Blake Babies EP and an in-with-the-new disc with Some Girls, who come to town tomorrow night. She also recently released a survey of her first 10 years as a solo artist. Gold Stars (Zoë) plucks a song or two from each of her eight albums -- including God’s Foot, recorded in 1996 but never released, and her subsequent hidden treasure EP, Please Do Not Disturb -- and adds some new ones.
Gold Stars was the label's idea, but Hatfield rose to the occasion. "I chose the songs that got played on the radio, and after that, it was just the songs that I liked," she says, calling from Cambridge, Mass. One album that's underrepresented is 1992's Hey Babe. "The first album just kind of freaks me out. ... I'm surprised at how raw and honest I was." Despite its three singles and iconic tracks like "Nirvana" and "Ugly," only "Everybody Loves Me But You" made Gold Stars. "I couldn't even go back and listen to it when I was putting this compilation together," she says.
Hatfield, whose girlish plaint has become music critics' shorthand for a certain kind of alt-rock 'round-the-way girl, says last year's Blake Babies tour was a mixed bag. "It was great to get back in a band situation where I wasn't the sole focus of everyone's attention," she says. The musical chemistry was still there -- God Bless the Blake Babies is as tuneful as the band's best early work -- but after a while, she and John Strohm remembered why the band had broken up. "We all realized that this is probably the last thing we're ever going to do together. ... I really like him and I think he likes me, but there's just a lot of tension between us and sometimes we grate on each other."
 |
|
It wasn't worth the hassle, and after one final writing spurt, they split again. What frustrates Hatfield is the creative paradox: "The weird negative things can be great for the music," she says. With that in mind, she's taking a wait-and-see approach to Some Girls, which also includes bassist Heidi Gluck and Blake Babies drummer Freda Love. On this tour, they'll be playing Hatfield's songs, along with some of their own.
The struggle between tense collaboration and lonely independence has largely defined her, both in her often witty, always dour lyrics and in the way she works, alternately in singer-songwriter mode and as the benevolent dictator of the Juliana Hatfield Three and Juliana's Pony. That culminated in 2000's simultaneous release of Beautiful Creature's mellow demos and Total System Failure's power-trio rage. Offering two albums at the same time may have confused record buyers, but the material begged to be separated. Not that she'll go to such extremes next time. "Total System Failure was really just a cathartic venting experience," she says, before adding, "A lot of rock bands, they just turn on the distortion and they turn the volume up to 11 and they scream, and they think because of that, they rock. But you don't necessarily rock just because you're screaming and you're loud. I think you rock when you're expressing your true soul and the stuff that's inside of you."
Which is not to say she's gotten mushy. How far is it, really, from Hey Babe's opening lines ("I wake up every morning and the first thing that I say is that I hope that I can make it through another lonely day") to "Table For One"? Hatfield says the song, which ends Gold Stars, is "kind of resigned to the fact that there is no ultimate happiness, there is no ultimate happy ending." Considering the amount of insecurity that runs through her work, it makes sense. "It's ending sort of with a question mark, which is fitting, because it's like, ŒWhere do I go from here?'... Ending that way is just letting people know that I don't have it all figured out and I'm not pretending to have it all figured out and I'm not pretending that I know what I'm doing. And I'm still confused. And I just wanted to reiterate my confusion."
Confusion aside, Hatfield's short-term band commitments haven't supplanted her ultimate goal: "I just want to make a great album, 'cause it's about fucking time that I did."
Juliana Hatfield and Some Girls play Fri., Aug. 2, $13, 21+, with Shellito, at the North Star, 27th and Poplar sts., 215-922-LIVE,www.northstarbar.com.
