Pages tagged “juliana hatfield”

If you ever wondered where singer/songwriter Juliana Hatfield honed the inspiration to write the lyrics that compose her introspective, expansive discography, her new memoir, When I Grow Up, provides more than few intimate clues. Recently released along with her latest album, How to Walk Way, the book poignantly depicts the 90s alt-rock pioneer's battles with personal insecurity as she grew into her musical career.

Former alt-rock “It” Girl proves she’s still got it

“I stayed until the “Star Spangled Banner” played... / Then it was over,” Juliana Hatfield sings on her new album’s opener “The Fact Remains” (wait for the punchline: “I stayed too long”). Like fellow Berklee College of Music attendee Aimee Mann, Hatfield began her career 20 years ago as part of a critically acclaimed college-rock band (The Blake Babies) that disintegrated in favor of a solo career. Ten albums down the road, Hatfield has clearly learned a thing or two about songcraft, but she’s still struggling to find solace in love, using her latest album as a platform from which to dish dirt on needy guys (“Just Lust”), memorialize past relationships as one might recall favorite broken toys (“Remember November”) and generally pine about how much love hurts (two particularly compelling duets—the dark “This Lonely Love” with the Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler, and the slightly less shadowy “Such a Beautiful Girl” with Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws). The album has its moments but suffers from fussy production—“So Alone” and “Shining On” would be much better songs without all the sonic buffing and fluffing. “Your memoirs are so full of tension, well, don’t I merit a mention?” Hatfield asks in the loose-limbed “Now I’m Gone,” neatly prefiguring her own autobiography, When I Grow Up, due later this year. It’s your party, Juliana, and you can sigh if you want to.

With years of simplistic and sincere songcraft, raw vocals and '90s malaise under her belt, Juliana Hatfield still has a lot to say. This time around, Hatfield has chosen two mediums to expose herself: a carefully-tailored pop album and a memoir that looks back on her lengthy run in alternative rock. She spilled some details about both creative efforts when she recently caught up with Paste.

Twenty years into her career, Juliana Hatfield is still trying to figure herself out. As always, she’s doing so on record. Beginning as singer/bassist of Boston’s Blake Babies, Hatfield emerged as a definitive solo artist of the ‘90s and peaked as alternative rock experienced its mainstream crossover. She guest-starred on ABC’s angst-ridden My So-Called Life, lent a song to the soundtrack for Gen-X time capsule Reality Bites and played bass on The Lemonheads’ It’s a Shame About Ray. Since her grunge-rock heyday, she’s oscillated between raw alt-rock and manicured pop on album after album, though always maintaining her signature confessional lyrics and eternally girlish voice.

Songwriter eschews pop conventions and spews lyrical venom

Hatfield’s always had an on-again, off-again relationship with pop production and songcraft. On Made in China she jettisons everything she’s learned about nurturing a hook and gives her melodic songs a black eye, pinning them up against a wall of loud, first-take guitars. The songs don’t so much end as clatter to a close. She even roughens her girly voice with distortion. I’d hate to be the “you” targeted in these angry songs. Don’t try to lean on her shoulder, because she’s no Bill Withers: “You act like you’re the only one with a chemical imbalance,” she sneers. As with the best of Jesus and Mary Chain, however, there’s clarity visible beneath the waterline, sharp lyrics and even some hummable choruses.

On her previous half-dozen albums, Boston-based Juliana Hatfield has clearly defined her sexy-waif persona through a steady stream of confessional songs filled with vulnerability, uncertainty and a reckless disregard for doing what’s good for her. On her latest LP, Hatfield manifests a nascent desire to get her shit together as she struggles with various (I have no choice here but to whip out the rock-crit cliché) personal demons, ranging from an addictive need for validation through romance (manifested here on “Forever,” with its key line, “Just one more, then I’ll quit forever”) to the arduous search for artistic inspiration (succinctly expressed in “Don’t Let Me Down,” which finds her “looking for words at the end of the road”).

This is a promising turn of events for a writer/artist who has all but exhausted her cache of themes. But Hatfield’s first step in her quest for knowingness turns out to be a tentative one, despite the presence of some disarmingly plaintive songs. Part of the problem is Hatfield’s very facility as a songwriter: The catchy melodies and clever turns of phrase come so easily to her that she continues to settle for songs that merely hang together rather than taking herself—and the listener—somewhere new and unexpected. On “Sunshine,” for example, in which she means to express her optimism about personal growth, she pulls out standard-issue metaphors; the song’s central line, “I’m waking up and I want to stand in the sunshine,” probably wrote itself, but it’s so pat as to be inert. She also relies too heavily on choruses that simply repeat the same line rather than concocting more thematically complex and satisfying payoffs.

Hatfield perpetuates her career-long tendency to overwhelm her fragile-but-expressive voice with cranked-up rock arrangements topped by her own electric guitar, obscuring the nuances of her vocal performances. For In Exile Deo she’s assembled a group of players who display utter competence but no particular feel for the material, resulting in performances that frequently come off as arbitrary, and sometimes downright generic. The album begs for something more inventive, in the manner of Polly Jean Harvey or Aimee Mann. Hatfield produced the record; one can’t help but wonder what it might have been under the helm of a song-sensitive producer/player like Jon Brion, who’s done such inspired work with Mann.

Ironically, the album’s most affecting vocal performance appears in its lone cover, Dot Allison’s “Tomorrow Never Comes,” for which Hatfield provides a restrained and elegant setting, as a string quartet frames her strikingly intimate vocal and delicately fingerpicked acoustic guitar. If only the artist treated her own material with the same sensitivity. She gets tantalizingly close on the album’s most emotionally charged songs, the above-mentioned “Forever,” the post-breakup ballad “Some Rainy Sunday,” the touchingly insecure “Jamie’s in Town” and the heart-wrenching “Because We Love You,” a startlingly candid plea for reconciliation with her father.

Hatfield, an undeniably genuine artist, has created a record that is flawed but frequently brave and inviting. One can only hope that she’s on the way to expressing something altogether revelatory in her music; at the very least, In Exile Deo provides proof of her determination to get there and evidence that she has the means to pull it off.