Photo of the Juliana Hatfield Three by Johnny Anguish (Daykamp Music): Todd Philips, Juliana Hatfield, and Dean Fisher (from left)
The Juliana Hatfield Three & Soul Asylum | 8:00pm, 10.21.24 | Delmar Hall, 6133 Delmar Blvd. | All ages | $35 advance, $40 day of show
Juliana Hatfield sits in a unique position among the artists that found sudden massive fame during the alt-rock explosion of the early ‘90s. Casual fans likely know her for her tenure leading the Juliana Hatfield Three alongside drummer Todd Philips and Dean Fisher. The trio released one album, 1993’s Become What You Are, that spawned two massive hits: “My Sister,” which hit #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart, and “Spin the Bottle,” which landed a spot on the soundtrack of one of the defining movies of Generation X, 1994’s Reality Bites.
Unlike many of her ‘90s peers, though, Hatfield wasn’t someone who popped up just in time to ride the alternative wave: she was one of the progenitors of the genre as singer and bassist of the Blake Babies, coming up in the same late ‘80s Boston scene as Pixies, Throwing Muses, and the Lemonheads. She would even join the Lemonheads for a few years, playing bass on their breakthrough album (1992’s It’s a Shame About Ray) before launching her solo career with 1992’s Hey Babe and its college radio staples like “Everybody Loves Me But You” and “I See You.” By the time of the success of Become What You Are arrived, she was well deserving of the spotlight.
Also unlike a lot of her ‘90s peers, you don’t need to do any hard searching to answer the question “Where Are They Now?” Hatfield is right where she’s always been, writing and recording her patented brand of alternative rock, blending a pop sensibility with crunchy distorted guitars and a wonderful gift for twisting a lyric just right. The music has just kept coming—20 albums under her own name, plus side projects including full-album collabs with the likes of Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws (as Minor Alps) and the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg (as the I Don’t Cares) and reunion albums with the Blake Babies and the Juliana Hatfield Three. In recent years, she’s alternated between new material and covers albums paying homage to the formative influences of her youth, with full-album tributes to Olivia Newton-John, the Police, and Electric Light Orchestra under her belt so far.
The original Juliana Hatfield Three burned brightly but didn’t last long, just one recording and touring cycle. But Hatfield, Philips, and Fisher previously reunited in 2014 for a reunion tour that led to a reunion album (2015’s Whatever, My Love) before disbanding again. A decade later, the original trio is back on the road for what Hatfield is dubbing a “30th(ish) anniversary” celebration of Become What You Are, playing the album in full alongside other songs from Hatfield’s catalog. She’s joined on the tour by fellow alternative nation survivors Soul Asylum.
We caught up with Hatfield via Zoom to look back at the genesis of Become What You Are and discuss songwriting, nostalgia, the nature of ‘90s hype, and what’s next after the tour wraps up.
The Arts STL: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today! I’m really excited to see you come through town.
Juliana Hatfield: You’re welcome, thanks for talking to me! I’m looking forward to coming back there, I haven’t been [to St. Louis] in a while, I think.
If setlist.fm is to be believed, you last played here in February of 2020, about a month before…everything ended. [laughs]
If that’s what it says, then that’s probably right.
You’re touring behind the big anniversary for Become What You Are. Obviously, as we’re talking the tour hasn’t started yet but I imagine you’re starting to warm up for it. How does it feel reengaging with these songs, especially compared to when you guys did the reunion tour in 2014, and then compared to when you originally toured them thirty years ago?
The really cool thing is that, in between those times of the band forming and the band reforming, we don’t really play music much together—but when we do get back together to play, the chemistry is still there, the musical chemistry. And that’s something that you can’t really control. It’s like you either have chemistry as people or players, or you don’t. We just kind of fall back into that groove.
And fortunately, the songs from the Become What You Are album, which is what we’ll be playing, those songs feel relatively true to me, so I feel good singing them still. I still feel them.
I imagine that there’s songs from that album that get pulled out for the full album set that don’t make it into your regular setlist very often. Is that true?
Yes, that is true. There’s plenty of songs from that album that I don’t normally play, for whatever reason. Just because I have such a huge repertoire at this point, I can only do a couple or a few songs from every album if I want to get to everything I want to play.
Revisiting your past like this, do you find that by nature you’re a nostalgic person, both in general and about your own music in particular?
I’m nostalgic, but not for my music, not for anything that happened in my career, no. I’m actually more nostalgic about the music that I was listening to in my childhood, before I ever had a band. Like the albums of artists I’ve covered like Olivia Newton-John and ELO, I get nostalgic for that sort of era, and everything from that era in the ‘70s…anything, like a TV show, or a song, or I’ll look up home décor from that era, I get really nostalgic for stuff like that.
But musically, career-wise? No, I don’t feel like I miss any of that. I don’t miss the ‘90s at all. I was pretty miserable, actually, in the ‘90s, as a person. I was really going through some stuff. I feel better now, just overall.
Thankful to have it in the rearview mirror.
Yeah…I’m really proud of the music we made, I’m proud of the work we did. I’m glad to have that under my belt, so to speak.
But you’re not one to, like, pull out [2000’s] Beautiful Creature for the first time in a while and be like “oh man, this is such a good album” or anything like that?
I hardly ever listen to my own stuff, unless I’m going on a tour and I have to relearn a song, like I’m doing now with Become What You Are—I’m listening again because I have to remember all the parts. But yeah, I rarely—rarely—listen to my own stuff. If I’ve just completed recording an album, I’ll listen to it incessantly for a couple of months, and then I’ll stop forever and I’ll never listen to it again.
What’s the experience been like of relistening to Become What You Are to pull those songs back in?
I feel a lot of compassion and tenderness for my thirty-ish-years-ago self. I feel like, “Aw, poor thing.” Though I was struggling a lot—I was struggling, and I think you can hear it in the songs. And also, I feel like I winked a little bit with some of the rhyming, it’s just so rhymey—matchy-matchy, rhymey-rhymey—and I’m like, “Oh, gosh, really?” It’s a little obvious, some of it.
I don’t know if anyone else would agree with me, but I just feel a bit more confident in my lyrical writing abilities these days. I feel like there’s a little bit more nuance in me now. Not cleverness—I don’t like cleverness in music—but I feel like I can express things with a little more nuance these days.
Going back to what it was like to actually record the album, obviously so much changed in the music industry in terms of what was getting attention between the time you recorded Hey Babe and when you were recording Become What You Are. At what point did you start to feel like, “Holy cow, people are starting to listen to alternative music, this could maybe be something”?
It started with Hey Babe. It was like, I noticed that some people were calling out the album as interesting or masterful in some way in certain areas of the independent press, and some labels were sniffing around…eventually Atlantic bought out my contract from Mammoth Records as a solo artist. And Hey Babe had sold more copies than the last Blake Babies record had. So I definitely had a feeling, like “Ok, yeah, whatever I’m doing, certain people are noticing it.”
It made me a little bit scared and uncomfortable, because I wasn’t really doing anything differently, I was just doing my thing. So really really, from the beginning, I was pretty skeptical about the hype about me. [laughs] Because I was just doing my thing! And then when I signed to Atlantic, that was in that era, the early ‘90s going into the mid ‘90s, [when] everybody was getting signed. Everyone I knew was getting signed to major labels, that was just what was happening. Some people think it was a great era of “women in rock,” quote-unquote, but it was really everyone—my friends, right and left, willy-nilly, everyone was getting signed. So I felt like, yeah, that’s happening, so I’m not that special, because the record labels were betting on something. I don’t know if it was Nirvana that set them all off, but it was like, “Something’s happening here in indie rock”—or whatever you want to call it—“let’s cash in on it!”
It was a cool time because a lot of us who were kind of quirky, weird, shy, not so good at self-promotion, we were being given a chance to get our music out there on a broader scale, or we were getting access to these better distribution channels. I was always skeptical, I always kind of felt like, “Ah, this isn’t going to last. There’s some hype around me but I don’t deserve it yet, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing. I haven’t matured as an artist.” I kind of always knew it was going to end, the hype. I think I was just born disillusioned, luckily, so I wasn’t too destroyed when I ended up putting out only two albums on Atlantic and then I went back to the indie world, pretty much.
I find it interesting, it’s a very ‘90s perspective to be predicting the end of your hype before it’s even really started yet. [laughs]
Yeah, it’s like we were all kind of defeated before we started, I think. It’s like Kurt Cobain is a perfect example, look what happened to him: biggest rock star in the world and even he didn’t believe the hype. Obviously, there was much more to it than that, he had struggles. But we all had a lot of struggles back then, and we were all pretty upfront about it, or it was obvious.
In a way that was refreshing because before that, and now again, a lot of artists are just hiding the struggle, I think. They’re back to being “professional artists” and, for better or for worse, putting on a show. Back in the ‘90s, not everyone was quote-unquote “putting on a show,” we were just kind of up there in our baggy jeans and no makeup and doing our thing. Which was kinda cool, in a way.
As you were recording the album, was it evident to you that “My Sister” and “Spin the Bottle” would be the breakout songs?
Not exactly. Definitely not with “Spin the Bottle,” because that one was one of the ones that I wrote last for the album. I remember before recording the album, Dean and Todd and I had been touring in the UK and PJ Harvey’s first album was really big then, and we were all kind of obsessed with it. There’s some interesting time signatures on that album, Dry, there are songs in 7, there are one or two songs in 5—5/8, 5/4—and so that inspired me to try to write a song with 5 beats per bar. I was like, “I’m going to try to write a song in 5 like PJ Harvey did! And her songs in 5 groove really well, so I’m going to try to write a song that’s, like, danceable in 5,” that makes you want to bop your head and dance around. That was my challenge and I wrote “Spin the Bottle” and I thought, it’s weird! I count it off in 5 just to show people that it’s in 5 and that it’s weird! So no, I never expected that to be a single.
And then when I wrote “My Sister,” I remember thinking, “oh yeah, this is pretty traditional: 4-chord progression in the verse, kind of easy on the ears, I can see how this might be pleasant for people to listen to.” But I really was writing for myself, I was just trying to write a song I liked. And that song’s a little weird too, because it doesn’t have a chorus, it just has some intros and verses and then a very rockin’ part, and it never has a chorus. And I would have thought “Oh, all the big hit songs have choruses” so I didn’t necessarily think that “My Sister” would be a single either.
What I’m trying to say is I was not trying to write a hit single. I was just trying to write an album’s worth of songs that I liked. And that’s what happened, and then the label chose the singles, and I was happy with that because I loved the songs.
What you said about “Spin the Bottle” is interesting—I am hopelessly bad about recognizing time signatures and things like that, but I’ve always felt like that song had kind of a…woozy quality to it, like it’s teenagers drunk at a party, right? The off-kilter time signature makes perfect sense there.
Yeah, and it’s almost like, if you do dance to it, you might fall over, you’re dizzy because you’re like, whoa, whoa, wait, there’s an extra beat in there. So yeah, maybe I was trying to mess with people’s equilibrium with that song. I’m not too sure.
One thing I’ve noticed is there are a lot of younger acts that have a Juliana Hatfield influence on them. Beabadoobee is one that really leaps to mind, especially her first record, but there’s a lot of young female singer-songwriters fronting guitar bands now. Do you see your influence out there?
I’ve been asked this question several times in the past couple of years, and I don’t really hear the influence, really. I mean, Beabadoobee maybe. I can see where people might see the connection, but, I mean, none of these women ever mention me so I don’t know think they’ve heard me, or heard of me. I think I’m more obscure as a cultural artifact—I’m more than an artifact, yes. I’m still working!
I don’t hear it, I honestly don’t. Other people have said Soccer Mommy. Someone else, a respected rock journalist, tried to draw the line between me and Olivia Rodrigo, and I’m like, “I don’t hear it.” And none of these people ever mention me. So no. I think they’re just fine being their own way, by listening to, like, the Breeders and stuff like that—Olivia Rodrigo has mentioned the Breeders, you know—but me? Not so much. I think I’m more of an unknown entity, pretty much.
You seem to be on a pattern lately where you’ve been alternating the covers records with new material. Obviously, your last record was a covers record. Do you have more new material coming?
Yes! I’m in the middle of writing and recording a new album of originals. The plan is to finish it and get it out some time in 2025. Obviously, I’m going to take a break from working on it when I’m on the road, because I can’t really work on writing when I’m touring. I’m kind of halfway through that record right now.
Amazing! Can’t wait to hear it.
Sure! I’m feeling pretty good about it. | Jason Green
For more information or to purchase tickets, visit thepageant.com. Get the latest on Juliana Hatfield at julianahatfield.com.
The Slowly But Shirley Tour: Soul Asylum with special guest the Juliana Hatfield Three
10.16.24 – ODESSA, TX @ Ector Theatre
10.17.24 – AUSTIN, TX @ Mohawk
10.18.24 – OKLAHOMA CITY, OK @ Tower Theatre
10.20.24 – KANSAS CITY, MO @ The Truman
10.21.24 – ST. LOUIS, MO @ Delmar Hall
10.22.24 – COLUMBUS, OH @ Athenaeum Theatre
10.24.24 – PITTSBURGH, PA @ Mr. Small’s
10.25.24 – HOMER, NY @ Homer Center for the Arts
10.26.24 – NORWALK, CT @ District Music Hall
10.28.24 – PHILADELPHIA, PA @ Union Transfer
10.29.24 – NEW YORK, NY @ Webster Hall
10.31.24 – PORTLAND, ME @ State Theatre
11.01.24 – RUTLAND, VT @ Paramount Theatre
