Hatfield Feeling Some Girls
Former Blake Babies mates team up for all-girl summer fun

June 3, 2003 —When Juliana Hatfield named her new trio Some Girls, she was well aware of the controversial history behind the Rolling Stones song of the same name, with its reference to "black girls" who just want to get fucked all night. She just doesn't really care if it offends people.

"We were recording the first batch of demos and started throwing names around," Hatfield says. "That one popped up and it seemed perfect. That's literally what we are…But it's also a cool reference to a really cool record. There are some young people who don't even really know about the Rolling Stones, so the name will have a different meaning to them."

The group also features former Blake Babies drummer Freda Love and multi-instrumentalist Heidi Gluck. Hatfield had stayed friendly with Love over the years, and when the Blake Babies reunited in 2000, the pair decided they didn't want the fun to end. By early 2002, they started writing songs together again, and Hatfield remembered why she enjoyed collaborating with Love in the first place. "Freda just makes me feel good," Hatfield says. "Her personality translated into her drumming. It's transcendentally…buoyant, simple, but not boring."

A self-described Luddite, Hatfield, 35, sent old-fangled cassette tapes through the mail from her Massachusetts home to Love in Indiana and the eleven effervescent pop songs that make up Some Girls' debut, Feel It, due September 9th, quickly took shape.

The only thing missing was a bass player. "I like the White Stripes and Sleater-Kinney," Hatfield says, "but they'd be so much more fierce with a bass player." With Gluck, a friend of Love, onboard, the result ranges from the Stonesy blues of "Prettiest Girl" — about a seemingly charmed, knock-out blonde Hatfield knew in high school who was rumored to have slit her wrists — to "Necessito," a funky Luscious Jackson-like party jam that brought out the freak in Juliana.

"This band gives me an opportunity to try out some things I seem to be afraid to do in my solo work," Hatfield says. "The whole groove of that song is very simplistic — it's the same chord progression over and over. Sometimes I'm afraid of keeping it really simple like that in my solo stuff. I always thought I was a soul singer, but no one else seemed to think so."

After visiting the topic several times on her most recent solo albums and her contributions to the Black Babies 2001 reunion album, God Bless the Blake Babies, Hatfield steered clear of writing about drugs on Feel It, sensing that she was getting into a rut. Instead, she takes on soulless consumerism in the bouncy blues number " Robot City ," which features lines like, "Dirty virgin lying about her age/She loves Frankie B/She dropped several hundred on her hair, and underwear."

"It's about how shopping makes me feel like a robot," said Hatfield. "All people do is go and spend money and shop like they're robots, in and out of stores."

The album ends with a cover of Robert Johnson's "Malted Milk," a song familiar to those who've seen Hatfield live over the years. The Girls recast the spare, boozy lament with a more playful, ethereal arrangement, keeping the moaning slide guitar and adding a barrelhouse piano, a new melody, a lazy, psychedelic tempo and, in Hatfield's mind anyway, a new meaning.

"Robert Johnson really articulates something universal about the pain of existence," she said. "That song's probably about beer and drinking, but I've always had this thing for ice cream. I've had problems with ice cream. I've been addicted to it, so I like to think it's about my addiction to ice cream."

Hatfield will take to the road in June as the bass player for old buddy Evan Dando's band, and a Some Girls tour follows in September. She's also targeted early 2004 for the release of her next solo album — not that she's on any kind of carefully thought out major-label-style release schedule. "I'm the least calculating person in the music business," Hatfield says. "I have an idea then I need to pursue it, immediately. Everything I do is not a question of why — it's a question of why not?"

—Gil Kaufman
Reprinted from RollingStone.com