Hatfield rallies Some Girls for latest recording project

Sept 17, 2003—"We didn't put an ounce of thought into the name at all," Juliana Hatfield said about her new band, Some Girls.

The band is Hatfield, who sings and plays guitar, her Blake Babies bandmate, drummer Freda Love, and Love's buddy, bassist Heidi Gluck. When the trio went into the studio last year to have some fun and the engineer remarked that one of the tracks sounded like Some Girls-era Rolling Stones, "we just pounced on it," Hatfield said.

"It works because we literally are some girls," the singer-songwriter, 36, said on the phone from her Cambridge abode. "So it doesn't really matter if you know the reference or not, it still works."

The seeds for Some Girls, who play the Paradise tonight, were sown during the Blake Babies' 2001 reunion album and tour. Jazzed to be working together again, Love — who lives in Indiana — and Hatfield began trading tapes after the tour. They brought in Gluck to flesh out the sound, booked a week in the studio and produced their scrappy, just-released debut, Feel It.

The simple yet rocking record nicely juxtaposes sunny grooves with darker sentiments, like the universal solo-apartment-dweller contemplation of whether anyone would know if you died ("On My Back").

"That's kind of about my life on the couch," Hatfield said with a laugh. "But I think it's a really positive song; it's a celebration of solitude." Except, you know, the dying part. "I've actually talked about that with my downstairs neighbor," she said, "and I think if he didn't hear me moving around for a couple of days, he would check in."

Since this record was made as something of a lark on their own dime, Hatfield, who is working on a solo album and a book, said she and her bandmates are unconcerned about record sales.

"You look at women that are popular now and to compete with them I would have to take all my clothes off and writhe around onstage like a porn star," said Hatfield, expressing gratitude for getting her foot in the door when she did, in the early '90s.

"I've never gone after an audience, I always just let the people that felt like it come to me, and I'm fine with continuing that way. I don't necessarily want the greatest number of people, I just want the right people."

—Sarah Rodman
Reprinted from the Boston Herald