Some Girls a Return to Form Once Again

Sept 18, 2003 —The Rolling Stones titled their 1978 return-to-form Some Girls because "there were so many I couldn't remember all their names," Keith Richards once said. Twenty-five years later, Juliana Hatfield, Freda Love and Heidi Gluck have claimed the name for their own rock outfit — not to recontextualize the Stones' unapologetic sexism, a la Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, but because their debut, Feel It (Koch), bears similarities to its uncluttered grooves and interwoven guitars.

"I love how that album feels rhythmically," says Love. "And I love having some homage to it, but it's not super-heavily deliberate."

And as Hatfield points out, "We literally are some girls."

To many readers, especially those younger than the band's namesake, the members of the trio likely are that anonymous. Hatfield and Love were in the late-'80s indie-rock hopefuls the Blake Babies. If that name doesn't ring a bell, cultural amnesia isn't entirely to blame.

"Our timing was great," Hatfield jokes. "We broke up just before the alternative explosion."

Hatfield went on to greater commercial success as a solo artist ("My Sister"), while Love and John Strohm formed Antenna. The Blake Babies reunion successfully revisited the band's chemistry for one album, and more significantly, sparked Hatfield's and Love's recent collaboration.

"The reunion made me realize how much I love playing with Freda," says Hatfield. "But I was curious to see what would happen if we played together in some context other than Blake Babies. And John had gone off to law school, so..."

After a solo career for most of the '90s, with her face out front and personal life under scrutiny (her "friendship" with the Lemonheads' Evan Dando was a topic of endless debate, Ben-and-Jennifer for the Spin magazine set circa 1994), Hatfield finds the new band liberating.

"I definitely feel less pressure. It's more fun and I'm able to be more lighthearted. She'll give me an idea and I can interpret it and add something. You end up with these songs you never envisioned."

"It feels like it's a move forward rather than backward," adds Love.

The results highlight their strengths, and their voices, still breathy and girlish, fit seamlessly. Lyrically, "there's a mixture of being hurt by the world and retreating from it," says Hatfield. On "Robot City," she addresses the alienation she feels from today's growing consumer culture. Not surprisingly Some Girls are happy to make music for an independent label.

"I can't even imagine where we would fit in, so I don't even think about it," says Love. "The most we can hope for is to play really good shows and get people talking about that. That's really where a musician can have her own independent life — on the road, making records. I can't imagine us having a hit record."

"It's all about money, really," says Hatfield. "To be commercially successful these days, a musician has to be greedy. I make music because I like to. That's probably really naive, but I just don't have any really ambitious goals at this point other than personal and musical ones. I can't worry about what I can't control."  

—Robert Cherry
Reprinted from the Journal News