Some Girls band together for album, tour

Sept 19, 2003—Though most fans and critics would voraciously disagree, Juliana Hatfield feels she's never made a "great album."

Even she has to admit, however, that her latest project scores pretty high marks.

"I think it gets a check-plus," Hatfield says of Feel It, the just-released album by her new band, Some Girls, which features fellow Blake Babies alumna Freda Love on drums and Heidi Gluck on bass.

"It was recorded over a year ago and I'm still listening to it and am still entertained by it," guitarist-vocalist Hatfield notes. "The fact I haven't gotten sick of it must mean something."

What it means is that Love had a good idea when, after years apart, she contacted her former bandmate to suggest they work together again.

Their first project was a Blake Babies reunion tour and album (with third BB John Strohm) in 2000. Then came the idea for the all-female trio.

After a bit of long-distance corresponding — Love from Bloomington, Ind., and Hatfield from outside Boston — they eventually recruited Gluck (of The Pieces) and set out to record some new tunes.

In just over a week, the 11 tunes for Feel It were in the can, produced by Love's husband, Jake Smith.

With the album's release, Some Girls have kicked off a concert tour that will bring them to Maxwell's in Hoboken tonight and the North Star in Philadelphia tomorrow — and there's already talk of another record.

"It was amazingly casual about how it all got together," says Love. "We never had a clear end in sight and when we invited Heidi — a person I didn't even know at the time — to participate, I never thought we were getting a band together. I thought we were just hiring a bass player for a demo. But she just magically fit in and it all came together."

Hatfield, whose feats in the indie-rock world in the past decade have been as a solo artist, also marveled over the chemistry of the collaboration. In fact, the creator of eight albums' worth of such provocative songs as "My Sister," "Universal Heartbeat," "Sellout" and "My Protege" admitted she learned something in working with Love, who's relatively new to songwriting.

"I'm such a fan of Freda's drumming and Freda as a person," says Hatfield. "I think she's a really good lyricist. Her songs are very simple, but profound, and that's a really hard thing to do…

"Some of my solo stuff tends to get heavy. I think more when I'm writing alone. That's what I like about writing with Freda. I don't worry so much about saying everything, I feel I don't have to explain everything, as I do in my own songs. It's kind of impressionistic instead of a photograph, more of an abstract process," adds Hatfield, who also recently has released Gold Stars 1992-2002: The Juliana Hatfield Collection, a compilation of tunes from her first seven albums.

Love, in turn, simply felt "very, very lucky" to team up with a tunesmith of Hatfield's caliber.

"I haven't done much songwriting and I wouldn't have wound up contributing so much if Juliana wasn't so encouraging," says Love, who since the Blake Babies has played in the Indiana-based bands Mysteries of Life (with her husband) and Lola. "I hardly play guitar, hardly play piano. I just get the ideas in my head…Juliana was so open to my unorthodox method. I think she's one of the best songwriters in the world and for someone who's so experienced, so talented, to be interested in my ideas…"

Love and Hatfield share writing credits on four songs on Feel It, including the standouts "Almost True" (which concedes "Our love is real and almost true") and the paean to solitude "On My Back" ("On my back, I can become one with the couch I'm living on. I can sleep all day and not do anything and let the phone ring").

Love contributes two other tunes, "The Getaway" and "Launch Pad," and the disc is rounded out with four new Hatfield compositions and a slippery cover of blues legend Robert Johnson's "Malted Milk."

The break-pace production schedule guaranteed the CD would have a natural, roomy feel, where each member of the trio's contributions prove vital.

In addition to her bass chores, Gluck adds discreet touches of harmonica, slide and lap steel guitars and keyboards to the arrangements. Backed by Love's steady, tasteful drumming, Hatfield's distinctive guitar work and voice are in top form.

Noting her singing has been described as "coy, kittenish, girlish," the 30-something musician points out "a lot of people make it sound as if I'm going for that sound, as if it's a choice I made, but it's the voice I was born with. There's nothing coy about it. I'm sweating it out and singing is not easy for me. It's a struggle."

Still, one can't help but be awed by a vocalist who can offer a phrase such as "Get up off me, I want coffee, my stalker is outside my door" with an air of nonchalance, then make the listener's knees weaken with her fragile delivery of an innocuous line like "putting on my bug spray" — all in the same song (the infectious "Necessito").

It's just one of many high points on the disc. The bottom line is, despite what Some Girls might say, Feel It deserves at least a "check-plus-plus."

—Patrick O’Shea
Reprinted from the New Jersey Times