the Juliana Hatfield Three

The Juliana Hatfield Three has reformed to make a second album twenty-one years after their first, Become What You Are, was released on Atlantic Records and secured a permanent place in alternative rock history. With its radio hits, “My Sister” and “Spin The Bottle”, “Become What You Are” was an influential force of uncompromising, original, melodic guitar pop/rock. In the intervening years since 1993, Juliana Hatfield’s musical output has never slackened; on various major and independent labels, she has released an average of one album a year, solo and with other projects (Some Girls, Blake Babies, Minor Alps).

Whatever, My Love was recorded with the original lineup of Todd Philips (drums), Dean Fisher (bass), and Hatfield (guitars, vocals, keyboards, and percussion) at Nuthouse Recording in Hoboken, New Jersey. Tom Beaujour (Nada Surf, Guided By Voices, Minor Alps) engineered and co-produced. Todd Philips has had a successful career in the film industry in L.A. and has also recently been touring as the drummer for the Lemonheads. Dean Fisher has been playing music in the Boston area, most notably with Tanya Donelly, and Dylan in the Movies.

The twelve songs on Whatever, My Love are unsentimental, funny, and honest. Hatfield, humble as always, acknowledges that, “We haven’t totally reinvented the wheel or anything” with this new album and that the recordings exhibit “stuff I am sort of known for, I guess”: a guitar-centric melodicism, and lyrical examinations of emotional confusion. “But I am a lot more confident now than I was then with the first album. And I had more fun recording this one.”

Hatfield’s songs’ subjects still don’t know why people are the way they are. But the music is fresh and inspired, gorgeous and punk, sleazy and sweet; fully present and alive. With their new album, the Juliana Hatfield Three has in a sense responded to its former directive to “become what you are” by making an album that is exactly what it wants to be, identifiable in its acceptance–and celebration–of the unknowable and unsolvable. The band will be on tour in North America in February and March of 2015.