In 1993, Juliana Hatfield was in the eye of the alternative-rock storm. She'd made a name for herself as one third of sharply sweet alt-poppers Blake Babies, she'd played bass on the Lemonheads' cherished It's a Shame About Ray, and she'd released a solo debut, Hey Babe, which contained heart-on-wrist tracks like "Everybody Loves Me But You" and "Ugly" (with a capital 'U'). She'd even anticipated Nirvanamania with a 1991 song named for the band, which she wrote after becoming obsessed with the Bleach track "Negative Creep." She courted controversy by suggesting that women can't play guitar ("I was just being a brat," she says now, "because people were asking me, 'How does it feel to be a woman in rock?'") and entered the celebrity gossip mill, being paired with Evan Dando and Johnny Depp ("I don't know how that rumor got started," she told SPIN in 1994.)
So it was really no surprise that with the release of Become What You Are, her Nietzschean-titled second solo album -- and her only LP released under the name the Juliana Hatfield Three (which included bassist Dean Fisher and drummer Todd Philips) -- she would start to climb the charts. Its hits were unusual: The giddy, flirtatious "Spin the Bottle" (also on the Reality Bites soundtrack) with its off-kilter 5/4 groove, hit No. 97 on the Hot 100. And its first single, definitive sororal love anthem "My Sister," is one of the rare songs to become a hit without a chorus -- in company with the Beatles' "Yesterday" and Lionel Richie's "Hello."
And now, she is getting the band back together....Dean, Todd, and Juliana have reunited in a studio in Hoboken to work on a new record with her co-producer, Tom Beaujour. They will release their second album, 20 some odd years later, in early 2015. A national tour will follow and will include a performance of Become What You Are in it's entirety.
