This Is The Sound: A Brief Review Of The Reissue Of Become What You Are By The Juliana Hatfield Three

By Berlinda Recacho

This past Christmas, I asked for the American Laundromat reissue of Become What You Are (1993) by The Juliana Hatfield Three. My brother – who got me the album pressed on bright red vinyl – was mildly amused: "You never played the whole CD back in the day," he said. "You only ever listened to three songs." This was accurate. With my finger perpetually on the clever "skip" button on compact disc players, I could go directly from lauding and lamenting a bitchy, cool, idolized older sibling (track 2: "My Sister") to exploring issues of innocence and experience through childhood party games (track 9: "Spin the Bottle"). I gravitated to these MTV-friendly tunes, the super-catchy paths of least resistance. The album, originally released on August 3, 1993, became what it is: Hatfield's highest charting success. As one of the Renaissance Women of the Nineies alternative music scene, she did it all: writing or co-writing all the songs; singing vocals; playing guitar; and all while leading her eponymous trio with bassist Dean Fisher and drummer Todd Phillips with support from Peter Holsapple (The dB's) on keyboards and Denny Fongheiser on percussion. Interestingly enough, Hatfield doesn't have a sister, reportedly penning one of her biggest hits from the point of view of one of her brothers.

However, to paraphrase the song: She had the greatest bands (The Lemonheads, Blake Babies)
She had the greatest guys (Evan Dando, Ethan Hawke)
She was good at everything/and didn't even have to try (She made it easy to love to hate her)

Vinyl makes you sit down and listen. It's way too much trouble to get up to count grooves to find specific songs. So I put the record on the turntable and for all intents and purposes heard Become What You Are for the first time. I realized that all those years ago I had been selling this masterful collection short. Hatfield's girlish voice has an unexpected edge, cutting in the way paper can slice through skin. But her voice is the counterpoint to her true instrument: Hatfield is an adept and impressive guitarist. How did I not notice this? Driven by guitar riffs that veer away from expected patterns, producer Scott Litt keeps the elements balanced but doesn't polish off the rough sonic surfaces, taking a cue from trios like The Police, Nirvana, and Dinosaur Jr. whose sound is more than the sum of its parts, far bigger than guitar + drum + bass should be. These songs, which I was so quick to dismiss in my youth, are deeper and more complex than I originally gave them credit for. They document a time when Gen X-ers were old enough to make their own decisions, but young enough to not regret their mistakes.

The Nineties were the golden age of the "Supermodel", also the title of the moody, drawling opening track, which exposes the veneer of perfection as a superficial – even degrading – illusion. "The highest paid piece of ass/You know it's not gonna last/Those magazines end up in the trash." It foreshadows the creepiness of reality television and social media influencers: "She's a living doll/and she's famous for nothing at all/She's living life like a dream/With a false sense of self-esteem." Then the ringer: "I wish she'd trade places with me." "This is the Sound" serves up the metaphysical observations of poets and philosophers cloaked in bright, hooky pop. "Mabel" and "A Dame With A Rod" render observations of marginal lives drawn through layers of grunge. The *$5,000-a-day "Supermodel" crawls through the looking glass into "Addicted" lamenting her fate by way of jump rope chant: "My body is a shell/A chemical well/A little private hell" – just like celebrities and the people who celebrate them – then and now. "Feelin' Massachusetts" pinpoints the desire to escape the home state, or state of mind that you have outgrown. The enigmatic "President Garfield" is not an ode to the 20th Commander-in-Chief, but a coded fan tribute to a hero who is admired rather than desired: musician Henry Rollins (whose real last name is Garfield). This – the only personal detail Hatfield lets slip – is promptly canceled out by the punchy "I Got No Idols", which rings hollow and true: "Love me love/but just don't touch/I don't like to be touched. That's the harm in mystery/all you know is what you see"

"For the Birds" was once the track I liked the least, a confession of being powerless to save a fallen fledgling, a protest song by way of furious heartstrings: "I'm trying, and I'm trying and I'm trying/But I can't get away from the thought/It's dying, it's dying, it's dying/And it's something that I couldn't stop/You're lying, you're lying if you say it's gonna make it/cos I know that it's not" This proved far too heavy-handed for me, so I masked my feelings with ridicule and dismissed it as maudlin and sentimental. But things come full circle. It might be the song I think about the most these days. When Hatfield sings: "I don't care for boys or girls/I'd rather hang around with the birds/Humans only wreck the world". Well, she's not wrong.

But of the three songs that I only listened to back in the day, what was the third? Track 11: "Little Pieces" is still my favorite 30 (!) years later. From the twang of the opening G chord suspended in time: "Feels like a heartbreak/but it's nothing near that great." This is the art of losing, mastered. It's the soundtrack of striving to impress, refusing to feel anything because you're tired of being hurt and missing your own mark in the process. Hatfield is less a wordsmith than a technician, or to put it more accurately, a magician. The chorus takes the jingle from that old Dry Idea deodarant commercial and reinvents it: "Just never let 'em see you sweat/Little pieces all they get/but why do I still feel like this?" But Hatfield's plaintive delivery makes the song come alive, cutting through the emotional rubble of what it was like to be 26, in the last decade of the twentieth century. I'm older now and supposedly wiser, but the haunting last line still strikes a resonant note in my chest region that shatters me every time: "It's a mystery/How I seem to be/Something less than myself."

Become What You Are by The Juliana Hatfield Three is out now via American Laundromat.

[Photos: Stacee Sledge]