New (Old) Song - If I Could

Here we go then. This track is taken from the forthcoming Juliana Hatfield Three album, Whatever, My Love.

It's a new recording of a song first heard in the 'honor downloads experiment' a decade ago.

Juliana:

I have always loved this song and I always wanted it to be done up properly and although this is not shockingly or radically different than the demo, I really love it.

Folk over on the PledgeMusic comments recall Juliana performing this song at the Bush Hall shows in London back in 2006. The website you're reading now exists because of those shows.

The song is rather special, isn't it?

New JH3 Album - Whatever, My Love

The forthcoming album from the reunited Juliana Hatfield Three will be titled Whatever, My Love.

Loving the deference to the 1993 artwork.

We have a scheduled release date of February 17, 2015.

Perhaps a little unexpectedly (given Juliana's run of solo self-released albums), the band are signed to American Laundromat Records, who now have the album listed:

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.

American Laundromat are now taking pre-orders which include bundle options for buttons, a decal and a t-shirt.

The shirt is a different design to that offered by Juliana through PledgeMusic and is available unbundled from the CD for $24 plus postage.

The tracklist:

  1. Invisible
  2. Now That I Have Found You
  3. Ordinary Guy
  4. If Only We Were Dogs
  5. I'm Shy
  6. Dog On A Chain
  7. If I Could
  8. Push Pin
  9. Blame The Stylist
  10. I Don't Know What To Do With My Hands
  11. Wood
  12. Parking Lots

A sad face emoji for the moment you realise that Blame The Stylist and Wood appear to be the only previously unheard songs here.

The following have been heard in some form before:

1,2,3,5,7 - first released during Juliana's Download Experiment in 2004-2005

4 - from Sittin' In A Tree..., a 2007 EP recorded with Frank Smith

6,8,12 - from Wild Animals, a 2013 solo acoustic album

10 - from Get There, a 2013 Minor Alps Album

They are all new recordings though and let's not forget that the involvement of Tom Beaujour in the studio with Minor Alps helped transform June 6th to Away Again last year.

Also, February isn't far off now is it? Good times ahead.

God's Foot Demos Released
GFD_540.jpg

God's Foot, as most of us know all too well, is the mid 90s album that has never been released. Many fans suspect it may be Juliana's masterpiece. You can read more about it here.

Today, we got perhaps the next best thing to your actual mastered studio mixes. Juliana has released some demos from the era, available as an exclusive on PledgeMusic as part of the Juliana Hatfield Three reunion project. Surely we've all bought this one, yes?

The tracks as originally labelled back in the day:

  1. How Would You Know
  2. Mountains Of Love
  3. Fade Away
  4. Eye To Eye
  5. Get Over Me
  6. Don't Need A Reason
  7. You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory
  8. Chance Is Waiting
  9. I Didn't Know
  10. Simple Man / Take Me To Your Master
  11. Charity

Of the release Juliana says:

the recordings were taken from an old cassette--the only version of these recordings that i have. so the sound quality is going to be possibly very slightly unlike status quo to ears that are used to, like taylor swift..or digital high resolution everything..the songs were recorded onto 2-inch reel-to-reel tape and then most likely transferred to half-inch tape and then transferred onto a cassette for my listening pleasure and then that cassette ended up in the basement sitting in a paper bag full of cassettes and then years later (circa now) the cassette was transferred onto a CD. and then this will be converted to mP3’s..it is by no means a sonic disaster..it sounds great and fine to me. but i am a caveman. and i know there are some serious audiophiles out there and they might notice something sounds a little off..but i don’t, really. and the demo versions of the songs are really cool… and some are quite different than what ended up on the album that never came out.

there are 11 songs..there were some different songs that ended up being considered for the album but either we did not demo every single song, or there are some that just cannot be found. although i never finalized an official version and sequence of the album, some of you have heard versions of what people who made the songs available (not me) were calling “god’s foot”. but, again, i never sanctioned the song choices. since i knew the album was not ever scheduled for release, i never needed to finalize the song choices or mixes or the sequence. i am telling you this so that no one is disappointed that a few songs you might’ve been expecting to be part of the GF demos will not be there. for example, “perfection” is not included in the demos. i don’t remember doing a demo for that one. maybe it exists somewhere, but i can’t find it. so that one is not in the list of GF demos…

These near 20 year old demos are sacred artefacts to this Juliana fan and I'm so pleased she's released them.

The 2014 reformation of the JH3 is a massive deal but given what we know so far about what's to come, I'll admit to being more excited to hear early versions of these GF songs than, say, a reworked 'If Only We Were Dogs'.

There are songs here that I've wanted to write about for years but have been reticent given the circumstances. Maybe now is the time for a kinda sorta God's Foot review. I'll give these tracks a good number of listens first anyway.

Big day.

Madrid, May 15 - Airscape (Video)

el proyecto musical de Juliana Hatfield y Matthew Caws el 15 de mayo de 2014 en Madrid. versionando a Robyn Hitchcock Aquí otro de los temas de MINOR ALPS - Live On Tomorrow (15-05-2014) - Sala El Sol - Madrid http://youtu.be/Pm5fYp9kaAc siguenos en Facebook http://www.facebook.com/lachatarreria http://www.lachatarreria.com

Here's a Robyn Hitchcock cover performed by Minor Alps at their Madrid show back in May, but only just posted to YouTube by La Chaterreria. There's also a new clip of Live On Tomorrow from the same event.

Because that's the news you've come here for. Minor Alps videos from 6 months ago, right?

(More on that other thing soon.)

The Juliana Hatfield Three Are Back!
25.jpg
21years.jpg

Exclamation mark in post title! Big news!

On the same freaking day that David Lynch announced the return of Twin Peaks, Juliana confirmed the reformation of The Juliana Hatfield Three. It was all a bit much for those of us old enough to remember the early 90s.

I am kind of excited to announce that the Juliana Hatfield Three has reformed to make a new album--our second, after "Become What You Are"

— Juliana Hatfield (@julianahatfield) October 6, 2014

Last year Juliana mooted the possibility of playing some 'Become What You Are' shows and continued to talk about it during the recent Minor Alps European tour. That she's reforming the band (with Dean Fisher and Todd Philips) and recording new music is even better news. The new album, the second to be released under the JH3 moniker over 21 years later, will be a fan funded thing.

The project is now

live at PledgeMusic

.

Juliana:

Todd, Dean, and I have just begun recording with the lovely and talented Tom Beaujour (who worked with me and Matthew [Caws] on the Minor Alps album) at the Nuthouse in Hoboken, New Jersey, and so far it is going great. Some of you may have previously heard some version of some of the songs we are working on. For example, one of the songs we are exploring is “If I Could”. We have always loved this song but there have only ever been demos of it; it has never been properly finished or produced. There are multiple attempted versions of it but the nut has never been quite cracked, and this has always sort of haunted me. Now I feel like I finally have the chance to get it right with Todd and Dean. We are also exploring electricized band versions of a couple of the punchier acoustic home-recorded songs from my last album, “Wild Animals”. And there will be some other surprises.

Things of note in the Pledge exclusives:

VIP tour soundcheck passes (for US dates to be confirmed circa March 2015)

God's Foot demos!

Skype guitar lessons

Juliana's Cream SG

There's plenty of other stuff including artwork, clothing and instruments.

Also, Juliana's on-off 'it's complicated' relationship with Facebook appears to be back on. There's now a Juliana Hatfield Three page, together with her reactivated official page.

!

UPDATE November 9, 2014 - The project is now 100% funded.

Nada Surf Announce B-Sides Album

Nada Surf have today announced a new b-sides compilation, to be released later this month - September 19 (EU) and 23 (US).

The track list features extra tracks from their last 4 albums and includes 'I Wanna Take You Home', which originally appeared on a bonus CD on 'Lucky' in 2008. It has not previously been available for download / streaming.

The song features Matthew Caws and Juliana Hatfield on dual vocal. The first ever Minor Alps song, sort of.

This is Minor Alps (Juliana Hatfield) (Matthew Caws) doing "I Want To Take You Home" live at Main St Records in Manayunk Pa on November 22 2013..

Mysteries Of Life - Back In Action


More Blake Babies related news then. Following her live appearance in Chicago back in May, Freda's band are now back in business, recording new songs with possible live shows in 2015.

Thanks to Carlos for the info.

God Bless The @blakebabies

Blake Babies official Twitter account launched today. Hopefully it might lead to us hearing some of this:

Some relics here...working on a potential compilation of stuff nobody has ever heard before!

A photo posted by @johnpstrohm on

Juliana's Art For Sale On eBay

gotta move out of my apt. into a smaller space & so i'm going to unload a bunch of my paintings on ebay starting tonight to help clear out

— Juliana Hatfield (@julianahatfield) August 10, 2014

 

Self-Portrait With Katy Perry's Body pic.twitter.com/CZLJWRI5rb

— Juliana Hatfield (@julianahatfield) August 10, 2014


12 of Juliana's paintings are now for sale on eBay.

UPDATE - Aug 19, 2014 MOAR:

there are a few new paintings and a drawing of mine up for auction here: http://t.co/2vBxOfxzCi

— Juliana Hatfield (@julianahatfield) August 19, 2014

UPDATE - July 1, 2015 - there's another auction with a further Katy Perry piece.

Minor Alps Interview, Photos - Froggy's Delight
minoralpsparis2014.jpg

Minor Alps, on the question of more music and that song they worked on in Europe:

Juliana Hatfield : On n’a pas de projets. Matthew a commencé à travailler sur le prochain Nada Surf donc il va surtout faire ça et on n’a pas de projet après ce soir, notre dernière date. Aucun projet.

Matthew Caws : Si ! On a commencé à parler d’un enregistrement ! On a cette reprise…

Juliana Hatfield : On a aussi écrit une chanson sur scène.

Matthew Caws : Ah oui ça aussi !

Juliana Hatfield : On a écrit une partie de la chanson et on veut enregistrer cette reprise qu’on joue en live donc il y a ces deux idées.

Matthew Caws : Oui, c’est cool ! On ne sait jamais, peut-être que ça pourrait aller ensemble : on a ce refrain qu’on a écrit au début de la tournée et on ne sait jamais, ça pourrait être le couplet ce qui serait énorme. Parce que... c’est dur à dire. On a écrit le couplet le plus joyeux du monde… et puis il y a la reprise…

Juliana Hatfield : Il y a toujours d’autres trucs qui peuvent mener à des futurs trucs…

The full interview (en français) from the final night of the recent European tour in Paris can be read at Froggy's Delight. There's also a review of the show.

Thomy Keat's photo portraits used in the interview can be viewed in higher res at Taste Of Indie.

Interview - Drowned In Sound
gettherecover.jpg

Matthew Caws, on the cover art for 'Get There':

It’s a photograph from the Olympic Peninsula, near Seattle. It’s not an Alp. We actually were messing around with a lot of photos of the Alps themselves; there were some really cool ones, night time ones, but it was hard to make them work. They were awesome, but really weird and dark. I’ve actually had a bad experience with that in the past, with a Nada Surf record we did called Lucky. You don’t always know how it’s going to print; you’re looking at your computer screen and thinking it looks great, but obviously the screen is generating light. You get the real thing and think “oh, man. This is not how I thought it was gonna look, it’s really fucking flat.” We love that picture too, though. It’s a nice fit, I think.

Dating back to their Manchester show in April, there's an interview with Juliana and Matthew published today at Drowned In Sound.

Minor Alps Euro Tour - Misc Links

la flèche d'or, paris 19 may 2014

Linkage not previously posted here:

Carsten's Tour Database / Google Maps overview of the tour

YouTube:

Lausanne (whole show)

Out There @ Madrid

Inside Of Love @ Bordeaux

Candy Wrappers @ Paris

Bette Davis Eyes @ Paris

Reviews:

Rave Child (Glasgow)

Bearded Magazine (Brighton)

Let's hope this is not the last we hear of Minor Alps. Big thanks to Matthew and Juliana for bringing this project to Europe.