Posts tagged blake babies

WGN Radio of Chicago has an interview with all three Blake Babies:

Now, this is a treat! The highly acclaimed and much beloved indie-rock band the Blake Babies (John Strohm, Freda Love Smith and Juliana Hatfield) join Justin [Kaufmann] to talk about their careers, how they came together, when they decided to try a career in music, seeing the bands around them become successful, what they learned from being in a band, trying to create something unique, what they remember about making those early records, releasing the demos of their record, “Earwig” what it means to be a part of this iconic band and the role that music plays in their lives now.

You can listen to the 40 minute interview at WGN's site.

From an interview in The Boston Globe with all three Blake Babies by Steve Smith:

It’s not a journey Hatfield is altogether comfortable taking. “I haven’t listened since we made them,” she confesses during a telephone interview covering the album’s arrival, as well as two concerts the Blake Babies will play in Boston on Saturday for small, select audiences who crowd-funded the LP’s production.“I know I have to listen to them at some point,” she continues, laughing softly. “I haven’t. . . . I’m afraid to go back. I’m listening to the album recordings so I can re-learn the songs for the shows. But I actually have not listened to these demos that we’re promoting.”

Up until around a year ago, neither had anyone else, probably. Strohm, speaking by telephone from his home in Nashville with Love — now Love Smith — on the line in Evanston, Ill., described how the tapes had come to be.

The Blake Babies Earwig Demos project has reached the 100% goal over at PledgeMusic.

There's still a couple of months to get involved:

pledgemusic.com/projects/blakebabies (archived)

The previoulsy announced private Blake Babies shows are now scheduled for July:

July 9, 2016 - Boston, MA
2 private studio performances (matinée & early evening)
pledgemusic.com/projects/blakebabies/bundles/17122

July 23, 2016 - Evanston, IL
Private matinée performance
pledgemusic.com/projects/blakebabies/bundles/17128

Freda Love Smith, writing for The Talkhouse about the Blake Babies Earwig demos:

But if we were glued together by John, we were utterly defined by the sound of Juliana’s vocals. Listening to her young talent hits me all the harder for the years. I didn’t fully recognize this back then, but now I hear the intensity of a twenty-year-old singer and songwriter who had been waiting and waiting, often despairingly, often impatiently, for the stars to align, for an opportunity to do the thing she was born to do. And here’s that moment! She has a band, a producer, a studio and a crack engineer, and after all those years of singing in her bedroom, she takes the microphone and she nails it. She throws down harmonies and they are amazing. She is the real deal.

The article also has a premiere of the Take Me demo (originally titled Take Me, Take Me) from the project.

A reminder that the demos collection is the main item in an ongoing PledgeMusic campaign (archived).

Blake Babies have launched their PledgeMusic project today (archived)!

John, Freda & Juliana:

In early March of 1988, we entered Fort Apache Studios in Cambridge, MA to capture our live set in a studio setting. We recorded 12 demos of songs for what would become our debut full length on Mammoth, Earwig. The master tapes from those sessions have been sitting on a few basement shelves since then and pretty much were forgotten about.

In 2015, we rescued the recordings and had the tapes remixed and remastered. And to our surprise, the demos turned out sounding better than anyone remembered.

They sounded so good that we had to do something special with them for you, the fans! We’re happy to announce that the Earwig Demos will finally be heard as intended, on vinyl ONLY here on PledgeMusic. While in our archives, we found some other unique and rare items to add to the pre-order. We hope you find something you will like.

There are vinyl, FLAC and MP3 ordering options plus other PledgeMusic exclusives.

3 private reunion shows are planned in the US - 2 in Boston, MA (on the same day) and 1 in Evanston, IL. Tickets for these limited shows are available (via PledgeMusic). Other than the possiblity of up to 3 extra acoustic house concerts available for $20,000 (!) each, the band "do not have any touring plans".

Exciting!

pledgemusic.com/projects/blakebabies (archived)

The Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, MA has announced an event for January 8, 2016:

Harvard Book Store welcomes Freda Love Smith and her former Blake Babies bandmate, local singer-songwriter Juliana Hatfield for a presentation of Smith's book Red Velvet Underground: A Rock Memoir, with Recipes.

The event is free. More info at harvard.com.

Speaking of Freda, there's a new Mysteries Of Life EP titled Bad Advice out now at Bandcamp.

From an interview with all three Blake Babies at NoiseTrade:

NT: Many present day bands list Blake Babies as an influence and have even name dropped the band in interviews . For example, Bully comes to mind recently. How does that feel for you all and to what do you attribute your lasting sonic legacy?

Strohm: I’ve met the people in Bully before – they are a local band here in Nashville – and they’ve given me no indication that they know our band! But I do hear an influence, whether it’s direct or they are mining similar influences as us. I’ve seen the references in the press. When young bands or music writers acknowledge us as influential, that feels amazing. That’s the best thing, really. We felt at the time that a big reason we were toughing it out – and it was very hard to do this band for a lot of reasons – was to build some sort of musical legacy that could become more important over time. We didn’t necessarily expect it to happen, but I think we really hoped it would. Now that we’ve built our lives in other directions it matters less than I would have expected, but it’s still very satisfying. I can only really speak for myself, but I’m such a geek music fan that it just blows my mind to think that something we did as kids decades ago actually has a life and continuing influence today. The very best thing that could happen is to inspire young people to want to make music, or to influence the music they make. That sort of thing really validates the whole experience, and everything we put into it.

Smith: I’m proud of the initiative we took in the early days of our career. How when nobody would sign us, we put out our own record. Also, how we worked hard and worked together because we cared so much about what we were doing.

Hatfield: I am just glad no one got killed, that we didn’t kill each other, or kill ourselves.

Also of note at NoiseTrade there's vintage audio of a 1989 Blake Babies studio session for WERS.

Freda Love Smith, Juliana's colleague in Blake Babies and Some Girls, has a new book out - Red Velvet Underground: A Rock Memoir, with Recipes.

You don't see enough of the memoir / recipe genre these days.

From the promo blurb:

Red Velvet Underground tells the story of how Smith's indie-rock past evolved into her domestic present. Loosely framed around cooking lessons she gives her older son, her story moves back and forward in time as she recollects how she got started in music, and how her career in rock eventually dovetailed with her passion for cooking and, later, the growth of her family. The book intersperses forty-five recipes with personal stories about her music career, cooking, eating, and family.

Here's a bit from TheTalkhouse, where you can read a fuller excerpt:

The Blake Babies and the Lemonheads had formed in Boston at about the same time, discovered each other quickly and become fast friends.

Evan and his Lemonheads partner, guitarist-singer-songwriter Ben Deily, attended one of the first shows the Blake Babies ever played, at an arty café called She’s Leaving Home. Evan stood front and center, enthusiastically rocking out, and Juliana was smitten from that moment, and far into the future. Of course, it was hard to meet that golden boy and not be smitten. Few people will ever gaze upon a human more beautiful than nineteen-year-old Evan Dando. And Evan wasn’t just a pretty face —he was an uncanny talent with a killer voice, a knack for melody and great taste in music. I will love him forever for bringing his copy of Big Star’s Radio City over to the apartment I shared with John and Juliana. “You guys are going to freak out,” he said. “I promise.” He was right. When Evan agreed to join the Blake Babies after we had unsuccessfully worked with two other bass players, we were delighted. As it turned out, it was only the beginning of a long cross-pollination between the two bands. John would later join the Lemonheads on drums, and years after that he would return as a guitar player. After the Blake Babies broke up, Juliana was an integral part of the Lemonheads’ classic record It’s a Shame About Ray.

Juliana, having read an advanced copy, has said:

These are sweet, unsentimental scenes from the ever-evolving life of a woman of many shifting and balancing roles: mother, wife, drummer, student, teacher, friend, daughter, food enthusiast. It’s all tied together with tantalizing recipes that have been lovingly improvised and tweaked into a life-affirming doneness.

The book is available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon USA and Amazon UK.

There's also an Apple iBooks version.