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:
- How Would You Know
- Mountains Of Love
- Fade Away
- Eye To Eye
- Get Over Me
- Don't Need A Reason
- You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory
- Chance Is Waiting
- I Didn't Know
- Simple Man / Take Me To Your Master
- 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.