"When Some Girls started, we had no long-range plans," says Juliana Hatfield. "But the first album and tour went so well that we were excited about doing it again. This time it felt more like a band and less like a scary experiment."
Crushing Love is the second album by Some Girls, the iconoclastic trio consisting of singer, guitarist and esteemed solo artist Hatfield plus drummer Freda Love, previously Hatfield's bandmate in seminal indie combo the Blake Babies and now a member of the Mysteries of Life, and bassist/multi-instrumentalist Heidi Gluck, formerly of the Pieces and currently of the Only Children.
The 14-track collection expands the provocative, hook-laden songcraft of its 2003 predecessor Feel It into compelling new directions, while maintaining the same balance of electric energy, melodic craft and emotional nuance that made the prior disc so resonant. With Hatfield, Love and Gluck sharing vocal and songwriting duties, the songs boast subtly irresistible hooks and pointedly punchy performances, as well as deceptively plainspoken lyrics that navigate thorny personal territory with unflinching truthfulness and barbed humor.
Those qualities are prominent on such Hatfield-written numbers as "Poor Man's You," "Social Control" and "Stars in My Dreams." Love's equally noteworthy compositions, including "Partner In Crime," "Is This What I've Been Waiting For?" and "Never Really Mine," are disarmingly forthright, with the drummer stepping up to the mic to deliver a rare lead vocal on the latter tune. Gluck also weighs in with a pair of melodically lilting, lyrically bittersweet gems, "On My Own Again" and "Live Alone."
"This record was a lot more collaborative than the first one, and it definitely felt more like a cohesive band this time," says Love. "Juliana and I have so much history together that the way we work together is almost second-nature, and the added element of a new person makes it feel fresh. Heidi's involvement on this record was really significant, and her skills as a multi-instrumentalist added a lot."
"Some Girls is a really open, creative atmosphere, and it feels totally different from what I do in my solo thing," Hatfield asserts. "In my head, Some Girls is an outlet for certain songs that I feel like I can't do justice to without Freda. Her drumming is so effervescent and groovy that some songs seem to call out for it. And Heidi is such a great musician and singer that she kind of makes it all jell."
The trio recorded Crushing Love under relatively rushed, chaotic circumstances, a situation that brought out the best in the threesome's creative chemistry. "It ended up being liberating for us, because we didn't have time to fuss over it," Love observes. "Once it started rolling, things really started pouring out of us, and those circumstances seemed to foster creativity and risk-taking. We didn't rehearse or make demos; we just showed up and started making the record. We sort of made it up as we went along, which turned out to be a great way to make a record."
Another element that forced Some Girls to revise its working methods was Love's recent battle with arthritis, which caused her to revise her percussive approach and reinvent herself as a stand-up drummer. "The necessity of having to break the drum kit down and play parts separately made us realize that we weren't limited to what I could physically play," Love explains. "That set us free to experiment with different beats, or to try something on the drum machine or add some percussion."
Crushing Love's on-the-fly recording approach was well suited to the emotional immediacy of the band's new material. "The songwriting was more of a collaboration this time," Hatfield notes. "When we started working on this album, I'd just finished one of my own and I was feeling like maybe I didn't have that much more to say. But Freda stepped up with songs that said a lot of things that I was feeling but wasn't able to write at that time. I'm really in awe of Freda's writing. She says these things in her lyrics that sound so simple that they can almost go right past you, but they're so profound."
"A lot of the songs on this record are asking questions, rather than trying to give answers," Love states. "A lot of them are about being willing to live with uncertainty."
"That's how emotions and relationships are, because things don't get resolved all the time," says Gluck. "To me, a great song isn't about conflict and resolution. Sometimes it's just about capturing a fleeting little feeling, rather than trying to explain the world in four minutes. I think that Juliana and Freda are really good at that. I like the fact that this album isn't just one concept or idea idea. It's three people trying to put things together and make sense of things."
"For me," Hatfield offers, "art is about working through things as a way to survive the pain and passions of life. You write and sing about this stuff as a way to not go crazy. It's not about summing things up or coming up with answers or making people feel good. It's about telling the truth, or expressing your own truth, and the truth isn't always pretty or happy."
In addition to the band members' own compositions, Crushing Love also features three tracks penned by outside writers. Hatfield: "'Just Like That' is a song that my ex-boyfriend wrote about me while we were together. I guess it's a little weird, me singing a song that was written by someone else about me, but it's a cool song and I felt an affinity for it."
The heartbreaking "He's On Drugs Again" was written by LonPaul Ellrich of the Indiana indie combo Sardina. Some Girls began playing the song while touring to support Feel It, and were so enthusiastic about it that they recorded it during a day off at Polara leader Ed Ackerson's Minneapolis studio; it's that version that appears on Crushing Love.
The album's third cover is the haunting album closer "Magnetic Fields," written by Love's husband (and Mysteries of Life bandmate) Jake Smith. The song also provides Crushing Love's title.
"They're the last two words on the album, and the phrase lingers in your mind," says Hatfield, adding, "It also makes us sound like superheroes. Jake's songs are always kind of inscrutable, but it seems to be saying that there are things we can't control that destroy the love between us or create wonderful things between us. It's horrible and wonderful at the same time, and that kind of sums up everything for me."
Combining aggressively infectious tunes with hard-won insight, Crushing Love once again demonstrates why Some Girls is more than the sum of its partsand not your average supergroup.
"This is a great way to be in a band," Hatfield concludes, "because there's no pressure and no agenda other than the music. I love working with Freda and Heidi; we do it for the sheer enjoyment of making music together and seeing what we can come up with. And we all live in different cities, so we don't spend enough time together to annoy each other."
