Growing up with an older sister and a nineties-obsessed dad, the Juliana Hatfield Three’s “My Sister” was a household staple. With every petty fight we had over the TV remote, or something equally banal, I’d quietly sing to myself, “I hate my sister, she’s a bitch.” Sure, that’s coarse language to apply to tiffs I’d forget by the next day, but my dad really showed us the song so we’d pay attention to the end: a fervent repetition of “I miss my sister.” Now that she and I live hundreds of miles away, I find myself replaying the song with special attention to that post-chorus, and I wish I could be back in a car with her, singing along to it. I’ve always thought Juliana Hatfield was adept at capturing the messiness of femininity—the jealousy, pain, and insecurity that feels synonymous with teenage girlhood. Especially within the imposing social norms of the nineties, Hatfield has always felt like a fresh voice, playfully flipping off the mainstream.
When Hatfield and her collaborators Dean Fisher and Todd Philipps released Become What You Are in 1993, a new age of female-fronted rock had already gained some traction with the salient breakthroughs of groups like Sonic Youth and Hole. The idea of a female musician as the bubbly pop star archetype was being beaten down by women with electric guitars, and Hatfield threw her hat in the ring with her solo record, Hey Babe, in 1992. Become What You Are is a quintessential guitar album, with unpredictable chord changes and resolutions that scratch an itch you didn’t know you had. Hatfield plays with time and tempo masterfully—between the half-time introduction to “For the Birds” and the starting-and-stopping chorus of “This is the Sound,” she is the master of each song’s momentum. She literally yells out “bridge!” in the middle of the “This is the Sound” as a preface to a musical break. Behind the rougher edges of her rock influence, Hatfield successfully created a catalog of ear worms. Take the punchy melody of “Addicted” or the dizzying repetition of “I Got No Idols” in the track of the same name: Become What You Are is timeless—even after thirty years, it feels totally fresh.
In working on Become What You Are, Hatfield joined in the line of rebellion with songs like “Supermodel,” where she sticks out her tongue at a then-contemporary modeling industry that relegated girls to nothing more than “the highest paid piece of ass.” Hatfield never shied away from confronting the rougher edges of womanhood, a virtual necessity following the magazine-obsessed culture of the eighties. She often depicts herself and other women as wanderers, like the central figure of “Mabel,” who has come to “realize she’s in a different place, realize her lack of social grace.”
Become What You Are came at a time when teenage apathy was the stylish persona. The spirited energy of eighties synth-pop bled into a lethargic mid-nineties, where slacker rock and grunge provided a crash pad for the burnouts to rest. Hatfield surely rolled with the punches of this half-assed brand of angst—her song “Spin the Bottle” was featured in the soundtrack of Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites, a quintessential film in the catalog of Gen-X malaise. It’s easy for the artistic output of this period to ring hollow, but Hatfield stands out as an artist whose music has only gotten better with age. Even “Spin the Bottle,” arguably her breakout hit, touts a ⅝ time signature, which keeps the energy of the song alive. Hatfield always championed sincerity above everything, which is why her lyrics have managed to veer away from the self-important. The growing pains of adolescence are omnipresent on Become What You Are, with the appropriate levels of misgiving rounding out songs like “Feelin’ Massachusetts” and “For the Birds.” The former spans the trials of a stifling suburban life, where Hatfield sings “I’m so bored” until the cows come home. But even this song glimmers with earnestness, as Hatfield balances her bitterness with the stirring imagery of an escape: “Take me to the ocean and leave me there, leave me all alone with the sun and the air.”
Hatfield got the idea for the album’s title from a maxim by Nietzsche, which suggests that growth is actually when people become who they truly are. The idea that one’s true self can be uncovered was freeing to her, especially considering how introspective her songwriting already was. She maps the roadblocks of maturity in songs like “Little Pieces,” where she sings, “It’s a mystery how I seem to be something less than myself.” Throughout the album, Hatfield discovers that becoming something else isn’t the answer to her self-doubt. “For the Birds” is an extended plea to leave humanity, but even after Hatfield sings, “If I had wings I’d try to fly,” she acknowledges that “they don’t make it harder to die.”
While I have waxed poetic about the impact of Become What You Are on a generation of women and musicians as a whole, Juliana Hatfield makes no such claims of importance for herself. In “President Garfield,” she repeats the phrase “I’m saying something really deep” as the song comes to a close, in a kind of tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of musicians’ tendencies to aggrandize their insight. She has continued making music under her own name through the past few decades, but Become What You Are is the only record officially released under the Juliana Hatfield Three. While she wrote all of the songs by herself excluding “I Got No Idols,” it feels like the trio struck gold with this record. It’s the perfect storm.
