december 93

 

This is where it all started for my part. Both "My sister" and "For the birds" where being played regularly on Danish radio, and it had kind of caught my attention. She was scheduled to play at Loppen in Copenhagen on December 16th - and that same day I went out and bought the "Become what you are" CD. I had the chance to listen to it a couple of times during the day so with only a vague idea about what her music was like I went to the show in the evening.

So what did I think? It was interesting - but it's not that I was instantly converted to the ultimate Juliana Hatfield fan that I am today. At the time I was mostly listening to various female singers with really strong voices - like Björk, Sinead O'Connor and even Kate Bush. My initial reaction was that Juliana couldn't really cope with that competition. Especially back then her voice was kind of thin and at the show the guy at the desk did his best to camouflage it by adding a lot of reverb.

I was also a bit skeptical about the songs - they were really in a much more traditional style than what I used to listen to. For some reason I was still very intrigued, and continued giving BWYA a lot of spins, and I guess it was only a few weeks before I was seriously trapped in the Juliana universe. I realized that although the style is pretty traditional she is indeed an incredibly gifted songwriter, her voice is interesting and her guitar playing skills are way above industry standards!

No pictures available from this show unfortunately - but if you want to you can try and imagine her with kind of blonde hair and a ponytail and a lot of makeup running down her face during the last part of the show. And of course this was in "The Juliana Hatfield Three" era, so with her on stage was Todd Philips on drums and Dean Fisher on bass.

After many years of searching I recently managed to track down a recording of this show and listening to it now I must say that it ranks as the best JH3 live recording I've ever heard! An incredible amount of energy, a lot of great songs and Juliana in a quite talkative mode - no wonder that this event turned out to have such a huge impact on the evolution of my musical preferences.

 

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