Juliana Hatfield – Lightning Might Strike (American Laundromat) (13th Floor Album Review)
Lightning Might Strike is studio album release number 21 for Juliana Hatfield as a solo artist, the latest in a long career that includes 10 more LPs under various band entities including the Blake Babies, The Lemonheads, Some Girls and Minor Alps.
Nearly 40 years in the business has seen her produce music toward the more poppier and folk end of the spectrum of indie rock and grunge, citing a variety of influences from punk legends, X and The Stooges to the folk rock of Neil Young.
She described songwriting as a form of therapy that provides an outlet helping her to navigate difficult times to Renee Graham in a Boston Globe interview in 1993. It may come as no surprise that Hatfield introduces Lightning Might Strike as a difficult time as she set out to write this album.
She says moving from the inner city to a rural town where she knew no one, her best friend dying, her dog passing away, and her mother diagnosed with esophagus cancer leaving her depressed, lost and lonely provided the material for this album.
“However much or hard I try, it seems, I’ve never had much control over much in my life,” she writes in the album bio adding that her mother believes in predetermination, a belief brought about when Hatfield’s uncle was struck and killed by lightning at the age of 16.
“With this album I was contemplating these ideas – fate, powerlessness, the effects of trauma, (and) the ways we can’t and don’t change.”
If all this suggests a collection of songs that will leave you maudlin, despairing and reaching for a bottle then more disappointment is to come: Hatfield faces up to all the crap that life can throw at her with a jaunty, upbeat and quirky take on things with wry lyrics and music that borders on the sunnier side of indie rock.
Those lyrics could easily stand as a collection of poems – well-constructed, considered, realistic yet filled with metaphors and cadence with no real loyalty to rhyme.
And the jangly guitars, persistent rhythm interspersed with some groovy guitar lines make for a toe-tapping, booty-jiggling music that should have you dancing through the night and happy that the sun will shine again in the morning.
“I hold on to humility and gratitude (most of the time) rather than (constant) bitterness, and I have hope, mostly in the form of the music that I make, even if its subject matter is sometimes kind of grim,” Hatfield says in the the bio.
Her mother’s fateful diagnosis is addressed in Scratchers, a song ostensibly about playing those instant win scratch cards.
My octogenarian mother sometimes she, too, plays the numbers. She wants to leave us a fortune, she sings, leaving us with the refrain, Lightning Might Strike, the album’s moniker at the song’s end.
On her dog shuffling off, Hatfield remembers, You ran with me down the hill describing such beautifully obscure moments with, where turtles sometimes would sun themselves in a glossy row on a log…leaving us with pure love in the words, My dear sweet baby, You will always be with me.
And on Long Slow Nervous Breakdown, a yearlong depression is approached with such beauty of description – It’s like a leaf being carried down a river and out to sea, or a balloon floating up and up into thinner air – you’d almost wish to swap places just to see the possibilities of Hatfield’s world.
Being lost and lonely is addressed with hope – All these clocks say different things so I can always be beginning and no song ever has to end – on Harmonizing With Myself.
And the effects of trauma are embraced as part of life’s rich pageant on Wouldn’t Change Anything – I tell myself I’m running from the weather, trying to avoid the storm, I’m afraid of falling trees, and things crushed underneath, The wind was always out to get me.
This is not sad, depressing music, but rather a hopeful, and optimistic take on a life that can sometimes feel overwhelmingly bleak.
Hatfield plays guitars, keyboards, vocals (including exquisite harmonies), some bass and percussion with Chris Anzalone on drums and Ed Valauskas most of the bass, all recorded remotely from various parts of Massachusetts. Pat DiCenso mixed and mastered to whole, with the project taking about 2 years to complete.
“This practice of putting songs together has always sustained me and given my life – as uncontrollable as it feels – meaning and purpose, even in the darkest time,” Hatfield writes.
Long may that practice continue, Juliana, you bring meaning and purpose and, above all, beauty to all our lives.
Alex Robertson
Lightning Might Strike is out now on American Laundromat Records
Click here to watch the 13th Floor MusicTalk Interview with Juliana Hatfield
