PHOTO: DAVID DOOBININ | Juliana Hatfield looked a little severe as she stepped onto the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage for a well attended free show last weekend. In a slim dark military coat with epaulets, her greying hair center parted and pulled back in a bun.
But soon into her set, accompanying herself on her Barbie-pink electric guitar, she was as we’ve ever known her, in that earnest, high voice, staying true to herself as she mowed down subjects in her songs. There was a sort of logic to her set—the opening “Candy Wrappers” were strewn “all over the hotel room floor,” which led to “Hotel” (“welcome me when I need a home”). She may have been thinking about coming down from Boston and checking into her DC hotel.
Later, she laid bare her process of sequencing songs, saying she paired “Wonder Why,” the well-observed song describing her parents’ house, with an Electric Light Orchestra cover, because the former song described “a transistor radio held up to my ear” on which her teenage self was likely listening to ELO.
Doing cover albums has been a thing in recent years for Hatfield—her latest is Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO, from which she did “Telephone Line,” which required a bit of crowd participation, as well as the lesser known “Sweet in the Night,” which she said was her favorite.
From her other thematic cover albums she played the most famous one from the Police collection, “Roxanne,” with just the right tone, and two from her surprising collection of Olivia Newton John songs—the yearning country ballad “Please Mr. Please” and the splendidly poppy “Dancing’ ‘Round and ‘Round.”
For all the sudden cover albums in her recorded output, she remains a prolific songwriter, reaching her peak in things like “I Don’t Know What to do With My Hands,” from her one-off duo with Matthew Caws of Nada Surf, Minor Alps, to “Everything’s for Sale,” which begins as cautionary advice but ends with a kaleidoscopic litany of largely artificial modern items, spat out like non sequiturs: “self-cleaning ovens, conversion therapy, rabbit ears, and feet.”
“I don’t think of myself as a really extra-smart person,” she said afterwards, “but I’m always really proud of myself when I remember all of those words.”
Female vocals paired with stark electric guitar riffs brought to mind PJ Harvey at times, though she proved with her most well known songs like “My Sister” (about whom she was clearly of two minds), that she’s charted her own course all along. Not every high note was there, and while these anomalies can easily be hidden within the noise of a full band, it was more unforgiving in a solo setting. But what a setting.
Because Hatfield has spent a lot of her performing career in small dark bars with her bands, the seated audience in the noted performance space impressed her, “with the big beautiful light, and the big beautiful head of JFK and the big beautiful tall ceilings.” When she doffed her coat mid-set and somebody hooted, she said “Come on, stop that. It was 85 degrees here in January.” (Actually 80, but it was a crazy record-setting winter day for a town that had five inches of snow a week before). She didn’t let it get to her.
Hatfield played around with her set a bit, such that she abandoned “Invisible” after a couple of lines because the segue didn’t seem right. “Sometimes you think things are going to go well one after the other and then it doesn’t,” she said as she tuned up for another song. “You have to know how to roll with it—or, not roll with it.”
Elsewhere, after straining near the end of “Dancin’ ‘Round and Round” she pled “rewind!” and produced a more pleasing vocal final verse. When someone called out for the 30-year-old “Spin the Bottle” at the show’s end, she considered it for a moment and agreed. “Every time I play this song I think, next time I play this song it’s going to kill me,” she said. “Like physically, I don’t have the energy.” But she vowed to forge ahead: “I’m just going to do it, I’m not going to talk about it.”
And like the perseverance that’s underscored her entire career, she tore through it.
SETLIST
Candy Wrappers
Hotels
I Don’t Know What to Do with My Hands
Everybody Loves Me But You
Roxanne
There’s Always Another Girl
Had a Dream
My Sister
Telephone Line
Wonder Why
Lost Ship
Everything’s for Sale
Please Mr. Please
Sweet in the Night
Dancing ‘Round and ‘Round
Spin the Bottle
