Breaking up is hard to do, of course. People like Neil Sedaka made it sound so simple, though, taking it a little too much in stride. Juliana Hatflield knows better, and she is capable of working up a little angst on the subject with an album about relationship splits, How to Walk Away. In a bit of stream-of-consciousness sampling from the album closer “Law of Nature,” for instance,” she knows “It comes around at night it’s transparent in the light you could crush it with a finger and you’ll do it just to watch it die flies are feeding on someone’s blood isn’t it kind of just like love.”
And so hummable! Typically Hatfield, though that may not have always been her intention throughout her 10-album solo career since 1992, as she wavered between girly-voiced melodic pop and self-conscious stabs at rougher-edged rock. That ‘different kind of tension’ led to such efforts as 2000's simultaneous release Beautiful Creature (evocative of Hatfield’s Hey Babe alt-rock solo debut), and Total System Failure, an all-out spunk-I-hate-spunk rock album. More recent commotion is reflected in the raw and unfocused Made in China from 2005.
While maintaining a pop appeal with effortless hooks galore, there is a precision and pertinence to the conceptually cohesive How to Walk Away, as all traces in Hatfield’s voice have given ground from girlishness to gravitas. And fittingly so, as illustrated in the ever-mounting soberness of the opening track “The Fact Remains”:
- …I stayed until the last of the bottles was empty and whizzing by my head I stayed ‘til there was no more air in the room and my tears no longer moved you ‘til you lied and you lied and you lied and you lied and you lied again then it was over I will never be the same I finally wised up but the fact remains I stayed too long next time maybe I will know how to walk away with pride and grace and faith in myself knowing how the world works and the way that things change.
Matching “The Fact Remains” in musical mood is the rueful but heartening “Remember November,” backed-up with subtle soaring harmonies conceivably “illuminating something asleep in me a great escape from a lonely life.” On the other end of the tempo spectrum is the rollicking “Now I’m Gone” with Hatfield playing a raucous electric guitar solo - and indulging in both her pop and rock excesses-of-sorts on pretty much the same song.
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