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New Juliana Hatfield: Can’t Get It Out of My Head

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Video: Juliana Hatfield – “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” (ELO cover)

Directed by David Doobinin. From Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO, out November 17 on American Laundromat.

After tribute albums dedicated to the songs of the Police and Olivia Newton-John, Juliana Hatfield has now tackled the works Jeff Lynne and his Electric Light Orchestra. In between these she’s also released albums of originals, Weird (2019) and Blood (2021). Plus she’s been on tour supporting her buddy Evan Dando as he celebrates thirty years of the Lemonheads’ classic It’s a Shame About Ray. She’s busy!

This new cover of ELO’s “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” is great. I like it better than the original, mainly because Hatfield’s voice doesn’t sound like a wimpier Robin Gibb. (Sorry, Jeff Lynne, you seem like a nice guy but the vocal on that song is not great.) Plus, it’s cool how Hatfield replaced the orchestral elements with guitars and stuff.

Hatfield says, “Overall, I stuck pretty close to the originals’ structures while figuring out new ways to express or reference the unique and beloved ELO string arrangements. An orchestra would have been difficult or impossible for me to manage to record, nor did I think there was any point in trying to copy those parts as they originally were. Why not try to reimagine them within my zone of limitations?”

Good choice!

Juliana Hatfield: web, bandcamp, amazon, apple, spotify, wiki.

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Shocker: Rock Hall inducts terrible bands

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The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has announced its 2017 class and–as usual–it’s disappointing. In a year when musical revolutionaries such as Bad Brains, Kraftwerk, Jane’s Addiction, and the MC5 were nominated, we somehow ended up with guilty pleasures Electric Light Orchestra, Journey, and Yes.

“Besides demonstrating unquestionable musical excellence and talent, inductees will have had a significant impact on the development, evolution and preservation of rock & roll.”

Sure, I suppose you could made drunken arguments that those three bands are worthy of respect. In fact, I’m pretty sure I have made those arguments myself after a few too many rum and cokes. But they suck. It’s cheese. It’s garbage. And even if those bands had an influence on other performers, the performers they influenced sucked even harder.

Of those three, ELO is obviously the least awful and Yes is the worst. And just like in real life, Journey is the mediocre one in the middle. I mean, come on. I enjoy Journey as much as the next guy who grew up in the arcade era. “Wheels in the Sky” is a badass jam and I can still close my eyes and picture Steve Perry’s pixelated head bouncing from drum to drum in the videogame. [It was actually the drummer’s head on that level, not Steve Perry. -ed.] But they’re fluff. Just because you have a song featured in a key scene in an “important” tv show doesn’t make you an important band.

Other performers inducted in this class were Joan Baez, Pearl Jam, and Tupac Shakur. Fine. Whatever. I don’t listen to any of that stuff, and in the case of Pearl Jam I don’t even like it, but I recognize the “musical excellence and talent” blah blah “impact” blah blah blah.

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