Blake Babies Let Out a Pretty-but-Tough Sound

She may think just like a woman, and she may emote just like a woman. But Juliana Hatfield, the lead vocalist and main songwriter of the Blake Babies, can’t help but sing sort of like a little girl.

Hatfield, 23, has one of those feathery, wisp-of-a-lass voices that have been an asset for such singers as Suzanne Vega, Edie Brickell, former Bangle Susanna Hoffs and Harriet Wheeler of the Sundays.

“I can’t deny that,” she said. But Hatfield, who fronts the Blake Babies on Friday at Bogart’s, where the young Boston band opens for Firehose, said the last thing she wants is a sound that is all sugar and spice.

“I don’t want to sound too light, and that could easily happen,” the singer/bassist said Tuesday from a San Francisco tour stop, speaking over the phone in an airy, petite, innocent-sounding voice not out of character with the way she comes across on the Blake Babies’ albums. “I’m always fighting against the way I sound, and I want the music to be harder, to counteract the sweetness of the voice. Too much of one thing is really bad. I don’t want it to be too sugary and sweet, too mellow and nice.”

The Blake Babies aren’t afraid to lead with the sweetness in Hatfield’s voice, nor are they against crafting melodies that display an unabashed fondness for pure pop. At the same time, the effort to “fight,” or “counteract” that sweetness, as Hatfield puts it, is evident, and the resulting tension brings a pretty-but-tough duality to the band’s sound. It also results in an emotional complexity that makes the Blake Babies’ 1989 album, “Earwig,” and last year’s “Sunburn” much more than light, casual listening.

The trio’s guitarist, John Strohm, will play along melodiously, then counterattack by digging up massive, noisy slabs of distorted sound from the Neil Young or Velvet Underground hard-rock quarry. In much the same way, Hatfield will only let pleasant, wistful temperance go so far. Then she will stretch and extend her voice so that it frays, turning the mood from gentle melancholy to something a good deal more searingly painful and immediate.

Sometimes, Hatfield takes on the role of women passively absorbing the pain dished out by their charming but unreliable boyfriends--like the character in “I’ll Take Anything,” who free-falls into a depressed ennui. She reserves her smallest, most girlish voice for the desperate character in “Watch Me Now, I’m Calling,” whose self-mutilating behavior is a cry for a man’s attention: “Over at the hospital they will dress my wounds, but they won’t really heal ‘til I’m touched by you.”

But the Blake Babies’ duality always asserts itself: the same woman who sings “I’ll Take Anything” is also capable of announcing quite aggressively her refusal to take abuse from the maddeningly inconstant men in her life.

“You’re a weakling, a suckling lamb / You’re not so tough, you’re just a man,” she says in “I’m Not Your Mother,” the tone of voice sounding all the more withering and dismissive because it comes from a source that is normally so sweet.

Blake Babies’ songs have the feel of lived experience artfully disgorged. But Hatfield says there is artistic license at play.

“I’m not trying to work (emotional traumas) out, really. Just trying to write interesting songs,” she said. “I’m not really like that in person, so people are surprised when they hear the songs: ‘God, you must be really messed up. Are you OK?’ Even if you’re not living out something intense, you can be feeling something intense.”

The image from “Watch Me Now, I’m Calling,” in which a woman cuts her arm with a knife, is drawn from life, she said.

“I was thinking about myself. One time I actually carved an X in my arm with a knife. That sounds really sick, but a lot of people have done it. (Blake Babies’ drummer Freda Boner) has done it. A lot of my friends cut things in their arm. I think it’s a woman thing. I think women internalize emotional pain a lot. They just go inward, and they want to hurt themselves. I guess I can’t really generalize, but it seems to happen a lot. Men can let it out a lot better” with overtly aggressive behavior.

In any case, Hatfield said, the impulse to direct pain at oneself is a central theme on “Sunburn.”

“The record’s kind of about being mad at yourself and the way that manifests itself in bad relationships. You can’t have a good relationship unless you have a good relationship with yourself.”

Hatfield said she has never been involved in the sort of “serious relationship” that gives many songwriters a good deal of their raw material. But she has taken note of the up-and-down dynamics between her two band mates. She said that Strohm and Boner, who are also 23, have been an on-again, off-again couple since before Blake Babies began about five years ago.

“I’m definitely influenced by those guys, by seeing it every day,” she said. “I think they’re about to be off again, but it’s not going to really affect the band. They’ve known each other so long they can deal with that.”

Originally from Indiana, Strohm and Boner were drawn to Boston by its fertile college-rock scene. Looking to form a band, they recruited Hatfield, whom Strohm had met at the Berklee School of Music.

Her previous rock experience had been in a cover band during her high-school days in the Boston suburb of Duxbury.

Hatfield said she received her bachelor’s degree in voice and composition last year from Berklee, a school known as a training ground for jazz players. She said Strohm dropped out after concluding that he was getting nothing out of the school.

Blake Babies got its name from an auspicious source: “John and Freda saw Allen Ginsberg read at Harvard, and they asked him what they should name the band.”

The pioneering beat poet suggested “Blake Babies,” after his own key influence, the visionary 18th-Century British poet and painter, William Blake.

The band came up in a fertile alternative-rock scene in Boston that also included such college-radio favorites as the Pixies, Throwing Muses, Dinosaur Jr., Buffalo Tom and the Lemonheads.

“We all know each other. There’s a good, supportive thing happening,” Hatfield said.

Blake Babies’ first release, in 1987, was a self-financed album, “Nicely, Nicely.” “Earwig” and “Sunburn” followed on the independent Mammoth label.

Hatfield looks with ambivalence toward the prospect of graduating to a major label--something she said that Mammoth’s owners are trying to engineer.

At the same time, she isn’t satisfied with dwelling in relative obscurity. Last year, Hatfield took up producer David Kahne’s invitation to help write a song for Susanna Hoffs’ debut album. She contributed some lyrics and sang backups on the tune “That’s Why Girls Cry,” which was dressed up in far glossier production than Blake Babies would ever attempt.

“It was a good opportunity, and I had nothing to lose,” Hatfield said. “I’m really detached from (Hoffs’ recording of the song) because I didn’t have much do with it. I got a kick out of it, but I know we could never make a record like that.”

Hatfield says she does relish the minimal version of the star trip that Blake Babies have experienced to this point because it signals that the band is reaching listeners emotionally.

“Every once in a while there is a person who is really into us and is visibly nervous upon meeting us,” she said. “It’s strange but flattering. I like when it happens. It’s nice to know we’ve affected somebody like that. That’s the best thing I could get out of it, the total payoff for what I do.”

* Firehose, Blake Babies and Lost Dog play Friday night at 9:30 at Bogart’s, in the Marina Pacifica mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Tickets: $11. Information: (213) 594-8975.