Sob Sister Act : Juliana Hatfield Sings of Unrequited Love, Identity Confusion and Foiled Romanticism

You want answers in this life? Write Ann Landers.

But if you feel totally mixed-up, terminally confused, acutely unfulfilled, and in need of somebody who can really relate , then Juliana Hatfield may be the sob sister for you.

Hatfield, a winsome young Bostonian with a small, high, girlish voice and a guitar that barks, knows mixed-up and unfulfilled. It has been her stock in trade since she arrived on the college-rock scene six years ago with the Blake Babies.

Now Hatfield has her own band, the Juliana Hatfield Three, which also includes drummer Todd Philips and bassist Dean Fisher (the trio plays tonight at the Coach House). “Become What You Are,” her first album on a major label, is pushing her to a wider audience on the strength of a typically catchy song called “My Sister.”

For Hatfield, that alternative-chart hit represents mixed-up confusion as usual.

“I hate my sister,” begins the first line of the first verse.

“I love my sister, she’s the best,” goes the first line of the second verse.

And Hatfield, 26, the sandwich child in a family of three kids, doesn’t even have a sister. Like a lot of her songs, “My Sister” is purely the stuff of daydreams.

“Supermodel,” the new album’s leadoff track, manifests similar double-mindedness.

Hatfield starts by taking shots at a Cindy Crawford type. “The highest-paid piece . . ., you know it’s not gonna last,” she gloats. But she ends with a confession of jealousy: “I wish she’d trade places with me.”

That’s not to say that Hatfield is completely lacking in consistency. Her music is reliably airy and melodic, and she and her band play it rough enough to make you wonder whether the Bangles and Husker Du didn’t break up after all, but simply merged.

Also, Hatfield’s love songs follow a regular pattern: girl flips for guy; girl doesn’t get guy--either because of her own timidity or because her would-be beau has eyes for others.

“My songs are about not knowing who to be and not knowing how to act,” Hatfield said over the phone recently from Amsterdam, that piping little voice sounding ground-down late in the day from the rigors of a promotional trip to Europe.

“There’s a lot of identity confusion. I’m pretty messed up, I think, but there are certain things I feel very strongly about. My music--that’s the one area I won’t let myself be pushed around. But in other parts of my life, I’m a confused mess.”

Hatfield grew up in Duxbury, an upper-middle-class enclave near Boston, where her father is a physician and her mother the fashion writer for the Boston Globe.

She says she knew in high school that she wanted to be a rocker: the Police was her early favorite, then her older brother’s girlfriend introduced her to the pantheon of college-rock influences: bands including the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, X and the Replacements.

Figuring that some formal background wouldn’t hurt, Hatfield enrolled in Boston’s Berklee College of Music, from which she graduated with a major in voice.

The Blake Babies began when she was in college, and followed the usual indie-rock path from homemade debut album to small-label deal and exposure via favorable reviews and steady touring.

Hatfield’s pal, Evan Dando of the Lemonheads, served a hitch in the Blake Babies, and she returned the favor by playing bass and singing harmonies on “It’s A Shame About Ray,” the album that established the Lemonheads as a mainstream success.

Hatfield’s conviction in the power of music was expressed last year in “Nirvana,” the best song on “Hey Babe,” her first solo album. In it, hearing a favorite song (she says she had in mind a track from “Bleach,” Nirvana’s pre-”Teen Spirit” debut album) rescues the protagonist from a suicidal mood and helps her get her ya-yas out in healthy, extroverted fashion instead of letting them quietly eat her up from inside.

But sitting in a hotel in Amsterdam, Hatfield admitted to being in a gloomy mood that a favorite song probably couldn’t redeem. The previous night’s show in London had gone badly due to equipment problems, and she had spent the following day feeling down.

“I’m just depressed today. That’s going to color the whole interview,” she said.

Hatfield wasn’t in the emotional black hole John Lennon sang from in “Yer Blues” (“I even hate my rock ‘n’ roll”), but she confessed that music no longer holds for her the transcendent quality she ascribed to it in “Nirvana.”

“Music is becoming less satisfying to me and doesn’t seem to have the power it used to,” she said. “So there isn’t a song on the new record like ‘Nirvana,’ where music is the savior.

“For a long time, music was hope. Now it seems music isn’t enough to make me happy. It used to be that’s all I needed to keep going. Now I need other things to take up the other parts of my life. I want to emphasize that I haven’t given up hope. I’m just starting to realize that music might not keep me happy forever. But it’s still the main thing in my life, and I love it more than any person, right now,” she said.

At the same time, Hatfield is looking around for other ideals, other releases, other possible paths to happiness.

“I read a lot of books. More and more, I’m thinking that the answer is not going to be in human relations,” she said. “Human relations, I mess them up and they let me down. I’m sort of lost, and I don’t know where to look. I try to experiment with physical things like exercise and food, to see if I can obtain some other kind of good energy with physical things. I can get really great feelings if I run for a long time. I feel really happy, but it doesn’t last.”

*

In one of the more unusual recent public relations maneuvers by a rock musician, Hatfield declared her virginity in an interview a while back.

Was this a canny P.R. ploy? After all, what better way to defy the usual libidinous expectations of the rock world than by professing virginity at 25, thereby creating an instant peg for oneself as the comely, untouched star of alternative rock?

Or was Hatfield, whose songs reveal her as an obvious romantic (albeit a foiled one), just making a sincere attempt to widen the discussion of sexual mores?

“I said that a year ago, and I was naive,” she said of the virginity quote. “I thought the article (in Interview magazine) would just be on the newsstands a month and would be gone. I didn’t realize journalists would be printing it over and over instead of letting it die.

“I just thought it was an interesting thing for a person my age to say. I thought it would make people think. I tell journalists to get off it. It just shows you where people’s minds are: In the gutter. I’ve learned a lot.”

Of course, since the protagonists of Hatfield’s songs often can be heard pining over desires unfulfilled and connections unmade, she can’t pretend that issues of sexuality don’t arise in her own work.

Take her character in the 1992 song, “Everybody Loves Me But You,” whose lament goes, perhaps self-mockingly, “Beauty and brains are all that I’ve got / I’ve got a cold, cold bed and a broken heart.”

“Right. But I’m saying that people misconstrue a lot of my songs (when) they think I’m talking about sex. ‘Spin the Bottle,’ for example, is about grown people playing this game and just having fun and not getting wrapped up in sex and jealousy. Just kissing and hugging, that’s all. It’s supposed to be innocent. When I talk about getting close to a person, lying down in bed with somebody in a song, it’s not necessarily sexual. Maybe they’re not (about) physical desires. I think my songs are much deeper than that. They’re existential yearnings, yearnings for what’s not tangible. Getting physical desires satisfied, that’s easy. It’s the deeper desires that are harder to satisfy.”

* The Juliana Hatfield Three, Madder Rose and Scarlet Promise play tonight at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $10. (714) 496-8930.