Reissues of the L.A. band’s mid-’90s albums capture how they brought girl-group yearning, three-part harmonies, and virtuoso violin lines to the era of Sassy mag and 120 Minutes.
In 1992, Los Angeles’ that dog. formed in the teen bedrooms of singer-guitarist Anna Waronker and bassist Rachel Haden, bringing all the ache and nerve and doom of girlhood to their lovesick vision of alt rock. Theirs was a musical world where astrology, crushes, lip gloss, and punk-rock garage shows all convened in an artful, off-kilter push toward possibility. Barely out of high school, Waronker played her older brother Joey’s left-handed guitar upside down. When Rachel’s sister Petra walked by, she didn’t want to be left out, and dusted off her violin to join. Together, with pitch-perfect three-part harmonies, virtuosic orchestrations, and crashing chords, the original iteration of that dog. made three albums—1994’s that dog., 1995’s Totally Crushed Out!, 1997’s Retreat From the Sun—in a baroque bubblegum pop-rock style all their own.
Waronker’s songwriting was thrilling: Her lyrics captured the raw essence of how overwhelming and transforming infatuation can be, singing in the witty, conversational style of a long-lost best friend. She brought girl-group yearning and ’70s singer-songwriter chops to the era of Sassy mag and 120 Minutes. Waronker originally wanted to be a music supervisor, having briefly studied filmmaking at USC, and she had a flair for the colorful details that spike the personality of a song—dialogue, tension, a sense of place. In her endearing deadpan, that dog. songs could feel like scene-setting film treatments for hypothetical teen movies. (Waronker would go on to compose music for Josie and the Pussycats, Clueless, and last year’s Shrill.) The band’s angelic harmonies tended toward a surreal California grandeur, and Petra’s classically trained violin playing was lucid and pretty, rather than noisy like John Cale’s, which made that dog. weirder still. Often compared to contemporaries like the Breeders or Veruca Salt, that dog. sounded more like folk-rock trio the Roches gone art-punk, slyly sophisticated.
But these were never the most discussed lines in that dog.’s biography. The Haden sisters were two of the triplet daughters of the legendary jazz bassist Charlie Haden, an original member of the Ornette Coleman Quartet on such towering classics as The Shape of Jazz to Come. Harmonic prowess surrounded them. Waronker, meanwhile, was the daughter of the Warner Brothers record exec Lenny Waronker—which meant she grew up in the orbit of icons like Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman, and was particularly fond of the latter’s plainspoken piano-pop symphonies. Completing that dog.’s lineup was boy drummer Tony Maxwell, best friend of Waronker’s older brother, a member of Beck’s band. They all attended Santa Monica’s Crossroads High School, where they also met future Girls co-producer Jenni Konner, who helped write some early that dog. lyrics.
And so that dog. embodied a strange in-between. They could not have been classified as indie; they signed to David Geffen’s DGC label within a year of forming. On the other hand, their music was too unusual for mass appeal. Future collaborators like Beck and Weezer originally opened for them in the L.A. underground, but that dog.’s rapid ascent meant the group of 19- and 20-year-olds was quickly met with skepticism—headlines in The Washington Post and L.A. Weekly read “Well Connected Dog” and “That Dad”—and sometimes written off as a gimmick. Yet it was their idiosyncratic experiences that helped make that dog.’s songwriting so audacious and their arrangements so richly textured. The Hadens spoke of favoring Bach and Arvo Pärt over anything on the radio. As Maxwell put it in 1997: “We never pretended to be anything other than what we were.”
When Waronker first began writing songs, her self-imposed rule was “no love songs, no guitar solos.” But as that dog. progressed, she gave herself a new challenge: only love songs and guitar solos. “I had five broken hearts at one time,” she admitted then, “all broken in five different places.” Her own sensitivity horrified her. Totally Crushed Out! started as her attempt at “a Beatles parody love song” collection, like a teen romance novel recast as clever, grungy power pop, but as it charted the mess and magnitude of emotional ennui, the cheeky art concept became catharsis.
After the irony-suffused experiments of their self-titled debut, Totally Crushed Out! was that dog.’s first cohesive record—a sugar-rushing testament to the emotional confusions of youth. The buzz-sawed Shangri-Las pop of “He’s Kissing Christian” delineates the experience of dating someone as he realizes that he would rather be kissing boys—a possible riff on the plot of that year’s Clueless—while the self-sabotage-y opener “Ms. Wrong” (a Konner co-write) is about not feeling a relationship because you don’t feel yourself. On the thrasher “Lip Gloss,” Waronker applies lip gloss in front of a guy and waits for him to kiss her, but, tragically, he never does. “Lily white/Cherry raspberry/Lip lover/Rachel Perry-eee-eee-eee!” the band chants in unison, like Devo-schooled Martians out of a truly alternative dimension of girl-punk kissability. From the Sweet Valley High-evoking album cover to the ill-fated prom dance on “One Summer Night,” the performance of femininity across Totally Crushed Out! is befitting of a gender studies thesis.
The starker moments of Totally Crushed Out! are stirring, evoking the band’s acoustic bedroom beginnings while also foreshadowing the impending greatness of Waronker’s writing. The loud/quiet whispers of “Silently” describe being pissed off and enamored by someone (later confirmed to be Beck Hansen) at the same time. The dour minimalism of “Side Part” knows all too well that the only way out of heartbreak, often, is through. Other mellow Crushed Out! ballads explore breaches of confidence, the despairing haze of being alone on “Holidays,” and the erudition of the MTV-era fangirl. Waronker’s songs cut to the marrow of young womanhood, validating how longing and obsession are all tied up in the process of becoming.
By the time of the sleek, polished Retreat From the Sun, Waronker was 24; she’d been in that dog. since she was 19. The songs were deeper, more finely wrought—initially, she thought they might comprise her first solo album. Retreat was recorded with Brad Wood, who’d produced Liz Phair’s seismic Exile in Guyville around the time that dog. formed, and it shared much with Phair’s intelligence, ambition, and sexuality. It was Wood who pushed that dog. to go “as new wave as possible” on Retreat’s laser-beam single, “Never Say Never”—a glossy video would find its way into MTV rotation—which not only evoked the Go-Go’s but featured their keyboardist Charlotte Caffey on synth. Beyond the single, Retreat From the Sun carefully placed Waronker’s sensitive balladeering—often as irreducible as teardrop country tunes—alongside throttling pop-punk gems containing timeless aphorisms: “By definition a crush must hurt/And they do, and they do/Just like the one I have on you.”
Waronker was inspired by the pop leanings of her then-boyfriend (and future husband) Steve McDonald, of L.A. glam punks Redd Kross, who lent her a piano, near which she displayed a photo of her family friend Randy Newman. She reflected on her deepening relationship with McDonald in many of Retreat’s songs. Waronker told Much Music, “I’m entering into more of a Carole King phase…. It’s pop, but it’s more, like, frizzy-haired. I’m gonna have frizzy hair and a baby and a flowered skirt.” (There are at least two explicit mom-rock tunes on Retreat From the Sun.)
Perhaps to temper all of that normative monogamy, Waronker and McDonald wrote a song together: “Gagged and Tied.” “I don’t care if you don’t treat me like a lady,” Waronker sings with delightful touches of evil. “I don’t care, just sit there, and don’t disobey me.” In this straight-faced BDSM scene—“Put on ‘Venus in Furs’/And you can go home afterwards”—Waronker’s singing is still unassuming and innocent, recalling how Liz Phair once said, “The point of some of [my] songs was to say things that shouldn’t come out of the voice that was saying it.” In the end, Waronker can’t help making even a dominatrix fantasy sound disarmingly sweet. “It’s not your style/I can see/You crack a smile,” she sings, a whole layered plot twist in less than a dozen words.
You could call Waronker a master of pop-punk literary compression. The breezy “Minneapolis” alludes to how she met McDonald one night at a beloved L.A. club. “I was at the Jabberjaw/Cutest boy I ever saw,” she sings, and in four minutes, the song captures the stomach-twisting spark of a crush—a rush of uncertainty, euphoria, nerves, embarrassment, caught glances, and timid conversation: “He said, ‘I’m leaving on Wednesday/Come see me when Low plays.’” There’s a beguilingly unvarnished feel to Waronker’s singing that makes these dimensional details sound much more casual than they are.
“Minneapolis” is one of three Retreat tracks named for specific places, and they’re the best songs Waronker ever wrote. Like “Minneapolis,” the dizzied “Long Island” rips through infatuation, location, and subtext: “You’re pretty dreamy for a boy from Long Island.” What could be less conventionally cool than pining for a guy from the suburbs? But Waronker’s daydream doesn’t waver:
I want to set a place for you at my table
We can sit forever watching reruns on cable
Take you driving in my brother’s beat-up car
Sharing a cigarette, we’ll wish upon a star together
In its compacted abandon, “Long Island” was a reminder that that dog. toured with fellow ’90s romantics Jawbreaker. So was “Hawthorne,” the sparest and sharpest song in that dog.’s catalog, in which Waronker soberly narrates a visit to her boyfriend’s hometown. “Hawthorne” is immediately visual: “Driving/Looking for your parents’ house/Striving/To find a piece of you,” Waronker sings. It’s a small, ephemeral moment, but a telling one, seeming to gesture at what those devastating crushes were after, mixing mundanity and depth. Both songs are evidence of the particular electricity of intimacy that can exist inside of cars, the sense that you are totally aligned with another person if only for a moment.
It’s that precise type of person-to-person connection that that dog.’s vulnerable records have fostered with new generations of fans, spreading by word of mouth and influencing bands like Paramore, Vivian Girls, Swearin’, and so many others. Though they imploded shortly after Retreat From the Sun, that dog. offer proof that honesty endures, that what makes something continue to resonate, usually, is simple—you could miss it, if you don’t listen close. “And I saw a punk rock show/In a car garage/And I saw you as a child,” Waronker sings on “Hawthorne,” wide-eyed and coasting; “I saw you/My dream come true.” How to make that feeling last is a mystery of life. But the songs did.
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