Juliana Hatfield

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Juliana Hatfield
Hatfield performing in 2019
Hatfield performing in 2019
Background information
BornJuly 27, 1967 (1967-07-27) (age 56)
Wiscasset, Maine, U.S.[1]
GenresAlternative rock
Occupation(s)
  • Musician
  • singer
  • songwriter
  • record producer
Instrument(s)Vocals, guitar, bass guitar, drums, keyboards
Years active1986–present
LabelsMammoth, Zoë, Ye Olde, American Laundromat
Websitejulianahatfield.com

Juliana Hatfield (born July 27, 1967) is an American musician and singer-songwriter from the Boston area, formerly of the indie rock bands Blake Babies, Some Girls,[2] and The Lemonheads. She also fronted her own band, The Juliana Hatfield Three, along with bassist Dean Fisher and drummer Todd Philips, which was active in the mid-1990s and again in the mid-2010s. It was with the Juliana Hatfield Three that she produced her best-charting work, including the critically acclaimed albums Become What You Are (1993) and Whatever, My Love (2015) and the singles "My Sister" (1993) and "Spin the Bottle" (1994).

She has performed and recorded as a solo artist and as one half of Minor Alps with Matthew Caws of Nada Surf. In December 2014, Paste named her cover of Elliott Smith’s "Needle in the Hay" number 10 in a list of the 20 Best Cover Songs of 2014.[3] In 2014, she reformed The Juliana Hatfield Three, announcing the new album Whatever, My Love for 2015.

In 2016, she formed a collaboration with Paul Westerberg under the moniker The I Don't Cares to release the album Wild Stab. More recently, she has released an album of original work titled Weird in 2019, sandwiched between two albums of cover songs, Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John (2018) and Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police (2019).

Early life

Hatfield was born in Wiscasset, Maine, to Phillip M. Hatfield, a radiologist, and Julie Hatfield, a former fashion editor for The Boston Globe.[4][5] She grew up near Boston in Duxbury, Massachusetts.[6] Despite recording a song titled "My Sister", Hatfield has no sisters but she does have two brothers.[2]

Her father claimed his family descended from the West Virginia Hatfields of the Hatfield–McCoy feud following the Civil War.[7] Her father served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War.[8]

Hatfield went to Duxbury High School in Duxbury, Massachusetts. She attended Boston University before transferring to Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.[9]

Hatfield also attended art school at the

School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2012 in a year-long, post-baccalaureate certificate program, to study painting.[10][11]

Music career

First bands and solo album

Hatfield acquired a love of rock music during the 1970s, having been introduced by a babysitter to the music of the Los Angeles

X, which proved a life-changing experience.[12] She was also attracted to the music of more mainstream artists like Olivia Newton-John[13] and The Police.[14]

While still at

Freda Love. The band released four albums between 1987 and 1991, and gained critical notice in Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, local radio airplay and press, and label support from Mammoth Records
in North Carolina. The band broke up in 1992, but had a brief reunion in 2001 to produce another album.

After the break-up of the Blake Babies, she joined The Lemonheads as their bass player, replacing founding bassist Jesse Peretz, and played on their breakthrough album It's a Shame About Ray in 1992. She left the band after about a year, but returned in 1993 as a guest vocalist on several tracks of Come on Feel the Lemonheads.

In 1992, she released her debut solo album Hey Babe.

The Juliana Hatfield Three

Her commercial breakthrough came in 1993 with the formation of the band The Juliana Hatfield Three along with high-school friend Dean Fisher on bass and former Bullet LaVolta drummer Todd Philips, with herself performing lead vocal and lead guitar duties. The band produced the album Become What You Are and two hit singles, "My Sister" and "Spin the Bottle".

"My Sister" was based on Hatfield's older brother's girlfriend, Maggie Rafferty, who lived with the family while Hatfield was in high school.

Del Fuegos and the Violent Femmes, which inspired her to form a band.[2]

"Spin the Bottle" was used in the soundtrack of the Hollywood film Reality Bites (1994). Hatfield also made the cover of Spin magazine.[16]

Hatfield was profiled in a number of girls' magazines, most notably Sassy, at this time and addressed serious issues faced by young women in her songs and interviews.[17] About this period she says: "I was never comfortable with the attention. I thought it had come too soon. I hadn’t earned it yet."[13] She gained notoriety in 1992 for saying that she was still a virgin in her mid-twenties in Interview magazine. In a 1994 interview for the magazine Vox, she said she was surprised by the effect 'outing' herself had: "I think there are a lot of people out there who don't care about sex, but who you never hear from, so I thought I should say it. The magazine I did the interview for is full of beef-cake hunky guys and scantily-clad models, so I thought it would be really funny to say that I didn't care about sex in a magazine that's full of sex and beauty – but no one really got the joke."[18]

Over the years Hatfield's virginity became a recurring theme in her press coverage, often accompanied by speculation that she had lost her virginity to The Lemonheads' leader Evan Dando who had referred to her as his "friend and sometimes girlfriend."[19] In 2006, Hatfield sent a letter to The Weekly Dig in critique of writer Debbie Driscoll's scathing review of Soul Asylum's latest album, The Silver Lining. Kevin Dean from the newspaper responded by bringing up the subject of Hatfield losing her virginity to Dando; Hatfield fired back at Dean for bringing up her sex life, while stating that she and Dando never had sex, and that it was in fact Spike Jonze that she had lost her virginity to.[20] She later admitted that she lost her virginity when she was 26 and "damn ready."[21]

Return to solo career

The Juliana Hatfield Three only remained together through 1994, by 1995 she had returned to solo status and released the album Only Everything, in which she "turned up the volume and the distortion and had a lot of fun".[13] One reviewer describes it as "a fun, engaging pop album".[22] The album spawned another alternative radio hit for Hatfield in "Universal Heartbeat". In the video Hatfield portrayed a demanding aerobics instructor. Before the tour for Only Everything, she released Phillips and hired Jason Sutter on drums, Ed Slanker on guitar, and Lisa Mednick on keyboards. Two weeks into the tour, she canceled the tour due to depression.[6]

In her memoir, Hatfield writes that she was suffering from

depression severe enough to be suicidal. She disagreed with the decision to avoid talking about her depression.[23] The drummer was replaced by Phillips, and touring resumed with Jeff Buckley
as the opening act.

In 1996, she traveled to Woodstock, New York where she recorded tracks for God's Foot, which was to be her fourth solo album (third if not counting Become What You Are, which was recorded with the Juliana Hatfield Three), intended for 1997 release. After three failures to satisfy requests by Atlantic Records to come up with a single, she asked to be released from her contract. The label obliged but kept the rights to the songs recorded during these sessions. Atlantic had paid $180,000 on the recordings.[24] "Mountains of Love" and "Fade Away" were released on a greatest hits collection entitled Gold Stars, while "Can't Kill Myself" was available for download from Hatfield's website. The remaining tracks surfaced on bootlegs, which she disapproved of, and she has rarely played them live.[24]

In 1997 Hatfield toured with Lilith Fair, an all-female rock festival founded by singer Sarah McLachlan.[25]

After the experience of God's Foot, and freed from her label obligations, Hatfield recorded the EP

Bar/None. Produced by Hatfield, the album included drummer Todd Phillips, guitarists Ed Slanker and Mike Leahy, and bassist Mikey Welsh of Weezer. The EP included "Trying Not to Think About It," a tribute to her friend, deceased musician Jeff Buckley
.

Almost as a reaction to the seemingly endless studio sessions surrounding God's Foot, Hatfield recorded the album Bed in 1998 in six days, about which she said on her website, "It sounds as raw as I felt. It has no pretty sheen. The mistakes and unattractive parts were left in, not erased. Just like my career. Just like life."[13]

In 2000, she released

Davíd Garza who co-produced much of the album. Wally Gagel, a producer for Sebadoh and Tanya Donelly
, helped Hatfield record her most electronica-influenced songs, "Cool Rock Boy" and "Don't Rush Me", which added texture to the otherwise acoustic album.

In 2002, Hatfield released Gold Stars 1992–2002: The Juliana Hatfield Collection. It contained singles from her solo albums, two songs from the unreleased God's Foot, a cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", and new songs.

In 2004, Hatfield released In Exile Deo, an attempt at a more commercial sound with input from producers and engineers who had worked with Pink and Avril Lavigne. Hatfield produced the album with David Leonard, receiving co-production credits on "Jamie's in Town" and the bright rocker "Sunshine". The critics praised it, with some calling it her best work since the start of her solo career.[28]

Ye Olde Records

By contrast, the 2005 album Made in China was recorded in Bellows Falls, Vermont and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was released on her own record label, Ye Olde Records. The record had a much rawer feel, with Hatfield playing instruments accompanied by the band Unbusted and other contributors. For the first time, Hatfield also played drums on at least one track.[29]

John Doe of the band X described the disc as "a frighteningly dark and beautiful record filled with stark, angular, truly brutal songs and guitars. This is surely a 'Woman Under the Influence', though I'm not sure of what."[30] Reviews were mixed, with some liking the lo-fi sound and others seeing it as slackness.[31]

The release of Made in China started a trend where Hatfield licensed her music, selling it via her website and with a distribution deal through Red Eye.[26]

In December 2005, Hatfield toured the United States with the band

X
, whom she idolized during her teenage years.

In 2006, Hatfield released her first live album. Titled The White Broken Line: Live Recordings, the album featured performances from her tour with X. It was Hatfield's third release for her record label.

Hatfield's 9th studio album, How to Walk Away, was released on August 19, 2008, on Ye Olde Records. The album's heartfelt subject on the break-up of a relationship resonated with critics, who gave the album largely positive reviews, with some hailing it as her best album since In Exile Deo.[32]

Hatfield returned two years later as her 10th studio album Peace & Love was released on Ye Olde Records, February 16, 2010. The album's composition, arrangement, performance, production, engineering, and mixing were solely credited to Hatfield.[33][34] The album received mixed reviews, with several complaining the album's low-key moody nature working against the potential of the songs.[35]

Hatfield offered, via her website, to write custom songs in order to fund a couple of projects; one of which was to release archive material. About halfway through the project, Hatfield stated that it had "completely re-energized and inspired" her again.

In October 2010, Hatfield and Evan Dando played two sold-out acoustic live shows together at The Mercury Lounge in New York. The following month, the duo played sold-out shows in Allston. This tour was followed in January 2011 by five dates on the American East Coast.

PledgeMusic

In April 2011, Hatfield announced her intention to work on a new album via fan-funding platform website PledgeMusic,[36] from which she asked fans to help fund the project in exchange for personal artwork and memorabilia ranging from posters, CDs, and demos to one of Juliana's First Act guitars (used during the recording sessions) and even locks of her hair. The project also included donations for the Save a Sato foundation to which Hatfield is a major contributor. Fan response was enthusiastic, going over 400% of the original project cost. The album was originally going to be titled Speeches Delivered to Animals and Plants, in reference to a passage in the John Irving novel The World According to Garp, but later Hatfield herself changed it to There's Always Another Girl,[37] in reference to a song in the album of the same name she had written as a defense for Lindsay Lohan after watching her flop I Know Who Killed Me.[38]

There's Always Another Girl was released on August 30, 2011, again independently on her Ye Olde Records label, though a downloadable version was made available to contributors a month before on July 27, which was Juliana's birthday. The album has received mostly positive reviews from critics.[39]

On August 28, 2012, Juliana Hatfield released a covers record titled

I Blame Coco, and Led Zeppelin.[40]

As of July 2013, Juliana Hatfield has finished recording her thirteenth solo album, Wild Animals, with crowd-funding—for the third time—through PledgeMusic.[41]

In December 2014,

SPIN Magazine named the cover one of the "40 Best 2014 Songs by 1994 Artists ," where it came it at No. 36. The review stated "The tempo's a bit quicker, and she double-tracks herself for the song’s entirety. But the (tasteful) inclusion of chintzy drum programming and mellotron cleverly point to Smith's eventual creative direction."[42]

Reformation of The Juliana Hatfield Three