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MY NAME IS
JULIANA HATFIELD.
I grew up in a small coastal Massachusetts town. As a young
girl, I was enamored of Olivia Newton-John and I saw Grease six
times when it came out in theaters. But when I discovered the
Replacements in high school, it was true love. With these as my
two main inspirations (Replacements and Olivia Newton-John), I
set out for the big city and the Berklee College of Music in
hopes of starting a band. There I met John Strohm and Freda Love
and we three teenagers formed the Blake Babies. We put out a few
records, toured the country a few times, and then broke up in the
early 90’s. Since then I have been on my own, except for a Blake
Babies reunion tour and album (God Bless the Blake Babies) last
year.
My first album was
Hey Babe.
The title wasn’t a sassy ironic come-on (though it did land me
on the cover of Sassy magazine) or a quasi-empowering
take-back-the-phrase kind of thing. It was an earnest plea to be
accepted into the rock-and-roll boys club continuum. And I
thought I had made a rock-and-roll record. "Hey babe," sang Lou
Reed. "Hey babe," sang J Mascis. I was just trying to continue
the tradition but I knew that as a girl it was hopeless and that
I would never be accepted on equal terms. The almost universal
misinterpretation of the title and of my intentions was the
first in a long line of misunderstandings.
Become
What You Are
was my first major label experience. It was a really simple
concept: capture me and my touring band (Dean Fisher and Todd
Philips) playing the songs we had been doing live over the past
year or so. It happened to be a moment in time when girls with
guitars were all the rage, and so, though the higher (than my)
industry standards of (commercial) success were never something
I aimed for, I was given a taste of it. The singles "My Sister"
and "Spin the Bottle" broke through and I was swept up in a
relative whirlwind of publicity and sold-out shows. But I was
never comfortable with the attention. I thought it had come too
soon. I hadn’t earned it yet.
Next came
Only Everything.
I turned up the volume and the distortion and had a lot of fun
blocking out the world with some cryptic lyrics (including a
song in crude French that I knew no one would understand) and
sing-along melodies. It featured the single "Universal
Heartbeat" ("A heart that hurts is a heart that works") and the
accompanying video in which I play an evil aerobics instructor
trying to push my students until they collapse.
For my next project I went to Woodstock and made what I called
God’s Foot.
I produced it and played a lot of the instruments myself. My
record company at the time seemed underwhelmed by my masterpiece
so I begged them to let me go. The bloom was off the rose and I
didn’t want to stay where I wasn’t appreciated. After my
weeklong hunger strike, they finally assented to my departure,
with effusive tears and hugs and good wishes. But they didn’t
let me take God’s Foot with me. They held onto it and never
released it. "Mountains of Love" and "Fade Away" are from this
album.
At first I was traumatized by the idea that God’s Foot would
never be heard. Then disillusionment set in and I took to my bed
trying to figure out what to do next. I knew from the early days
in the Blake Babies that if no one wants to help you out, you do
it yourself. So I booked six days in a studio in a converted
firehouse in Providence and made
Bed,
the album. 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.
Beautiful
Creature
started as a bunch of demos for what I envisioned as an acoustic
album, utilizing the myriad producers and musicians in Los
Angeles during my year-long sabbatical there in 1999. As the
recordings progressed, I realized the demos themselves could
work as an album. But when I returned to Boston, I felt
unsatisfied. I needed to express a darker side. This was my
idea: a loud release of tension featuring a rock drummer and
bassist (Zephan Courtney and Mikey Welsh) and lots of long
sloppy guitar solos. And no love songs. The result was
Juliana’s Pony:
Total System Failure,
a not-at-all attractive reaction to the ugly side of humanity,
specifically American culture.
Gold Stars
is my eighth full-length album. It contains songs from each of
the previous seven plus two covers (one by the Police, one by
Neil Young). Oh, and there’s a song from my 1997 Please Do Not
Disturb EP. Got it?
In the past ten years, trends have come and gone, money has been
made and spent, what went up came down, and I have continued to
do what I love, which is making music. Creating something out of
nothing. Learning by doing rather than by calculating and
strategizing. This is my own version of success, on my own terms
and in my own time. I sort of tried to play the game for a while
in the mid-90’s, but I was disqualified because I wouldn’t smile
for the camera. The pressure to be something I was not was
constant and unrelenting. It was a battle to maintain a sense of
authentic self when that self was still in the developmental
stages.
I will continue to write, record, and perform my songs as long
as I can and as long as it feels right. I am still motivated by
the same things I was in the beginning. The goal has always been
to just be myself. |
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