Past tense
Juliana Hatfield hits rewind for album webcasts
If you haven’t played your older Juliana Hatfield albums in awhile … well, neither has she. So when she plays all of her 1998 album “Bed” in a webcast this weekend, you and she can rediscover it together.
“Bed” was a watershed album for Hatfield, who was returning to the indie world after a bad experience with a major label. Rawer musically and edgier lyrically than before, it lays out territory that’s served her well in the decades since. The webcast can be accessed through her site (julianahatfield.com) today at 4 p.m; she’ll play the album and chat with fans afterwards. It’s the second in a monthly albums series; she intends to go through her entire catalog in months to come.
Rediscovering her old albums, she said, has been more fun than expected. “It’s making me realize that wow, I’m not as bad as I thought I was. I actually have a pretty solid body of work that holds up, and I haven’t always felt that way. The songs on ‘Bed’ still make sense for me, personally and culturally. And they have some nice chugging rhythms that translate to playing on acoustic guitar.”
The songs marked a shift in her worldview, prompted in part by her fallout with the Atlantic label. They’d been grooming her for pop stardom, but it ended with her making an album (“God’s Foot”) that never got released.
“It was a real turning point in my life. The label put me through the wringer, and it did hurt my pride when I was abandoned by them. So ‘Bed’ was the album where I realized that the people in power are heartless, and that I was powerless in so many parts of my life. I used to tell myself that great things were coming, but that was where I stopped feeling that way.”
Yet the album feels more like fighting back, with some especially snarling moments in her guitar solos. “That’s the contradiction of the album, because I realized that the only time I feel power is when I’m making music. So it was an explosion of frustration, but also an abandonment of my past life and the start of doing whatever the hell I wanted to. I can have loud annoying feedback at the beginning of a song, I can stack together five vocal takes that don’t really fit together, and nobody is going to stop me.”
If you prefer the darker and nastier side of Hatfield’s work, you’re in luck: Her next album “Blood” which is wrapped up and set for April release, goes even further in that direction. “It might be shockingly dark to some people. It’s inspired by the past four years, the past year in particular. The lyrical content is not very hopeful, there’s some pretty harsh and violent imagery. But the music is cool, kind of groovy and prog. I enjoy exploring the dark side in my music, that keeps me healthy. And I’m very anti-violence in real life, it just feels good to dive into the shadows and swim around a little bit. And people who know my sense of humor will understand that there’s humor in these songs too.”
On the lighter side, she’s also continuing her series of covers albums. She’s done Olivia Newton-John and the Police; and the next one is likely to be R.E.M. “That’s daunting though, because they have so much material. I think I’ll approach it by only doing the first half of their career, and calling it Volume One.” And yet another new project was born just recently, when she cleaned out a closet and found the Dr. Seuss songbook she’d had as a child. “I’m thinking of recording some of that. There’s a song called ‘Cry a Pint’ that I love, it’s about when you can’t stop tears from falling. It’s funny and dark, very Dr. Seussy. But I’m not too sure about it’s marketability.”