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The last time I spoke with Juliana Hatfield was January 2019, just in advance of her seventeenth studio album Weird. That batch of songs, which reflected her own sentiments of seclusion and detachment from the outside world, proved to be eerily prophetic of what was to come for most of us about a year later.
But on her latest effort Blood, Hatfield isn’t so introspective, instead turning the mirror outward to the anger, division, avarice, and violence that have choked our country. “I think these songs are a reaction to how seriously and negatively a lot of people have been affected by the past four years,” she said recently in a press release. “But it’s fun, musically. There’s a lot of playing around.”
Blood is the best kind of sonic contradiction, pitting Hatfield’s biting wordplay against vivacious melodies and delectable grooves. As always, she writes with incisive imagery that’s especially fun to pull apart and examine on tracks like “Mouthful of Blood” and “Chunks,” which are rife with colorful metaphor. Her guitar work adds depth and drama to the mix, and she never seems to fail in finding some kind of new way to express herself through her strings.
While Hatfield has often written and blueprinted songs at her Massachusetts pad, Blood was almost entirely conceived, recorded, and produced there. Singer-songwriter Jed Davis (Ramones, The Bowery Electric Crew) served as the set’s co-composer and co-producer, working remotely from his home in Connecticut. Final overdubs and mixing were completed in the studio with engineer James Bridges
We recently sat down for our third conversation for Albumism, catching up about some shared acquaintances and musical interests before we discussed Blood, which arrived on Friday via Mystic, Connecticut-based indie label American Laundromat Records. It follows her critically acclaimed 2019 covers album, Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police.
We’ve talked previously about you typically not having a plan or vision when you start making a new record. Tell me how Blood started to take shape.
Well, I think I’ve fallen into this pattern now, or this schedule of, doing a covers album and an originals album. That’s all I want to do now, so that’s my life until I get bored of it. So, I had done The Police album, and then I just started writing. And I was inspired by the way things were the past four years—and the past year, in particular—you know, kind of the dark, ugly times. There’s been so much darkness circulating, and a lot of rocks being turned over—and a lot of worms, though I don’t want to bad-mouth worms. But all of this ugliness is out in the open and that’s what I was writing about.
Yeah, I really love the juxtaposition of, as you say, some of these really tough, disconsolate topics and the bright, sanguine melodies you’ve written for them. And certainly, that approach isn’t completely new for you. Is that contrast intentional, or does it just evolve when you’re assembling songs?
Yeah, well, I don’t come at music from a standpoint of wanting to create a certain type of song. I don’t stand apart from a song and think, ‘oh, I need to make this dark subject have dark music.’ I don’t believe that the subject matter has to have a certain musical tone. I think it’s actually more interesting when the music is buoyant and joyful and the subject matter’s dark. I think it’s maybe easier for people to tolerate that when it sounds pretty.
But none of it’s really that strategic for me—I just have this instinct for buoyant melodies and they come from a really joyful, innocent place inside of me. It’s, like, a very protected, incorruptible place that I think will always keep spitting out those melodies until the day I die.
You chiefly constructed Blood at home, and did most of the work independently, which is a change from how you normally record. I’m curious what you learned from that experience and if you made any good discoveries in the process.
I learned that I’m more efficient in the real recording studio, because when I’m on the clock and I’ve booked these twelve-hour days in a row, I kind of can’t slack off and I’ve got to get the work done. So when I’m in the studio, it’s just “bang-bang-bang” and getting everything done. But when I’m at home, I can sometimes just work for an hour and then I’m like, ‘ugh…I’m too tired. I can’t do any more.’ Or having to engineer really hurts my brain and zaps my energy. I can’t work a full long day when I’m at home—or I don’t, anyway.
I have to wear an engineer’s hat, and I don’t like engineering. It was a much longer, slower, and less efficient process doing it at home. But I got it done somehow—or I got most of it done, and then I brought the songs to the studio and I added on some drums and guitars and stuff like that. I mean, I can be efficient with writing when I’m at home, but I can get rather lazy and overwhelmed with the recording technology.
You worked collaboratively with Jed Davis from a distance. What was his role in helping you build the tracks and readying them for what you would eventually finish with James in the studio?
He helped me a lot with my laziness, and I guess I was having motivation problems and having trouble finishing songs. I had lots and lots of little musical snippets and ideas in the beginning, but I didn’t have many fully written songs. Jed would just say, ‘hey, why don’t you send me whatever you have and I’ll play around with it.’ So I sent him a bunch of snippets, some of which I recorded onto the photo booth from my laptop—you know, like, me playing an acoustic guitar and recording it, or into an iPad, or into a little Sony digital camera.
I would send him all sorts of tiny little bits of music, and he would build some of them into songs. “The Shame of Love” actually starts with the little acoustic guitar piece I sent him, and then he programmed some drums. That one has a lot of him on it. And the chorus is taken from an entirely different snippet I played on a different guitar in a different room. So, he would put sections together and they’d be built into song forms, and then I would build up from there the lyrics and melodies and stuff.
I need to ask about the song “Chunks,” which I love for all of its graphic lyrics and its fuzzy, buzzy pulse. There’s that great sort of scratchy riff that plays across the whole track. I’m assuming that must be you strumming muted guitar strings with some distortion?
No, that was actually from a couple of years ago when I was in the studio working on an album, and I had a little chord progression idea and recorded it into an iPad, or something. It was a few chords, but my guitar was plugged into an amp with a chorus effect on it. At the end of the musical phrase, just as my hand was coming off the chord, it made this krrchhkk sound. It was, like, a split second—a half-second—of noise, and I told Jed that I loved that sound and asked if he could do anything with it. I loved it - it was so crunchy. Somehow, he took that split second of noise and made the riff out of it and did that krik-a-chik-a-krick—that rhythm—with my sound. He took the chunky sound I loved and then I wrote a song about chunks of flesh, or something. The title came later.
But you’d asked me about the subject matter?
Yeah. I mean, I think I can guess what the narrative might be about, but I wanted to hear what you were feeling and thinking about when it was written.
It’s got a couple of different inspirations, but I guess the most obvious one is just the feeling of wanting to punish the bad guys—and just taking it to a cartoonish extreme. I mean, I hope people can see the humor in it and understand that I don’t actually want to do these things to people. It’s just a feeling I know a lot of people are having, you know, this feeling of rage and a burning desire to punish the bad guys because we’ve seen so much exposure of rottenness in the past four years. Just so much hatred, and corruption, and greed, and nastiness.
People feel unable to do anything about it and this feeling of futility, so I just put them into a song. But then, also, there’s a feminist reading, and sometimes I look at it as a song about how women are expected to behave in this society and meant to be friendly, polite, accommodating, quiet, pleasant. And, you know, if you raise your voice or if you take offense to something, someone will say to you, ‘why can’t you be nice? Why are you so rude?’ So, it could be seen as a feminist reaction to society’s expectations of womanhood. That’s another kind of reading on female anger and how people are dealing with women’s anger.
Thank you for sharing that. I don’t have that lived experience and didn’t think about it that way. Of course, nobody has ever said those things to me as a man, so I don’t ever have to think about it.
Women from a young age are not encouraged to express their anger and made to feel guilty for feeling angry and punished for expressing it, or even feeling it. At some point, all of that anger is going to come out, maybe, and the song is an extreme example of it. Every woman will tell you they’ve been told to smile more, and I get that a lot, and have heard it a lot in my career. In publicity photographs when I’m not smiling, it becomes an issue for some people. ‘Why are you not smiling? Why aren’t you happy? Smile! You’d look prettier if you smiled!’
We discussed at length the idea of solitude as it related to Weird, your last album of original songs. I think there has been a lot of shifting around of people’s perception and value of work in the past fifteen months—it certainly has for me. Has anything about your musical ethos fundamentally changed with the pandemic?
It hasn’t really affected me all that much, actually. I do work a lot on my own, and I do a lot—actually, most—of my writing alone. And even when I’ve collaborated with someone, like when I did that record with Matthew Caws as Minor Alps, we were each writing separately and then we kind of put our songs together in the studio. It wasn’t a lot of sitting in a room together writing. I’ve always been pretty self-sufficient.
And now that I’ve been doing livestream shows, that’s been great in terms of having people contributing in more ways than one. I know it’s not the same as being in person, but I’m pretty adaptable and was able to keep doing things when everything shut down. I think I’ll probably go on the road again whenever people are allowed to go on the road, but if not, I think I can just keep going with this indefinitely.
There’s something interesting about that approach to live shows, isn’t there? I’m sure it’ll never rival the experience of an artist and an audience sharing space together, but I do think there’s a different kind of intimacy that’s achieved when you’re watching a performance in solitude. I watched you play through your In Exile Deo album live a couple of weeks ago, and it felt really personal to see it happen in that medium.
Yeah, it’s not the same thing as playing in the same room with electricity in the air, but it’s a different and interesting thing. I’m still getting comfortable with it, but it’s just really interesting to me and I want to keep doing it. At the beginning of all of this, I never thought that I would do a livestream—I scoffed at the idea, actually. I thought it was lame, or something. But then when I dipped my toe into those waters, I kind of liked it. It’s just so easy for me to do it—I just have to drive a couple of miles to the studio. They have everything set up for me, the lights and everything, and they can broadcast it on their YouTube channel. It’s a good setup and I don’t have to stress about it too much.
It was fun to see you work through the material and interact with fans in a different way. Just kind of throwing out all of the conventions of what a concert would usually look like
Right...throwing out all of the conventions, like knowing how to use all of the technology and knowing the songs. [laughs] Those conventions...conventions like remembering the chords. [laughs]
Getting back to the subject matter you contend with on Blood—I won’t be so obtuse as to ask you how we should solve the world’s problems, but do you, from your worldview, see a way for us to be better and do better as people?
I don’t feel very optimistic, really. Everything is so divided in our country. It’s almost like you have to choose a side and depending on your perspective you’re either on the good side...I mean, there is a good side and a bad side, and which side is good or bad is dependent on your perspective. But, yeah, it just becomes harder and harder to have any nuance in expression. That’s kind of what “Mouthful of Blood” is about—you have to be on a side and there’s no room for nuance in thought or expression nowadays. Or you’re made to feel like you’re not ‘on the team’ if you don’t have all the talking points correct.
But I understand feeling like there are good guys and bad guys because it’s really seemed to be that way over the past four years. I don’t know how to make anything better. When I heard the factoid that something like a hundred million people have Amazon Prime accounts in this country, I just couldn’t believe it’s true. That's, like, a third of the population valuing convenience over anything else—any other value. You’re feeding the beast—all these hundreds of millions of people continuing to bolster Amazon, which is a monster. A lot of those people probably do things they think are helpful like recycling and composting.
But I just feel like human beings are going to destroy the planet. There’s no other end result, I don’t think. Ultimately, everyone’s too selfish to make a change in a better direction overall, as a whole. I know it sounds kind of depressing, but anytime something good happens, there’s a whole other side where people are fighting against the good thing that happened. I don’t know. What do you think?
Well, there is so much about our entire system that’s broken—or that never worked in the first place. We’ve built a society on the backs and lives of people that have been hurt and exploited and violated for centuries. We’re never going to achieve justice or equality if we continue to operate on that premise. We have to dismantle the entire thing and start over. But that takes radical change, and I don’t know that there’s a willingness by everyone to actually do that.
Yeah, I don’t think people are willing to make radical changes. I think many people are willing to try and help, but there are some things that people aren’t willing to give up. They want comfort and convenience. And also, some people can’t afford certain things. But I think our whole value system is just screwed up—the things this country is built on are just outdated.
Yes. We have a difficult and painful history in this country that many people aren’t even willing to acknowledge, let alone work to change it. If so many aren’t ready to admit or believe injustice exists, how can you possibly eliminate it?
Right. Some of them are, and some of them aren’t. But that history isn’t even taught very well in school in this country. If you’re starting with children by teaching them a chosen history, it’s not a good place to begin.
So how do you personally keep moving forward when you get weighed down by the things that surround you? What’s your respite?
Music is an escape for me, and even if it’s a dark song like “Mouthful of Blood,” when I’m singing it, I’m not really too attached or focused on the content. When I’m playing and singing, it transports me to a better place. It really is an escape—playing and listening to music. Moving forward? I don’t know. I guess I’m just trying to keep creating and it’s something that makes me feel good to do, and I don’t feel like I’m hurting anybody when I do. I know it’s kind of a pointless thing for me to be doing with my life, but it feels good. And maybe that’s really selfish.
But I know some people are enjoying it, so in some way I am—and I think artists are—providing a service and are important. Making art is important. I know as a child growing up, taking art classes and music classes, and playing sports, too—it was all such a crucial part of my development and childhood, and I think it’s really important that children are encouraged to do those things. They’re all related, in my mind. It’s a way for them to get away from intellectualism and indoctrination to find their own selves and their own creativity. It’s important for their psyche, and healthy psyches are good for the world.
I won’t ask you to rehash your favorite albums since we’ve done that in the past. But what are you listening to right now that’s offering you some enjoyment?
I’m really not listening to anything in particular right now—nothing new, anyway. I listen to certain radio stations, and that’s it. There’s a station here called WJIV, and it’s been around forever. It’s run single-handedly by a guy in Maine, and he’s kind of, like, libertarian-ish. He has this really freeform playlist, and he just sort of plays whatever he wants, and it’s interesting and kind of fun. You should check it out.
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