Photo by David Doobinin

We’ve been listening to a lot of Juliana Hatfield lately. This year we featured her tracks on our Zone 3 and Songs To Get Vaccinated To spotify playlists, and now we’re all about the new album Blood. Blood is somewhat of a departure for Hatfield in that it dabbles in programmed drums, though the record remains truly Hatfield at its core. 

Hear for yourself when Blood drops on May 14th. Until then, read the interview below where Juliana Hatfield and Allston Pudding talk about recording during the pandemic, the Boston music scene in the late 80s, and what Hatfield thinks you should name your band.

Allston Pudding: Can you tell me about Blood? It’s clear that ‘blood’ is a main theme in the lyrics.

Juliana Hatfield: When I was looking back at the songs…there was a lot of “blood.” Some of it is subtle: “tearing my skin off in peace” (“Dead Weight”), there’s a car crash in “Shame of Love” … and then there’s metaphorical blood in “Mouthful of Blood.” Blood is all over this album.

AP: The song “Had a Dream” is about murdering someone with a knife. The lyrics “the world is controlled by blood sucking thugs” are in “Nightmary.”

JH: Exactly. It seems like I couldn’t title it anything but Blood. It made too much sense.

AP: A lot of our readers are musicians that are trying to figure out how to record albums during a pandemic. I heard a lot of Blood was recorded at home. What instruments were recorded at home?

JH: I usually start off with a drum machine beat, just one beat that repeats over and over. Because I don’t know how to program a whole complicated drum beat. I have an old drum machine that I use. I might find a beat on that and record a few minutes of it. Or I find a beat on GarageBand and then lay down 4 minutes of a drum beat. And then start adding maybe acoustic or electric guitar, and then I just add onto that as I see fit. A little keyboard, bass, vocals. 

After I had done a lot of it at home I took the stuff to Q Division Studios and added real drums to the fake drums and I added some more guitars that I wanted to do in the studio because I can’t really play guitars through loud amps in my apartment.

There are a few songs that I collaborated on with Jed Davis [Sevendys, Collider]. You can tell the songs he worked on because he programmed more elaborate drums like on “Shame of Love” and “Had A Dream.” The real simple drums are me, like on “Nightmary” and “Gorgon.” I have more of a simple groove, like on Nightmary there’s one cymbal crash at the end and that was me. That’s my style. I’m not a flashy drummer.

AP: Did you keep any of the guitars and bass tracks you recorded at home on the final album?

JH: Oh yeah, of course. When I went to Q Division Studios I was just adding on top of what I had already laid down as the song.

AP: Did you [record by plugging directly into your laptop] for the bass and guitar?

JH: Acoustic guitar was all just ‘set up a microphone.’ I don’t go direct with acoustic guitar; they’re mic’d. Sometimes I’ll mic a guitar amp. I have this tiny little Marshall. It’s smaller than a lunch box, smaller than a breadbox, and you can get this really cool distorted sound. I did that on some songs and I mic’d that. Some guitars I went direct and plugged into GarageBand and some I used GarageBand sounds. There were a few songs where I used the same few GarageBand sounds over and over again. Same with bass: I would go direct or use a GarageBand sound.  

AP: How did you get connected with Jed Davis?

JH: I don’t remember how I met him. He might have come to a show of mine or something, I don’t know, and we started talking. He ended up doing artwork for the album Weird. He really helped me figure out how to use GarageBand because before making this album I had never recorded into my laptop. He was helping me so much with troubleshooting. Whenever I would encounter a problem he would talk me through it, walk me through it.

AP: Did the covers album you did of Olivia Newton-John songs change the way you write songs?

JH: Sadly no. I always hope that I can progress or change but I think my songwriting shtick is part of my DNA. I do things a certain way and I can’t really change. I’m like impervious to influence, kind of.

AP: What’s the shtick?

JH: It’s just what I do, you know? I write these songs a certain way. I write these melodies, a certain kind of melody, and then I harmonize, then I slap some mellotron on it, and I have a sloppy aesthetic. I just like things a certain way and I write the same kind of songs over and over again: verse/chorus/bridge…solo, verse/chorus/bridge…solo. That kind of thing? I like certain sounds, simple and loose, really melodic, a little bit gnarly, a little dirty. Jed helped to change things up a little bit on the new album. His midi stuff and programming with drums is outside of my comfort zone a little bit. So that happened.

AP: Do you think you’ll do that moving forward? Work with Jed or another collaborator?

JH: I don’t know.  I never know. I don’t really think ahead at all. So, I don’t know. I liked working with him. The next thing I do I’m going to play all the drums myself. I don’t think I’ll have the programmed drums. [Davis] also played some synth bass [on Blood]. I’ll do real acoustic drums and real electric bass on the next thing.

AP: Let’s talk about the covers albums you did back-to-back of Olivia Newton-John and The Police. Would you recommend that to any songwriters? Learn somebody’s work and record it?

JH: I never really give anyone any advice. I think the artists know what they should do. They don’t need anyone like me to tell them what to do. I do whatever I want because no one stops me and I wouldn’t really advise anyone to do what I do because I don’t know if it makes any sense. But it was fun for me, that’s for sure. I don’t know if it’s practical for people to make whole albums of covers but I love doing it.

AP: Going back in time a little bit. Could we talk about the Boston scene that you came up in? The late 80s/early 90s. You, Pixies, The Lemonheads, Throwing Muses, Breeders, Dinosaur Jr., – the greater New England scene. Can you put into words what the feeling was in those days knowing there was so much talent and music industry attention? Do you imagine it was similar to that of Manchester or Seattle?

JH: What was happening here, it wasn’t a music industry thing. When we were starting out there were no major labels coming around. It was just a bunch of us slobs playing in the clubs and it was exciting because there were so many great bands.

Going to see Dinosaur [Jr.] in a tiny club with 12 people in the audience. They were at full volume from the very beginning. It was so exciting to be there. Exciting only because the band was so fucking great, you know?

We weren’t thinking about getting signed in the beginning, we were just trying to get a record out somehow, and play gigs, and that’s kind of what everyone was doing and then we met The Lemonheads because we loved their music. [My band at the time] the Blake Babies went to see them play and then we all became friends and started playing music together. It was just a fun, exciting time. Labels signing people, that was later. the Blake Babies never got signed to a major label so we weren’t really as big as bands like Pixies, or Throwing Muses who got really big in England. At that time they were playing to big crowds over there but that never happened to the Blake Babies.

AP: Did you tour England at all with the Blake Babies?

JH: We toured a little, not much. We did later after Freda [Love] quit the band so it was kind of a drag. Freda was gone, and we were going to break up soon.

AP: Speaking of the Blake Babies. I heard Allen Ginsburg named your band?

JH: Yeah that’s the story but that was before I had joined the band. You’ve got to have Freda tell the story. They went to see Allen Ginsburg do a reading at Harvard and after the reading at the Q&A session they asked him “what should we name our band?” And he said “Blake Babies.” But that was before I even knew them. So they had the name before I joined the band.

AP: Has anyone ever asked you to do the honor of naming their band?

JH: Oh yeah. Someone asked me once, some girl, and I told her to name her band “The Dirty Virgins.” I don’t know if she ever did. 

AP: I was looking at an interview you did in 1992 on MTV 120 minutes. You said you’d never experienced gender discrimination in the music industry. I wanted to know, looking back on that time in your career, do you think that still holds true, that you weren’t discriminated against?

JH: Oh wow, we’re going to get into this stuff? I was very naïve back then and I didn’t really understand what was happening but now after a lot of years have gone by I would say that sexism is real, and it affected me, and it affected my career.

So yeah, systemic sexism exists in the world at large so of course it exists in the music industry. BUT I would say that coming up in indie rock in the late 80s with John Strohm and Freda Love [Blake Babies] and all the other bands around us, that was one of the greatest, most feminist, most encouraging, welcoming, fair environments that I’ve ever worked in. So, I feel really lucky that I was able to spend a bunch of years in that environment before I went into the national major label/national press. I had this really good, safe, nurturing environment in indie rock back then, which was great.

AP: So you felt protected?

JH: I felt protected by the people in my band and by the scene, the people around me. Gary Smith, who took us under his wing, recorded [Blake Babies’] first demos and he later became our manager and one of my best friends. He was an early protector, a supporter. He discovered Pixies too and Throwing Muses and he recorded those bands’ first demos. He was a very supportive, feminist, progressive, fair-minded, had a moral compass, he was a really great supporter and friend in the early days. He always was by my side and helped me, protected me. So, it’s just a matter of you’ve got to have good people around you, I think.

AP: You were on the cover of Spin Magazine in 1994. Was that a big moment for you? What did you think when you saw that cover?

JH: I was so miserable at that point, I couldn’t enjoy anything. You can see just looking at the photo how miserable I was. I was very uncomfortable with the press’ attention. I didn’t know how to deal with it, I hadn’t planned for it. So, the picture is of my misery. I felt like I didn’t know how to do my job which involved so much talking to the press and being photographed. I felt like *fake whiny voice* “I don’t wanna do this stuff, I just wanna make music.”

Part of me felt proud, I guess, that I was on a magazine cover. It was cool but I was so uncomfortable and miserable at that point that I probably failed to enjoy the moment. And then the way they set up the cover: “LIKE A VIRGIN.”  That was the headline. I was like “Fuck. Really?” That whole moment in time, the way that the conversation was around me, [the way] the press was talking about me, it was such a bummer and I think it really had a negative effect on the perception of me in general, and through time, throughout history.

AP: Well, I know you’ve got another interview in a few minutes so we can call it here. Thanks so much for your time — I really appreciate it.

JH: Thanks man.

Check out Juliana Hatfield’s latest album Blood, releasing May 14th through American Laundromat Records. Listen to the lead single “Mouthful of Blood” below.