Photo Courtesy of Shank Hall
Juliana Hatfield
In the early ’90s, just before and after Nirvana blew up the musical firmament, Juliana Hatfield came to embody what would later be characterized as “the Cool Girl.”
She starred for five years in the surprisingly muscular, unsung late ’80s jangle-pop college rockers Blake Babies, then she joined Evan Dando and The Lemonheads on bass for their finest moment, It’s a Shame About Ray, including a duet on showstopper “My Drug Buddy.” A year later, she released Hey Babe, the first of three terrific solo albums before Warner Brothers dropped her, and then she spent a few years recalculating her trajectory.
It’s perhaps not surprising to discover that her cute, aloof, guy-friendly demeanor was a façade, built upon—in answer to—an unsteady self-concept. Indeed, Hatfield admits there was little joy for her during those years in the spotlight. “My own internal problems made it impossible for me to truly enjoy or experience my success because I was personally so fucking miserable,” she says.
Like many shy people, music was Hatfield’s means of expressing deep personal truths. The combination of her sweetly expressive, very girlish voice, the aching vulnerability at the center of her songs and the brash, jaded swagger with which she brought them off was intoxicating.
Arguably, her biggest song conflated a B-movie star and a game of “Spin the Bottle,” whose junior-high imprimatur not only spoke charmingly to that feeling of being a grown-up in kids clothes, but quietly to her early 20s virginity. If she was a cool girl, she didn’t feel it.
“I had really no concept about how to present an image to the public. I was just trying to navigate the turmoil going on inside of me. I was just crumbling all the time whenever I was out in public or even privately in social situations,” Hatfield recalls. “I didn't have any skills… to navigate society or relationships. I had a really hard time and struggled a lot for a long time. So, people thought I was aloof or cool. I was really, more like, catatonic or just like so racked with anxiety and depression that I couldn't move.”
Even her tomboy look was self-denial born both of artistic integrity and deep insecurity.
“I wanted to be taken as seriously as any of the guys, and I didn't want to differentiate myself with sexy clothes or a lot of makeup,” she says. “I was perfectly comfortable with denying my femininity. That was my choice. I was really uncomfortable with my femininity… I was just always trying to disguise it or ignore it. Or make it disappear.”
Fortunately, time is like cake icing in that it tends to eventually smooth over or cover up those early blemishes.
Hatfield stepped away from the solo career to reunite with the Blake Babies and then kept going with Blake Babies bandmate Freda Love in an all-female trio, Some Girls, releasing two criminally neglected albums. She had an idea for a tour diary that morphed into 2008’s When I Grow up: a Memoir. Four years later, she received an art degree and continues to produce canvasses.
In the intervening eight years she’s released new band albums with Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws (Minor Alps) and the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg (The I Don’t Cares), four solo albums, and two albums of covers of Olivia Newton-John and The Police.
Her latest solo album, Weird, returns to that grubbier early ’90s sound and continues a fine run of releases. On the title track, Hatfield recalls a friend, “asking don’t you need romance / And I told him no / It’s So Weird.”
But the truth is just the opposite. Sometimes when we finally fully embrace who we are, we achieve a peace no one else can give us. And sure, it feels weird, but what doesn’t? Hatfield has cut her teeth in an underground family of misfits; weird is the norm here.
She’s not rich by any means except internally, where she enjoys the fruits of self-confidence that’s taken time to grow tall enough to pursue whatever her creative soul craves.
“It's like writing, painting, playing music or taking stuff in, you know, reading, watching movies, eating. It’s like my whole life is going back and forth between those things,” she says. “It’s fantastic. I have a lot of freedom to be. It’s my job to be creative, but I have a lot of stuff that I don’t show to people, which is so satisfying for me—to be able to do it for myself or to share it with only friends or people who are interested and not have to worry about an audience.”
In the end, Hatfield’s proven she always was the Cool Girl, even if she couldn’t fully perceive it herself.
Juliana Hatfield performs at Shank Hall on Thursday, Feb. 6, at 8 p.m.
