PRESS

4 Albums Scott Litt Produced that Weren’t for R.E.M.

By Al Melchior for American Songwriter

R.E.M.’s sound gradually evolved over its 31 years of existence, but there were two points where it changed drastically. The first of those occurred when Scott Litt co-produced his first album for them, and the second occurred when he stopped co-producing their albums. While R.E.M.’s jangle-infused first four albums are still revered among their fans, the sharper-edged Document shook up the band’s sound and image. It also gave them their first Platinum album and began their ascent into superstardom in earnest.

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Secret Messages: Listening to ‘Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO’ with my Father’s Ghost

By Sun Hesper Jansen for The Jam Files

The day before my dad died, too young, from a succession of cancers, I worked up the courage to ask him if he’d mind haunting me. For all his life, he’d been an atheist and steadfast scoffer of all things spiritual. Only the fact that he'd liked talking to the hospice chaplain, who took one look at his long hair—and the enigmatically impish smile he'd developed in his waning months—and refused to buy that he wasn't some sort of mystic, finally emboldened me to confront him on the subject. Naturally, that was the day he lost the ability to speak at all, and when he listened, he was far away in the arms of Morpheus. The next morning, he was dead. It didn’t stop me from making my request. “You can be as dramatic as you like,” I said to his vacated shell, still half-prepared for him to wink at me. “I mean, I’m a known witch; I can handle dramatic. But I feel like it should be in music. Music would make a lot of sense.”

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Juliana Hatfield on Her New Covers Album “Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO”

By Ian Rushbury for Under the Radar

Isn’t it great when crazy ideas turn out to be the best ideas? Juliana Hatfield wasn’t the first artist to think, “Hey, I’m going to make an album of covers of just one artist!” Most of those plans fade with the hangover in the morning. Hatfield however stuck to it and has done it three times now.

Joining her tributes to The Police and Olivia Newton-John is her latest album—Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO. Even the harshest critic would admit that that’s a bold undertaking, especially for a three-piece band with not a trace of a cello or a violin. She’s turned (another) labor of love into a smart, credible alternative rock gem. Hatfield spoke to Under the Radar about this and her other two cover albums prior to her U.S. tour in the fall of 2023.

Ian Rushbury (Under the Radar): As someone who was born in Birmingham UK and as a consequence loves pretty much anything associated with Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood, I was especially keen to hear your treatments of these ELO songs.

Well, I hope that I did them justice. I hope that the fans are okay with what I did.

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Juliana Hatfield — My Life in Music

The Boston indie-rock luminary on the records that don’t bring her down

By Sam Richards for UNCUT

X
Under The Big Black Sun
ELEKTRA, 1982

​​I was a teenager living in this small town in Massachusetts. My older brother decided to join the army and his girlfriend moved in with us. She became the cool, older sister that I never had and her record collection was really a really important education. I remember one day she put on the X song “Motel Room In My Bed” and I thought it was the most exciting, glorious sound I’d ever heard. It made me realise that I was looking for something much more raw and weird and tough than the pop stuff on the radio, but without losing any of the melody. I didn’t really understand that they’re singing about sex and poverty and death, but somehow I still related to the angst underneath.

Continue reading Juliana’s list here.

Juliana had a great conversation with music journalist and writer Lori Majewski on the Fierce Women in Music podcast at SiriusXM. Listen here.

Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO: AllMusic Review

By Stephen Thomas Erlewine

The third in a series of tribute albums from Juliana Hatfield to her idols, Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO finds the singer/songwriter tackling the catalog of an artist that is known for their lush, layered arrangements — the kind of recordings that are the opposite of Hatfield's largely handmade recordings. Part of the charm of her Sings series is how Hatfield addresses these kinds of challenges, finding ways to rearrange familiar records so they retain their original vibe while also bearing her own idiosyncratic imprint. With Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO, she achieves this by balancing classic rock radio staples with deep cuts — she closes the proceedings with "Ordinary Dream," pulled from Electric Light Orchestra's excellent latter-day album Zoom — then concentrating on the elements that give ELO a light, sweet airiness. That's a spirit that easily translates to the stripped-down surroundings Hatfield creates by herself, along with drums from Chris Anzalone and bass by Ed Valauskas. Choosing to transpose strings to guitar and voice helps Hatfield achieve a sense of intimacy while retaining a sense of romantic grandeur, a combination that gives Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO a distinctly warm and comforting feeling without succumbing to the pitfalls of nostalgia.

Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO

By Kyle Lemmon | FLOOD Magazine

On her third covers LP since 2018, the alt-rock songwriter takes on Jeff Lynne’s symphonic rock hits and deep cuts with a locked-down style that’s less theatrical than even her own recordings.

Juliana Hatfield has cranked out solo albums at a quick clip since 1992, but beginning in 2018 the alt-rock songwriter shifted to switching between original LPs and covers of influential ’70s and ’80s artists she grew up listening to as a budding musician. Previous covers ran the gamut from The Police to Olivia Newton-John, but her voice perhaops fits most comfortably with her latest pick: the classically inclined pop and symphonic rock of Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra.

Whereas ELO always pushed every button and mixed in as many studio tricks as possible, Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO makes no fuss on lightly produced versions of “Telephone Line,” “Can’t Get It Out of My Head,” and “Strange Magic” (Hatfield wisely selects more than just the blockbuster stadium-rock hits such as “Mr. Blue Sky,” “Turn to Stone,” or “Evil Woman” to cover). The indelible guitar hooks and high-gloss melodies of ELO shine through most on “From the End of the World,” though. Hatfield nails that deeper-catalog track and a few other career earworms from ELO, but her overall style is locked down and less theatrical than even her own recordings.

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By John Moore | Glide Magazine

It admittedly started as a novelty, or so it seemed. In 2018, Juliana Hatfield – one of the coolest understated musicians to come out of alternative rock (when that term still meant something) put out Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John. Gen X has a storied tradition of covering ironic music (we made cover albums of School House Rock and Saturday Morning Cartoon theme songs) and this just seemed to play into both nostalgia and irony. But the album, made up of more than a dozen Newton-John songs, was actually great, and given the care that went into these songs, it was clear that Hatfield was a genuine fan. The next year she followed up with Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police; surprisingly, an even better covers album than the one before. So, Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO seems not only logical but expected given Hatfield’s love for pure unadulterated melodic pop songs.

And yes, it’s as good as you’d imagine.

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Review: ‘Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO’

By Mike Tobyn | Cover Me

The Electric Light Orchestra, over a journey lasting 50 years and counting, have never been contemporaneously cool. Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood formed the band to allow them to fuse their love of pop with their classical training and knowledge. Orchestra was clearly a statement. Wood soon moved on to other things, but Lynne has stayed with the concept ever since. They have never been at the forefront of a trend, and only reluctantly acknowledge following any. During their rebirth in the 2010s, one journalist called them “anti-cool,” from a position of deep love and appreciation.

The music did all the talking, and it was in magnificent voice. Lynne himself liked to hide behind his Aviator glasses, thus providing a role model for Daft Punk hiding behind helmets. As Punk, the art form, was starting in their home country, ELO were touring the United Streets, beguiling live and TV audiences with a lineup including two cellos, a French Horn, and a Mellotron. However, the music was amazing. Classically influenced, prog adjacent, concept album addicted, disco flecked at times but with true song-making craft combined with expert musicianship. Lynne was clearly appreciated as a ‘musician’s musician,’ with a remarkable catalogue of collaborations with some of the greatest of them all, but the public was behind the artists. Everyone got there in the end, and today ELO are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Lynne is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and many artists have sampled their work in acknowledgment of their influence.

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Review: Juliana Hatfield Faces the Music With A Set of E.L.O. Covers

By Hal Horowitz | American Songwriter

Starting in 2018, singer/songwriter Juliana Hatfield began alternating albums of original material with those dedicated to interpretations of ’70s-’80s artists that have influenced her. Previous releases reimagined tracks from the Olivia Newton-John and The Police catalogs with her understated, breathy, voice and stripped-down, even earthy instrumentation. She returns to tackle the pop and pomp of the Electric Light Orchestra.

Eventually shortened to just E.L.O., the Jeff Lynne-fronted band shifted from a prog-infused, Beatles-inflected outfit, with prominent strings that were a full-time band and touring members (ie: not hired hands), to chart-busting icons whose sumptuous hits dominated radio playlists for a large portion of the ’70s. E.L.O.’s heavily produced, some may say over-produced, output was initially reflective of the times, but became less so as punk took over and Lynne seemed to be a dinosaur.

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Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO Stereophile Review

Performance ****
Sonics *****

Juliana Hatfield has always found a way to stand out in what seems like a crowded field. As a member of bands like Blake Babies and Some Girls, she shaped a sound that was always fresh but also in step with what was popular. Five years ago, she switched gears and did something it seemed like maybe too many other artists were already doing: She made a covers album.

She chose Olivia Newton-John. Her take grabbed ears, turned heads, and reminded us to never count Hatfield out. A Police tribute followed; it too was widely celebrated; a review in Under the Radar said, "Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police distills all that's great about Hatfield ... and presents it in the context of an artist reinventing herself, and these songs, for all to see."

Now she arrives with her strongest tribute album yet; it may be one of her strongest records ever.

Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO is a brilliant look at the career of Jeff Lynne, one of rock's most highly regarded writers, producers, and performers and the singular creative force behind ELO. Hatfield picked his music to explore partly because they share an approach. Alone with Garage Band in her bedroom, she tinkered with the sound, arrangements, and harmonies with the same attention to detail Lynne brought into the studio throughout his career. The result is a 10-song collection that is bright, breezy, and lush but firm when firmness is required. The collection spans ELO's career including not just well-known hits like "Telephone Line" and "Don't Bring Me Down" but also "Ordinary Dream" from the much later album Zoom.

Deconstructing the work of an artist like Lynne and reassembling it requires rare confidence and daring. Once again she transforms the music. It loses none of its majesty and little of its depth. Indeed, Hatfield may have just moved the music of Jeff Lynne and ELO into heavy rotation for a new generation of listeners.—Ray Chestowski

Juliana recently spoke with Mike Royal of the Sending Signals podcast. They cover her new ELO covers album, art vs. commerce, being understood vs. not wanting to reveal yourself, recording techniques, and more. Listen here or wherever you find your podcasts: https://sendingsignals.simplecast.com/episodes/juliana-hatfield.

Listen to Juliana discuss the "Xanadu" soundtrack, and much more on this episode of the You, Me & An Album podcast.

Photographer, author and podcaster Mike Hipple talks with Juliana about her career and how the politics of the music business almost led her to quitting entirely — and how that journey led her to return to school to try and get an MFA in fine art. Listen here or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Patti Smith, Bob Mould, Lenny Kaye & more celebrated 50 years of 'Nuggets' @ City Winery

Nuggets, the classic Lenny Kaye-curated garage rock / psych compilation, turned 50 this year, and there have been a number of celebratory events, including two all-star shows at NYC’s City Winery on July 28 & 29 that also raised money for Jesse Malin’s recovery fund. 

The sets were pretty much the same both nights, with Kaye leading the house band, plus guest performances from Patti Smith covering The Electric Prunes and The Leaves, Bob Mould covering The Castaways and The Litter, Steve Wynn & Peter Buck covering The Moving Sidewalks and The Spades, The Bangles‘ Vicki Peterson and John Cowsill covering The Beau Brummels and The Knickerbockers, Juliana Hatfield covering The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Marshall Crenshaw covering Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs, Ivan Julian covering Love and The Music Machine, Richard Lloyd covering Count Five and The Vagrants, and more.

Check out photos by Al Pereira and both night’s setlists and video, here.

Juliana Hatfield Shares Video For New Electric Light Orchestra Cover “Can’t Get It Out of My Head”

Juliana Hatfield is releasing a new Electric Light Orchestra covers album, Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO, on November 17 via American Laundromat. Now she has shared its second single, her rendition of “Can’t Get it Out of My Head,” via a music video. Check out the video and full tracklist below.

This video was directed by David Doobinin who drew inspiration from French photographer Gilbert Garcin, who incorporated dreamlike black and images to play with light, shadows, and cutouts. Of the video, Doobinin says in a press release: “I created cutout versions of Juliana to create layered, architectural visuals. I wanted the video to capture that restless, ‘caught between two worlds’ experience we all feel sometimes, while also highlighting Juliana’s raw and poetic nature, and how she embodies both awkwardness and grace.”

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Juliana Hatfield – “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head” (ELO Cover)

In the past few years, the veteran alt-rocker Juliana Hatfield has devoted entire cover albums to the work of Olivia Newton-John and the Police. Later this year, she’ll follow those two with Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO — which, as you’ve probably figured out, his her full-LP tribute to Jeff Lynne’s ecstatic ’70s prog-pop project Electric Light Orchestra. She’s tackling the other half of the Xanadu soundtrack! We’ve already posted Hatfield’s version of “Don’t Bring Me Down,” and now we’re getting another track.

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Juliana Hatfield Announces ELO Covers Album, Shares “Don’t Bring Me Down”: Stream

Juliana Hatfield has announced a new addition to her series of covers albums. Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO drops November 17th via American Laundromat Records, while her rendition of “Don’t Bring Me Down” is out now.

As indie rock royalty, it may come as a surprise that Hatfield would enjoy the pop stylings of Electric Light Orchestra. Yet you could easily trace her inarguably catchy music to the band’s melodies. “ELO songs were always coming on the radio when I was growing up. They were a reliable source of pleasure and fascination,” Hatfield said in a statement. “With this album of covers I wanted to get my hands deep into some of the massive ‘70’s hits but I am also shining a light on some of the later work… My task was to try and break all the things down and reconstruct them subtly until they felt like mine.”

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The 50 Best Original Christmas Songs Since ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’

By Maura Johnston | New York Magazine

42. Juliana Hatfield, “Christmas Cactus” (2020)

This shimmering ode to a stubbornly non-blooming plant that’s supposed to come into flower is a great metaphor for dashed holiday hopes — although Hatfield, whose recent run of songwriting productivity led to this track about an actual plant of hers, is pretty Zen about the whole thing. “I have faith that someday it may bloom,” Hatfield told the Boston Globe in 2020. “But if it doesn’t, that’s okay, too.”

Read the entire list here.

Live Long and Prosper, Juliana Hatfield

By Jesse Sendejas Jr. | Houston Press

When it comes to her favorite artists, Juliana Hatfield wears her heart proudly on her sleeve. Alt-rock royalty and a guitar hero in her own right, she’s recorded full cover albums of her music heroes, artists like Olivia Newton-John and The Police. So, which song might she select as one of particular brilliance in her life? “Make a Move on Me,” maybe? Or perhaps “Can’t Stand Losing You?” Hatfield decided to boldly go in a different direction.

We chatted with Hatfield about one prominent song in her life and the songs on Blood, her 19th solo studio album. We asked how she’s been a prolific songwriter over the years and her thoughts on touring during the pandemic, all ahead of a scheduled tour stop in Houston last month.

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Since her emergence in the late ‘80s with Boston indie outfit Blake Babies, Juliana Hatfield has maintained a fruitful output as both a solo artist and a member of sundry bands. She began the ‘90s with the Lemonheads and established herself as a distinctive voice of the era with the Juliana Hatfield Three, which she reformed to critical acclaim in 2014. Long after so many of her cohorts came and went, she continues to turn out album after album, combining angst and authenticity with snappy songsmithing. Her nineteenth solo effort, “Blood,” is at once a testament to the times and a continuation of her signature style. 

The new record is about as dark as the title suggests, unsparing in both its psychological explorations and its societal indictments. Hatfield tackles both the personal and the political with plenty of grit, punk energy, and torrential distortion, but packages it with a certain playfulness. The songs are as catchy as they are abrasive, with their volatile contents held together judiciously by musical elements that strike a fine balance. Hatfield sang and played guitars, keyboards, and drums on the album, and it’s fitting, considering such immersion, that her lyrics seem to hold nothing back. She spoke with Entertainment Voice about the creative process, musical choices, and lyrical underpinnings of her latest work.     

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Following the release of her latest album, Blood, indie-rock icon Juliana Hatfield talks about songwriting, her minimalist guitar ‘collection’ and why recording an album during a pandemic meant she finally had to get to grips with GarageBand.

Juliana Hatfield has just released her 19th solo album of original material, Blood – it’s the latest entry in a wonderfully varied career that sees her rightly enshrined as indie-rock royalty. She started out with her Boston band Blake Babies back in 1987, and has also incorporated two albums of covers (The Police and Olivia Newton John, since you ask), releases with Some Girls, The I Don’t Cares, Minor Alps, a stint playing bass with the Lemonheads, and a six-song EP with the band Frank Smith. So yes, she’s extremely prolific. What is also remarkable is the consistent quality of that output. From the outside it appears almost effortless, as if the music lives inside her always.

“Music that’s in my ear, just day to day melodies that I’m humming, that’s usually other people’s songs,” Hatfield tells us from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “When I’m writing, when I’m coming up with new things, I’m usually more focused. I have to sit down and work on it.

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Listen to Juliana’s conversation on SHEROES Radio with Carmel Holt here.

The indie-rocker is now a touchstone for a generation of young songwriters – and after learning to channel her pain and frustration, her 18th album is one of her best

Jliana Hatfield speaks with deliberation: her thoughts unfurl after pregnant pauses and are sharpened by astute clarifications. “I’m sorry, I lost my train of thought,” she says at one point, doubling back to ensure her meaning is clear. Such consideration isn’t a surprise, given the rippling effect of an infamous early-career interview.

Nearly 30 years ago, while promoting her debut solo album Hey Babe, 23-year-old Hatfield, who was brand new to interviews, admitted to an inquiring male journalist that she was still a virgin. The casual comment became the focus of his piece, and incited scrutiny that followed the American songwriter throughout her rise. “When I was in the thick of it, it wasn’t really computing for me,” she says on a phone call from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It wasn’t until much later that I realised how intense it was, how gross it was, and how it affected my career in negative ways.”

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In her new album, Juliana Hatfield’s concerns are comeuppance, self-abasement, and the depravity of those who revel in the power to make decisions that can adversely affect others.

During her six-year tenure with American Laundromat Records, Juliana Hatfield has alternated between covers of her longtime favorite artists, as she did on Sings Olivia Newton-John and Sings The Police, and her own compositions, as she did on — among others — 2019’s Weird (click my Arts Fuse review) and Blood, which is now available in formats that include variously colored cassettes and LPs.

There is indeed — please forgive me for this as I might not forgive myself — blood on these tracks. Sometimes Hatfield utters the word itself, other times she conjures up images that are unavoidably sanguinary. Among her concerns: comeuppance, self-abasement, and the depravity of those who who revel in the power to make decisions that can adversely affect others.

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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.

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The veteran singer-songwriter details the unconventional recording techniques behind her 19th solo album, Blood

Since delivering her debut solo album Hey Babe back in 1992 – or, perhaps, since co-founding cult Massachusetts college rock unit the Blake Babies in the mid-'80s – Juliana Hatfield has built up one of the most impressively hooky, fuzz-forward catalogues in all of indie rock. 

At least from a technical standpoint, that consistency was challenged when the musician began working on her 19th solo full-length, Blood. 

Following the untimely demise of a once-trusty digital 8-track, Hatfield spent the early months of the pandemic begrudgingly learning how to use GarageBand, on which she tracked much of Blood’s guitars and synth work (overdubs eventually took place at Q Division Studios in Somerville, MA).

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Name Juliana Hatfield
Best known for alternawaifdom.
Current city Cambridge, MA.
Really want to be in In one fantasy of mine I move to Helsinki to work as a textile designer for Marimekko. Or else just work in the factory.
Excited about I might be joining a landscaping team!
My current music collection has a lot of Nothing (I own almost no music—and I don’t stream).|
And a little bit of Trashy pop.
Don’t judge me for Maybe Marie Osmond’s This Is the Way That I Feel, but then again I love it and I’m not embarrassed, dammit! Rock snobs can suck it!|
Preferred format Non-commercial genre-less terrestrial radio (WJIB is always on in my car).

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Juliana Hatfield serves as basement band in Full Frontal sketch

Samantha Bee put a Wayne’s World spin on Election Day with a sketch that — emulating Mike Myers’ Saturday Night Live character — imagined the many alternate endings of the presidential race.

With Juliana Hatfield serving as the basement band, Bee’s Wayne Campbell first receives the worst possible news regarding the 2020 election — Trump won in a landslide, the GOP overtook the Senate and the House, a massive earthquake destroys America — before opting for a different conclusion.

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Juliana Hatfield and I were bandmates in the Boston indie-rock band Blake Babies. This year marks the 30-year anniversary of our music video for the song “Out There,” which featured us shaving our heads on camera.

In early 2020, my band Sunshine Boys supported Juliana for a few shows on her US tour, and during a backstage chat we discovered we were both sick of dyeing our hair to hide the grey, and had both been thinking about chopping it all off to let nature take its course. Months later, during COVID-19 lockdown, we decided to take the leap together again, making a tidy bookend with the “Out There” video shoot 30 years earlier.

This is an edited transcript of our email exchange as we reflect on now and then, going grey, and growing older.  

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In the last couple of years, Juliana Hatfield has recorded full-length tributes to Olivia Newton-John and the Police. These decisions seem pretty random, and they make one think: What's next? Homages to Joan Armatrading and Ian Dury & the Blockheads? (I'd be okay with that, actually.) Regardless of what you think of her choices, Hatfield is a consummate pro in the vocal and guitar-playing departments, and she handles the material with golden-eared, indie-rock aptitude. Over the last 28 years with the Blake Babies and many other projects and on her own, she's proved herself extremely adept at interpreting other people's songs as well as writing her own melodious compositions that instantly insinuate themselves into your memory.

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Los Angeles has had a long-running yet intermittent love affair with Juliana Hatfield dating back to the days the Blake Babies broke out of the college radio ranks and her Juliana Hatfield Three project followed. Since then, she’d sweep through town every few years like a breath of fresh air. Her songwriting craft and musicianship are second-to-none in an industry of bar-chord rock. She can do it all with an open heart and open fingering on the fretboard. She’d dazzle us and then she would disappear for another couple years to write another new album. Being strung along over 18 albums hasn’t been completely insufferable, though.

Hatfield’s last appearance here in the City of Angels was the 2015 reunion of the trio at the Roxy, celebrating the release of their second album in 22 years, “Whatever, My Love.” Last night, she returned as a four-piece (with trio member Dean Fisher on bass, Mike Oram on second guitar and Chris Anzalone on drums). They touched down at the Echoplex in the middle of a month-long, 20-date foray across the States behind her most recent releases: 2018’s “Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John;” last year’s releases of new originals “Weird” (see below); and a second one-band covers album, “Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police.” Not surprisingly, Hatfield’s distinctive voice tied the disparate material into one cohesive night.

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The 25 Best Things to Do in Portland This Week: Jan 27-30 | Portland mercury

Juliana Hatfield's alterna-'90s rock-queen résumé is flawless. The songwriter had a hit on the Reality Bites soundtrack, played bass on the Lemonheads' classic "It's a Shame About Ray" (and was romantically linked with dreamboat frontman Evan Dando), and even guest-starred on a truly bizarre supernatural episode of My So-Called Life as a ghost teen angel. But beyond the I-wish-I-was-her list of cool points, Hatfield has been doing the same thing for the past three decades in many different musical projects: writing really, really good songs. Her whip-smart, insightful lyrics and sugary vocals are always on point; she's like if a singer/songwriter at a coffee shop were actually captivating. (Thurs Jan 30, 9 pm, Doug Fir, $20)  —Robin Edwards

12 OF THE BEST MUSIC SHOWS THIS WEEK IN L.A. | L.A. Weekly

Throughout her career, Juliana Hatfield has penned an impressive number of thoughtful, melodic and musically varied original songs. But going back to the 1980s and her time with Blake Babies — when she bent genders with a coyly charming remake of The Stooges’ feral “Loose” — the Massachusetts singer has also specialized in uniquely personal covers of material by other musicians. In 2018, Hatfield defied expectations of punk-rock coolness when she released Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John, and late last year she similarly reexamined the work of Sting and company with Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police. Rather than just mimic the overplayed originals, she imbued them with her own wit and arrangements, especially a punked-out revitalization of the dozy “Murder by Numbers.” Despite such digressions, Hatfield is at her best on 2019’s Weird, a set of glowing original indie-rock anthems. —Falling James

Juliana Hatfield could, as they say, sing the phonebook and we’d listen. So it’s all the more captivating when she covers someone like the Police. Hatfield just dropped a Rachel Lichtman-directed video for her cover of “Can’t Stand Losing You,” off of 2019’s Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police (via American Laundromat).

Hatfield fronts a band of Julianas in the slick video for the track (she played all the instruments on the recording), her vocals adding new sheen to the 1978 classic. The three versions of Hatfield represent Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland — with a rare peek at the musician on the drums. In her capable hands, the song sounds like it could have come out today — rather than more than 40 years ago. Plus, the suit Sting Juliana sports is sharp.

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The New Intepreters: Singer-Songwriters Find Comfort in Covers | TIDAL.com

The cover version — it’s an essential part of the history of rock ’n’ roll. After all, one could even argue that if Elvis Presley hadn’t covered Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right” in 1954, bringing an amped-up version of the blues to white audiences, rock ’n’ roll as we know it might not exist.

Covers are also how the Beatles and the Rolling Stones found their footing, tackling songs by their heroes such as Little Richard and Chuck Berry as they honed their songwriting skills. Once they mastered that craft, it brought a seismic shift to popular music, inspiring later rock ’n’ roll bands to follow their muse and write original material.

Of course, between then and now, rock artists have covered other performers’ songs, sometimes dedicating entire albums to interpretations. David Bowie’s 1973 effort Pin-Ups and John Lennon’s 1975 set Rock ’n’ Roll come to mind, but more often than not rock artists have relied on their own songs.

In recent years, however, the covers album appears to be making a comeback.

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Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic: Juliana Hatfield Goes Deep On Her New Police Cover Album | GRAMMY.COM

The alt-rock veteran cleverly balances some of the GRAMMY-winning band's most iconic hits like "Every Breath You Take," "Roxanne" and "Can't Stand Losing You," with some of their deeper album cuts and B-sides on her latest project

"I'm starting to think I may have finally found my true calling. I think this might be my thing and I'm really enjoying it," Juliana Hatfield mused, with equal parts dry wit and keen self-awareness. This confessional observation comes from the seasoned singer/songwriter/bandleader reflecting on her newest musical endeavor—splitting up her standard album releases with cover albums entirely devoted to a single artist or band.

Following 2018's widely celebrated Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John and this year's Weird, she has once again picked an inspirational muse from her early years around which to craft a lovingly loud collection of guitar-graced tributes.

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Covers projects can be a dicey proposition. For established artists, it could be a sign of creative bankruptcy or just plain laziness. Often it's simply a love letter from artist to artist, acknowledging the influence and (hopefully) paying solid, earnest tribute. The key to a successful tribute album is to shed new light on the songs while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original. That is where Weezer got it so painfully wrong on their surprise covers album, The Teal Album, which contains ten note-for-note covers of songs the whole world knows by heart. That's not a cover, that's karaoke. What's the point?

Juliana Hatfield understands how to make a good covers album. Last year, her Olivia Newton-John tribute album won several accolades. While she didn't stray too far from the original arrangements, she helped shed light on the songbook of an artist who, despite a string of successful singles, has remained largely underrated. With her latest covers album, Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, Hatfield is tackling a completely different type of artist and is surpassing the Newton-John project by rearranging the songs in an often striking fashion. Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland made up a band that was not necessarily known for being covered ad nauseum, and that's odd because hearing their songs performed by another artist only confirms the quality of these songs.

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Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police Plays The Hits | Paste

Everything you’d expect from a Hatfield cover album, but more

Listening to Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police, Bostonian punk-adjacent rocker Juliana Hatfield’s second release of 2019, is like listening to yourself singing The Police while riding in the car with you friends, except none of you are Juliana Hatfield, only half of you actually remember the lyrics to each of the songs and, unless you’re Jimmy Fallon, you don’t have a band backing you up as you belt out and mangle the classics. So really, it’s not at all like listening to yourself singing The Police, which is a relief; it’s a good enough time just listening to Hatfield pay tribute to one of rock’s greatest bands in her own particular way.

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This cover image released by American Laundromat Records shows "Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police," by Juliana Hatfield. (American Laundromat Records via AP)

Juliana Hatfield, “Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police” (American Laundromat Records)

One way to assess a covers record is whether its appeal stretches beyond fans of the re-interpreter to fans of the original performers. In the case of “Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police,” both camps should be pleased.

Part of the album’s appeal lies in Hatfield’s choice of several Police deep cuts while relying on the hits for only a third of the tracks. Having released an album of Olivia Newton-John covers last year, Hatfield’s adeptness with the genre is reconfirmed.

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This should have been a fairly routine interview, and it began that way. An old, cult-beloved—then and now—late ’80s band reissues an old, posthumous compilation of “odds and sods” on vinyl, 26 years after its original 1993 issue on CD on Mammoth Records (now on American Laundromat Records), and all three surviving members kindly agree to discuss it.

Thus, bassist/singer Juliana Hatfield, guitarist John Strohm and drummer Freda Love kindly fielded a few questions about it you see below, innocently offered without any great desire to stir up a gigantic amount of old muck.

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For our recurring Self-Portrait feature we ask a musician to take a self-portrait photo (or paint/draw a self-portrait) and write a list of personal things about themselves, things that their fans might not already know about them. This Self-Portrait is by Juliana Hatfield.

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Alone with her guitar, Juliana Hatfield embraces confusion on Weird

It’s a chilly afternoon in Boston and Juliana Hatfield is noticeably under the weather. But talking about guitars and her new album, Weird (American Laundromat), appears to be a welcome distraction. “I’m trying not to think about it,” she says between coughs. The sentiment fits Weird’s recurring theme of isolation. To paraphrase a line from “Do It to Music,” the album’s closing track, music is how she blocks out the world and its troubles.

Hatfield is best known for her alt-rock hits “My Sister” and “Spin the Bottle,” both from the Juliana Hatfield Three’s 1993 album, Become What You Are, and for her stint in the Lemonheads the previous year, when she played bass on It’s a Shame About Ray. Those who jumped ship when the ’90s faded have missed a lot. In back-to-back releases like Beautiful Creature and Total System Failure, Hatfield expressed her love of pop songcraft and grimy blasts of distortion, respectively, a dichotomy she wields masterfully on her new, and 15th, solo release.

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Juliana Hatfield Revisits My So-Called Life and Reality Bites | Consequence of sound

She also talks about finally meeting Liz Phair and aging with grace

On today’s Kyle Meredith With…, Kyle talks to Juliana Hatfield about her new album, Weird, and gets the scoop on several new songs. She also tells the story of how she recently met Liz Phair for the first time and time-travels back with Kyle to discuss her contributions to the movie Reality Bites and television series My So-Called Life, both of which are celebrating anniversaries this year…

Listen to the interview here.

Can’t Help Myself: a Conversation with Juliana Hatfield | TALKHOUSE

Chris Collingwood (Fountains of Wayne) talks to his friend about the process of writing her latest album, Weird

Juliana Hatfield’s career has been built on intensely personal songs crafted with meticulous attention to melody, and her new album Weirdreaffirms her reputation for looking inward with eleven songs about coming to terms with solitude. I spoke to Juliana about her process, in what I hope is the first of several pieces about how artists make art. (Full disclosure: Juliana and I have traveled in the same circles for years.)

Chris Collingwood: You’ve put out around twenty albums with various bands. I’m thinking about 2017’s Pussycat and it seems at least with that one, you had to have a conception of it ahead of time.

Juliana Hatfield: I’m not a conceptualizer. I really don’t plan anything and it’s usually just a case of my writing about whatever I’m thinking about at the time. That album was written during the run-up to the presidential election, so it was inspired by current events going on around me, which is all anyone was thinking about.  That’s my process in terms of subject matter. It’s not very conceptual. That one just happened to seem very conceptual, and it is, because that’s what I was experiencing emotionally at the time.

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Since her early output with the Blake Babies and her then-nascent solo career, Juliana Hatfield has learned many truths about herself, such as how she truly appreciates the restorative power of solitude, and the helpfulness of creating within boundaries. Both of these ideas come into play on her new album, Weird, which draws a small circle around the themes of disconnection, self-reliance, and blissful aloneness.

Conceptual focus has become more prominent on her recent albums, like the furious post-election release Pussycat, and her sincere tribute album Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John. It's an approach that suits her well, with Weird delivering 11 songs that retain her distinct musical hallmarks, accompanied by a sharp and cohesive set of lyrics.

We spoke with Hatfield about being the "anti-Kardashian," writing lyrics at the kitchen table, and her new song that harkens back to the heady days of guitar-heavy 90s alt-rock.

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Due to arrive this week, just nine months since the release of the acclaimed Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John, is the acclaimed singer-songwriter's seventeenth studio album, Weird. Weird explores both the confinement and liberty of solitude. “I often feel cut-off from other people, from my feelings, from technology, from popular culture,” Hatfield explains in a recent press release. “I feel weird, I feel like I’m dreaming my life and that I am going to wake up some day.”

From start to finish, Hatfield’s new set is adorned with irresistible melodies, shimmering on tracks like “Sugar” and “Do It To Music,” and brooding on others like “Receiver” and “Paid To Lie.”

Where her true singularity lies is in the dust-up, bumping each of Weird’s songs around in unexpected directions with crunchy guitar solos (the blown-speaker buzz effect she achieves on “Lost Ship” is particularly great), purposely constructed to reflect Hatfield’s mindset while recording the album.

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‘Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John’ Illuminates the Legend’s Timeless Songcraft | Albumism

Juliana Hatfield opens Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John with the evergreen 1974 ballad “I Honestly Love You,” its string-sweetened arpeggio intro substituted with the buzz of a pair of distorted electric guitars, giving it an uncharacteristic crunch. Hatfield’s voice is markedly saltier than Newton-John’s whipped chiffon soprano, but when the familiar first verse arrives (“maybe I hang around here / a little more than I should / we both know I’ve got somewhere else to go”), the earnestness and vulnerability of the original still gleams. It’s proof that the substance of a well-constructed song will resonate regardless of how it might get bent and reshaped through interpretation.

This is the greatness of Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John: the depth and quality of the British-Australian chanteuse’s catalog linked with Hatfield’s indie-rock lens affectionately magnifying its versatility...

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juliana hatfield sings the hits of 'old friend' olivia newton-john | NPR Weekend Edition

Juliana Hatfield was a darling of the '90s indie music scene. She played with Blake Babies and The Lemonheads and had a hit with the edgy pop song, "My Sister." Hatfield released a string of alternative albums since those days, full of distorted guitars and strong vocals. But now, longtime fans may be surprised at the gentler influence of her latest album, Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John.

Hatfield says that she's considered Newton-John's music an inspirational thread for most of her creative life. The 14-track album, which was released earlier this month under American Laundromat Records, houses Hatfield's interpretations of many of Newton-John's best-known hits like "I Honestly Love You" and "Hopelessly Devoted to You" from the soundtrack of 1978's Grease, one of the films that helped make Newton-John a star. When asked if she identifies more with the character of Sandy Olsson, she says her idea of being viewed as the good girl has changed over the years.

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The Rumpus mini-interview project #132: Juliana Hatfield

Think back to your first records: not the records your parents had sitting around, but the first albums you really wanted—the ones that made it on to your Christmas wish lists. At some point, you probably grew out of those records, or at least pretended to, abandoning them for the cooler, perhaps more detached, tastes of an older friend or sibling, or maybe the local DJ. But not me, and not Juliana Hatfield.

“I have never not loved Olivia Newton-John,” she explains in a press release for her new album, Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John. “Her music has brought me so much pure joy throughout my life.”

Pop music has long been reinterpreted by alternative artists, from Sonic Youth’s Madonna-inspired side project Ciccone Youth to Ryan Adams’s song-for-song reworking of Taylor Swift’s 1989. But Hatfield’s project isn’t intended as ironic. It’s a sincere tribute, and a perfect pairing of two distinct musical sensibilities.

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Juliana Hatfield: Pop, Punk—and Olivia Newton-John? | The Wall street journal

The cult favorite’s new album is a surprising tribute that reinvents songs from the 1970s darling in her own style.

Few fans of Juliana Hatfield might have guessed that Olivia Newton-John is one of her favorite singers: Ms. Newton-John’s name appears once, in passing, in Ms. Hatfield’s “When I Grow Up: A Memoir,” and her 2012 self-titled covers album included songs by Ryan Adams, Liz Phair, Nada Surf, Teenage Fanclub and classic rockers—though no Ms. Newton-John.

But Ms. Hatfield’s new “Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John” (American Laundromat), out now, is such a loving tribute that it makes her admiration clear. Ms. Hatfield takes 13 songs from the singer’s impressive catalog and remakes them in her own signature style in which pop, punk and indie rock unite.

A joy in itself, “Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John” demands a fresh visit to the body of work of both artists—one of whom  found a cult following amid a rocky, three-decade-long career, the other achieving global acclaim with unpretentious charisma...

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New Music Friday: April 13 | NPR All songs considered 

NPR Music's Stephen Thompson and Ann Powers join host Robin Hilton for a quick run-through some of the most essential new albums out on April 13, starting with the Korean surf-rock band Say Sue Me and their wistful and gritty album Where We Were Together. Also on the show: Singer Juliana Hatfield's inspired and uplifting tribute to Olivia Newton John, the distorted chaos of A Place To Bury Strangers and more.

Featured Albums:

1. Say Sue Me: Where We Were Together
2. Juliana Hatfield: Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton John

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AllMusic Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine 

When Juliana Hatfield was a kid, Olivia Newton-John was the first pop star to cast a spell upon her. The spell never lifted, not when Hatfield fell for punk as a teen, nor when she became a rocker herself in the 1980s, so there was only one path she could choose: to record an album where she could pledge allegiance to her idol. Make no mistake, 2018's Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John isn't ironic, nor is it an attempt to turn a perennially uncool pop singer hip...

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10 New Albums to Stream Now | Rolling Stone

Juliana Hatfield, Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John
Pop supernova Olivia Newton-John and alt-pop heroine Juliana Hatfield both possess winsome sopranos, and this delightful album filters Newton-John's biggest hits through Hatfield's slightly grungier sensibility. Hatfield's obvious affinity for the source material is evident throughout, with her coy take on the late-Seventies smash "A Little More Love" and her heartfelt version of the Grease showstopper "Hopelessly Devoted to You" being particular highlights. Hatfield has been on a creative tear in the past few years – she's collaborated with Matthew Caws in the moody Minor Alps, released 2017's pointedly political Pussycat, and reunited her old bands Blake Babies and the Juliana Hatfield Three – and this reverent, yet loose-limbed tribute continues that streak. Maura Johnston

Pick Five: Juliana Hatfield | Cover Me

In Pick Five, great artists pick five cover songs that matter to them.

Juliana Hatfield is an old hat at making an unlikely song her own. Earlier this year, she made both our Best Cover Songs of January and March roundups. A couple years before that, her version of “Needle in the Hay” was a high point of a Wes Anderson tribute album. A couple years before that, she released a terrific self-titled covers album of her own. I mean, how far back do we want to go here? Hell, she even made our Best Cover Songs of 1996 list! Suffice to say, she knows how to crush a great cover.

That’s why we were so excited to hear about Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John. It more than lives up to our high expectations. Hatfield takes on hits like “Physical” alongside plenty of deep cuts that prove this is not some gimmick; she’s a genuine fan.

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Juliana Hatfield Indulges Her Sweet Tooth on New Olivia Newton-John Covers Album | Paste 

In song, as in romance, one never forgets a first love. No matter how cheesy or childish it may seem later, the memory of that initial encounter with music’s emotional power never goes away. For me, it was Paul McCartney and Herman’s Hermits; for you, maybe it was *NSYNC or Hanson. For Juliana Hatfield, it was Olivia Newton-John.

But Hatfield never committed the betrayal that most of us are guilty of. She never spurned her middle-school crush when she got to high school. I may have mocked Herman’s Hermits; you may have mocked Hanson, but Hatfield stayed true to Newton-John. She embraced punk rock as an older adolescent, but...

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On 'Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John,' A Boston Icon Makes A Case For The Pop Diva | WBUR

Anyone who knows Juliana Hatfield probably remembers her from the ‘90s, when her band The Juliana Hatfield Three was a mainstay on alternative rock stations and MTV. Her biggest hit was a song called “My Sister,” a lean, pugnacious number that encapsulated the scraggy sound Hatfield became famous for.

The album art for “Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John.” (Courtesy)

So some might be surprised to learn about Hatfield’s latest endeavor: an entire album of covers of Olivia Newton-John, the English-Australian singer and actress best known for her star turn as Sandy in the hit 1978 film “Grease” and for a string of treacly soft rock gems in the ‘70s and ‘80s. 

Continue reading — and listen to the WBUR interview — here.

Quiet Storm: Why Juliana Hatfield's Hey Babe Roared As Loud as the Riot Grrrls | The Guardian

Nineteen-ninety-two was the inaugural year of the “women in rock” era: a stretch of several years when artists from Courtney Love and PJ Harvey to Meredith Brooks unwittingly formed a cohort of so-called girls with guitars and the phrase “girl power” seeped into the popular lexicon from the underground precincts of the riot grrrl scene.

Juliana Hatfield was at the heart of this zeitgeist. In 1992, Hatfield had just broken up her college band Blake Babies and released her solo debut Hey Babe on Mammoth Records...

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Juliana Hatfield on Her Olivia Newton-John Covers Album: 'I Wanted to Escape From All the Horrible Negativity' | billboard

From her days as a member of indie anchors Blake Babies and Lemonheads up through her ongoing solo career, Juliana Hatfield has been a quietly steady presence in the underground pop-rock world. While it’s been a while since she hit the commercial heights of her ‘90s peak when the Juliana Hatfield Trio's Become What You Are and her 1995 solo effort Only Everything landed her on the Billboard 200, she has maintained a dedicated fan base thanks to steady touring and a consistency of vision as she combines personal explorations with more universal concerns.

More recently, her 2017 release Pussycat was an album-length rebuke to our current president, with sharp lyrics and a welcoming musical jangle...

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SONGS WE LOVE: JULIANA HATFIELD, 'A LITTLE MORE LOVE' | NPR

Once we reach adulthood, it's easy to dismiss childhood musical obsessions as frivolous rather than formative. That enthusiasm can be seen as embarrassing, or some form of misguided, or infantile, admiration. It's far more challenging to take the uncynical view and honor the passion behind the musical fixations of our youth.

For Juliana Hatfield, one of those enduring artists is Olivia Newton-John, the musician and actress whose supple, golden voice made her a country and pop megastar. The Boston-based musician's forthcoming album, Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John, is a heartfelt tribute, with an emphasis on Newton-John's '70s and '80s high points...

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Kyle Meredith...with Juliana Hatfield

Listen to this September 2017 interview with Juliana discussing Pussycat and the 25th anniversary of Hey Babe and her solo career.

"Pussycat is the kind of bluntly political record Hatfield used to be knocked for shying away from. At the height of her 1990s stardom, Hatfield was dismissed in the more activist corners of the music world as a lightweight (never mind that her songs frequently explored the ways society needles and dismisses women). She's spent her career in an often thankless middle ground, too feminine for the masculine music press, yet not punk enough for the riot grrls. But Pussycat lends the case for a critical reappraisal. Now would be an ideal time for one..."
—Pitchfork


"Hatfield's fury works in her favor. Even when the tempos are slightly slow or the guitar hooks charm, there's a nerviness to the performance that's bracing. And, beneath that kinetic energy lies a wealth of smart, barbed songs. What impresses about Pussycat overall is how there's no separation between the personal and the political...the specificity of her outrage makes Pussycat an unusually powerful protest album." 
—All Music


"The current resident of the White House will likely inspire plenty of angry art..credit Boston indie-rock institution Juliana Hatfield with landing the first full-force blow. Pussycat is a relentless, unabashed and unvarnished reaction to the Trump presidency; a frequently gruesome, sometimes funny and even occasionally hopeful assault on the assaulter-in-chief."
—Paste


"Pussycat..is not so much a response to Donald Trump as it is a channeling of the long-held, easily-accessed, unassuageable fury one feels in the dominant culture of sexism, abuse, lookism, and degradation which Trump—though it of course predates him—has come to represent, perpetuate, minimize, sanitize, and reinforce. The fourteen songs that comprise Pussycat are not arguing for the newness or the arrival of anything; they are phoenixes rising from the known and familiar fire of what it is to live in a recursive, crushing, enduring patriarchy. Which brings me to my second point: to classify Pussycat as "anti-Trump" or even to characterize it less generally as "a political album" is to imply, however tacitly, that such subject matter is somehow new terrain for Hatfield, whereas any student of the music she's put out into the world in the thirty years she's been a performer will tell you: she's never been anything but political."
—Vincent Scarpa, Performer magazine