An interesting Q&A with Juliana by Keith Valcourt for The Washington Times, despite being festooned with adverts and 'click here to read another two sentences' horrors, ends with talk of projects old and new:

Q: A couple of years back there was an attempt at a Lemonheads reunion CD. Why did that fail?

A: Evan and I went out to LA, and Ben Deily, who was in the original Lemonheads, was there too. We went to Ryan Adams’ studio, [and] he was going to play drums. But we had to pull the plug after the first day because Evan wasn’t in any shape to do it. He wasn’t prepared either. He didn’t have any songs. It was a kind of a disaster.

Q: What else are you working on musically?

A: I’m doing some writing with another songwriter, but I don’t want to name any names right now. But I’m going to try to write some songs with another songwriter [as well].

The Juliana Hatfield Three are featured in the March 2015 edition of Performer Magazine. The article by Vincent Scarpa reveals this nugget about the origin of one of Whatever, My Love's (and Wild Animals') tracks:

"Push Pin," the album's most infectious song, was written by Hatfield for a possible Lemonheads reunion album a few years prior, to be produced by Ryan Adams (a project that never came to fruition).

There's a digital version of the print edition which can be viewed here.

Update - There's now an easier to read conventional web page version of the interview - http://performermag.com/the-juliana-hatfield-three-returns-the-performer-interview/

View fullsize

A feature for The Boston Globe ahead of the Sinclair show, including quotes from Dean and the other two of The Three:

“There’s no more three months in LA for us,” says Fisher, comparing these sessions with the ones for “Become What You Are,” which was produced by Scott Litt shortly after he’d helmed R.E.M.’s “Automatic for the People.”

“I think it’s good because all of our contemporaries are just finding ways of doing this,” Fisher adds, “being your own small business and making it work. You have to do more jobs, wear more hats to do it, and I think Juliana’s great at doing that.”

Juliana, talking to The Examiner

It was important to me that we didn’t just go on the road as a nostalgia act, and that’s why I wanted to have a new album. Yes, there are people who love that album from 1993. But maybe they’ll like the new album. I’m not gonna force it on them, but I think they might like it. It’s important to me to keep producing new material and I do put out records on my label, just very quietly. I try to put out something every year, and most of them I don’t promote, but I put them out there. I wouldn’t have been comfortable doing the tour of Become What You Are. I needed to have something new just to prove that I can still write songs and I have more to show than just that one album. I’ve been doing this since then, and I still have good stuff. I cannot be summed up by that one album.

A good Q&A with Ted Chase at QRO Magazine. Juliana, on Ordinary Girl from the new album:

“Ordinary” in quotation marks. ‘Ordinary’ doesn’t exist.

This girl’s boyfriend is such a fuck-up that she’s so sick of the drama that she wants someone quote-unquote ‘ordinary’. So ordinary becomes the fantasy. The fantasy is someone who’s not a fuck-up.

I’m a musician who – I go on tour for months of a time, I pack suitcases and I live out of hotels, and I go on stage at eleven o’clock every night and play this loud, electrified music. To me, sometimes that gets so tiring & draining that I fantasize about office work, that I fantasize about getting up and going to an office at nine every day, and then going home at five every day.

The fantasy is the quote-unquote ‘ordinary life,’ but I also know that ‘normal’ doesn’t really exist. Everybody’s insane.

Also, on the question of inspiration from other 90s reunions of late:

I was kind of inspired by– When I heard that Veruca Salt was getting back together and making an album, and they sold out their show in Boston, I felt like, ‘Hey, I wanna do it!’ I felt this competitive instinct, like, ‘Hey, if they can make a record and get back together and sell out in Boston, I wanna do it too!’ The competitive instinct…

Chad Berndtson, for The Patriot Ledger:

I had planned to ask you about why it was the right time to create new music for the Juliana Hatfield Three, but it sounds like you had the music first and the Three just became the project. Still, why a new album? That you were reuniting with this band probably would be enough to get folks out.

Juliana:

I like to be productive and put out new music, for sure. I like to be engaged and produce new stuff. As we got to thinking about a new record, I was thinking, if we’re going to tour, we might as well have something new to offer people and keep the thing from being purely a nostalgia trip. We’re updating the sound in the 21st century and giving some new energy to the old songs.

Another recommended interview here. Mike Mettler of The Sound Bard asks a series of questions different from the norm, covering sound fidelity, melodies from childhood, Juliana's lead guitar ambitions, and more.

Mettler: Is sequencing still important to you? I feel like I need to hear this record in a specific order.

Hatfield: It is really important to me. I care about it a lot. I still think of albums as albums, you know? I put a lot of time into sequencing, even though I know a lot of people don’t listen in that order. But it matters to me, yeah.

Mettler: The first line of the album is, “You make me feel like I’m invisible” [“Invisible”] and the very last line is, “So many metaphors for pain” [“Parking Lots”]. I figure that had to be a very deliberate choice on your part — how this story begins and ends.

Hatfield: Putting “Invisible” first was a very conscious choice. I guess it has more to do with my place in my legacy, or non-legacy. It’s a lot about that. And I guess the “metaphors for pain” thing applies to all of my music, but I don’t really want to talk about it with anyone. I make songs so I don’t have to talk about it.

Juliana, interviewed by Matt Wardlaw for Cleveland Scene, on the origin of The Juliana Hatfield Three name:

It’s kind of a terrible name, I think I was just trying to make a play on jazz or something kind of old time like that, a jazzy kind of name. I guess I was maybe trying to be funny, you know? But it was a way of establishing that yes, this is a band, but yes, I am the leader and yes, I am the front person. It kind of gave me an out once I wanted to break up the band.

View fullsize

This interview at Salon is a good one. The journalist Annie Zaleski is clearly a fan and has asked some of the questions I think a lot of us would. For instance, I feel that one of the most contentious re-recordings on Whatever, My Love is I Don't Know What To Do With My Hands, a song I associate with Minor Alps and which I don't think works as well without Matthew. Zaleski may not agree with that but is curious to hear why Juliana reworked it. Juliana:

The way Matthew [Caws] and I recorded was, we wrote these songs and then we went to the studio not having really clear, detailed visions of how the songs would turn out. We kind of let the recordings take shape in the studio. As a result of that, the Minor Alps version of “I Don’t Know What to Do with My Hands” turned out a certain way. And then after some time passed, and I went back to listen to it, I was unsatisfied. I liked what Matthew and I did, but I feel like it’s not quite right. I needed to record it again to see if it would do anything else for me; I thought it needed another chance.

When I went in with Todd and Dean, we had a different approach. We went in as a band to try to just jam it out, and it has a more groovy, strummed feel. And I guess that’s how I started to envision the song after Minor Alps recorded it. And with Todd and Dean, I was able to get that new version down. It was really just a personal goal to get a version that I felt more satisfied with.

View fullsize

Before the start of the Juliana Hatfield Three tour next week in Portland, Juliana has spoken to Kathleen Pierce of Bangor Daily News:

I would bring a transistor radio to bed with me and listen to all the pop hits of the ’70s, I was young and very impressionable. Soaking all this stuff up, it got into my blood.

Bands like ELO [Electric Light Orchestra], Diana Ross, the song from Mahogany, The Little River Band, ABBA, that’s the stuff that got into my blood, my chords and my melodies …The Carpenters, Eagles, the Steve Miller Band.

View fullsize

Jed Gottlieb, for the Boston Herald:

When you average an album a year, you don’t generally have time for nostalgia. But “Whatever, My Love” found Hatfield looking back.

“For years, I said I’d never do one of those tours where you’d play the old album,” she said ahead of her hometown Feb. 27 show at the Sinclair.

“But I got older and my brain shifted into positivity. I listened to the Three’s first album (1994’s “Become What You Are”), and I liked it. I don’t always have that reaction when I hear old albums.

“Getting back with (drummer) Todd (Philips) and (bassist) Dean (Fisher) reminded me it feels really good to plug in, be loud and rock,” she added. “I’ve missed that.”

From a feature - 'The Juliana Hatfield Three: Still Becoming What They Are' - by Stephen M. Deusner for Paste::

If Whatever My Love sounds like a direct sequel to Become What You Are, it might be because several of these songs were written in the mid to late 1990s, when Hatfield was at the peak of her popularity. She recorded “If I Could,” “Now That I’ve Found You” and “Invisible” as demos, with Philips on drums, but they never fit on any of her subsequent albums. “I loved those songs and I didn’t want to forget about them. Todd was actually the one who suggested I bring them back for this record. He made me remember how much I liked them.”

View fullsize

A feature by Patrick Foster in USA Today:

The focus of the shows will firmly be on the music and, befitting a reunion tour, the group's better-known work will take center stage. "We're actually going to be playing the Become What You Are album in its entirety. That's the first order of business. After that we're going to do some songs from the new album and some older stuff from throughout the years." As for crowd expectations, "it will be a nice kind of mixture" she predicts. "People that will be there for nostalgic reasons, and I think there will be some younger people."

View fullsize

From an article by Jim Sullivan for WBUR's The ARTery:

At various points, Hatfield, now 47, has moved away from music, or at least, has talked about doing so. “I feel like I should be doing something more grown-up or something more respectable,” she says, “but I just feel yanked back over and over again. It’s like being in love with someone who drives you crazy. You think you want to get away, and you try to get away and you just keep getting pulled back. It’s almost like it’s out of my hands. I can’t quit it. I keep trying, but I just can’t fight it anymore.”

Juliana, on the appeal of Guitar-Bass-Drums trios and keyboards:

It’s kind of classic and simple and hard to really fuck it up. It’s like there’s a comfort and simplicity in that sort of lineup, although lately I’ve been playing a lot more keyboards on the recordings. I’ve been getting back to playing keyboards. I just think it’s more fun to play a guitar live, because you can swing it around and bash on it and move. But with a keyboard you’re more rooted to one place. Also, I like how the guitar strings can bend, but the keyboard is more stationary and static, and you can’t … in a live setting, it’s kind of restraining.

Read the whole interview with Len Comaratta at Consequence of Sound.

Juliana, interviewed by Kenneth Partridge for Nylon:

I’m nostalgic, but I’m more nostalgic for the 1970s, when I was a child growing up...That’s the era I really connect with. The music, the television, the movies, the fashion, the décor: The ‘70s is my favorite era. When I think of the ‘90s, I think of really bad fashion—like, a terrible fashion era. Not great TV. I don’t think it’s the best. I’m not personally nostalgic for it, but I understand that some people are, and if I can go out there and make those people happy while playing some music with my friends and having fun today, then that’s great. Then we’ll all be happy.

Minor Alps, on the question of more music and that song they worked on in Europe:

Juliana Hatfield : On n’a pas de projets. Matthew a commencé à travailler sur le prochain Nada Surf donc il va surtout faire ça et on n’a pas de projet après ce soir, notre dernière date. Aucun projet.

Matthew Caws : Si ! On a commencé à parler d’un enregistrement ! On a cette reprise…

Juliana Hatfield : On a aussi écrit une chanson sur scène.

Matthew Caws : Ah oui ça aussi !

Juliana Hatfield : On a écrit une partie de la chanson et on veut enregistrer cette reprise qu’on joue en live donc il y a ces deux idées.

Matthew Caws : Oui, c’est cool ! On ne sait jamais, peut-être que ça pourrait aller ensemble : on a ce refrain qu’on a écrit au début de la tournée et on ne sait jamais, ça pourrait être le couplet ce qui serait énorme. Parce que... c’est dur à dire. On a écrit le couplet le plus joyeux du monde… et puis il y a la reprise…

Juliana Hatfield : Il y a toujours d’autres trucs qui peuvent mener à des futurs trucs…

The full interview (en français) from the final night of the recent European tour in Paris can be read at Froggy's Delight. There's also a review of the show.

Thomy Keat's photo portraits used in the interview can be viewed in higher res at Taste Of Indie.

Matthew Caws, on the cover art for 'Get There':

It’s a photograph from the Olympic Peninsula, near Seattle. It’s not an Alp. We actually were messing around with a lot of photos of the Alps themselves; there were some really cool ones, night time ones, but it was hard to make them work. They were awesome, but really weird and dark. I’ve actually had a bad experience with that in the past, with a Nada Surf record we did called Lucky. You don’t always know how it’s going to print; you’re looking at your computer screen and thinking it looks great, but obviously the screen is generating light. You get the real thing and think “oh, man. This is not how I thought it was gonna look, it’s really fucking flat.” We love that picture too, though. It’s a nice fit, I think.

Dating back to their Manchester show in April, there's an interview with Juliana and Matthew published today at Drowned In Sound.