Kids Interview Bands:
Piper interviewed Juliana Hatfield at Ace of Cups in Columbus, Ohio on April 30, 2017.
The Kids Interview Bands YouTube channel bio:
Kids Interview Bands launched in the summer of 2012 with original hosts Olivia and Connie. In the summer of 2014, Olivia's youngest sister Piper took over the hosting duties. The girls have interviewed over 350 touring artists who have passed through Columbus, Ohio since launch.
A different set of questions to the normal here. Fabulous.
An interview with Estelle Tang for Elle, as part of Juliana's promotion for Pussycat but focusing on a song from many years ago. Juliana:
I was feeling sexism coming at me, I was feeling people making assumptions about me. But it was a continuation of lifelong sexism that girls start to encounter as soon as they're conscious, you know? It's a continuum of people seeing you in a certain way if you're a woman, or if you look a certain way or if you sound a certain way. And I was very self-conscious about the sound of my voice. I knew it was kind of young-sounding and girlish and thin, and I was always fighting against what my voice might make people assume about me.I wanted to counter the cuteness with whatever else I could. Like intelligence, even surliness sometimes. I wasn't smiling all the time. I had a bit of an attitude, I was kind of irritable. There are people out there who will see a cute girl singing a melodic song and they have a bunch of assumptions. I wanted to just be clear that I was in charge of my thing. I was in charge of my music and my image and no one else was controlling me.
[Recently, while making Hatfield's new album] it all really became so clear that nothing has changed, with the whole Donald Trump pussy grab thing. All this stuff came rushing back to me, the whole lifetime of sexism and misogyny. It only became fully clear to me at that moment, where I realized the man who is about to become the most powerful man in the country—it's all the way up at the top. It's so rooted in the culture and in maybe in men. That's the truth. It hasn't changed. And it was always there [during] my whole career.
Vincent Scarpa, interviewing Juliana for Performer Mag:
VS: Was there something about these songs, this project, that led you to make that decision? Did it feel necessary in some way to be in control in any and all ways possible?
JH: Partly it was just the urgency of the songs, the urgency of how I was feeling at the time. I wanted the songs to feel urgent and timely by the time the record was done. I thought, “Kellyanne might be fired soon!” [Laughs.] And if I do everything, I don’t have to negotiate with anyone about what I like or what I don’t like. I had a very strong, clear vision. And I’d just done some gigs with The Blake Babies playing bass, so I was feeling like my bass chops were kind of lubed up. It was quick, it was economical. Twelve days, recorded and mixed. And I’m so happy with the sound of it. With some of my older records, when I go back and listen to them, I’m disappointed in the sound. But I feel like I finally nailed it on this one. I was very particular. I was very clear with the engineer about exactly what I wanted. And I think cutting out a lot of people in the studio made me more able to have confidence in my vision. When there are other people around, I tend to listen to their opinions. Which isn’t to say their opinions aren’t great—they often are—but I think your vision can be muddied or diffused by other people. Being in there by myself, I was able to really tune in very closely to the process of hearing what I was hearing in my head and then getting that on tape. It feels good. I have doubts about a lot of things, and I’m worried about people misinterpreting it—all of that stuff—but I am proud of this record.
Juliana, interviewed by Michael Tedder in a longform article for Stereogum:
“It’s very easy to overlook me, because I never really went away. It’s hard to sell me. I don’t care. Why would I care? What can I do at this point? I’ve been doing this so long. Some flukey thing could happen. I could have a ‘Walk On The Wild Side,'” she says, referring to Lou Reed’s unexpected, relatively belated hit. She then shuffles her legs. “It could happen. Probably won’t. Something could hit if the timing were right. But I’m not planning on it.”
The in depth article covers the Boston Scene from the early 90s, interviewing some of the artists still creating music today, including Belly, Buffalo Tom and Letters to Cleo.
Juliana's response to the query "The song that encouraged me to learn my instrument of choice":
I picked up electric guitar years after acoustic guitar ..I was 9 or 10 when I started acoustic guitar lessons and was about 18 or 19 when I bought my first electric guitar. At that point I was inspired by early REM and the song “Radio Free Europe” was easy enough for me to figure out and that was really exciting…to realize that, “Hey, I can do this, too! I can do what REM is doing!”
You can read more of Juliana's selections including the first single she bought, her first live show, her guilty secret track and more in an interview with Henri Montrose for ARTISTdirect
Juliana, on the new album's title, from an interview with Jeff Niesel for Cleveland Scene:
“Sometimes, someone will talk about a person who appears to be gruff or harsh and say, ‘He’s just a pussycat,’” she says. “I was thinking about the duality of that and how cats can be soft and sweet, but if they don’t like you, their claws will come out. [The title] goes along with my image as well. I think some people hear my sweet little girl voice and think I’m a nice little pop singer, but I’ve always had these protest songs and these angry songs. People don’t always notice it or when they do notice it, they’re surprised and confused by it.”
Nashville Scene has a short article ahead of this weekend's Blake Babies shows:
“There’s an ease to playing with them, John and Freda,” Hatfield explains. “A chemistry that I don’t have with any other things that I’ve done. So it’s not just going back and getting together and playing the old songs — it’s really trying to use our present energy, who we’ve become as people, taking this new, older, richer, experienced energy and bringing that to the old songs and seeing how they mix together.”
There's also an interview with John at weld for Birmingham.
Furthermore, did we know that there are Blake Babies fans in R.E.M.?
Well worth it. https://t.co/SO0r5RXjqu
— Mike Mills (@m_millsey) October 15, 2016
My pleasure. Still listening to Sunburn. https://t.co/tJHwQoxxnz
— Mike Mills (@m_millsey) October 15, 2016
A reminder of the shows this weekend:
Saturday, October 15, 2016 - The Basement East, Nashville, TN
Sunday, October 16, 2016 - Saturn, Birmingham, AL
From a Blake Babies interview at chicagoist on the subject of future plans:
STROHM: Nothing specific, but we’re generally feeling good about the way things are going. I can only speak for myself, but I would love to find a way to do more with Freda and Juliana.
LOVE: Not yet, but I hope we play a few more shows. We are also discussing the possibility of reissuing our back catalogue.
HATFIELD: As far as the Blake Babies go, we are not really looking past this Chicago thing. We have no solid plans for anything else but the Boston shows were fun and I hope that at some point we can maybe try and do some more.
From an interview in The Boston Globe with all three Blake Babies by Steve Smith:
It’s not a journey Hatfield is altogether comfortable taking. “I haven’t listened since we made them,” she confesses during a telephone interview covering the album’s arrival, as well as two concerts the Blake Babies will play in Boston on Saturday for small, select audiences who crowd-funded the LP’s production.“I know I have to listen to them at some point,” she continues, laughing softly. “I haven’t. . . . I’m afraid to go back. I’m listening to the album recordings so I can re-learn the songs for the shows. But I actually have not listened to these demos that we’re promoting.”
Up until around a year ago, neither had anyone else, probably. Strohm, speaking by telephone from his home in Nashville with Love — now Love Smith — on the line in Evanston, Ill., described how the tapes had come to be.
Juliana, writing for The Talkhouse:
I had written a song, “Nirvana,” about my big love for Nirvana’s first album, Bleach, specifically for the song “Negative Creep,” which had inspired me so much. Also, we knew a lot of the same people, including Danny Goldberg, who had signed me to Atlantic Records and who worked with Nirvana in management. After Kurt died, I gave a copy of the letter to Danny, who had it framed and hung it on his office wall.
A couple of days after the Nirvana show, my band and I met up to fly to the U.K. to start our own tour, and my drummer gave me the note. He had been hanging out in private with Kurt in New York in the days after the Roseland show and Kurt had then given the note to him to pass on to me.
The article includes an image of Kurt's note.
Freda Love Smith, writing for The Talkhouse about the Blake Babies Earwig demos:
But if we were glued together by John, we were utterly defined by the sound of Juliana’s vocals. Listening to her young talent hits me all the harder for the years. I didn’t fully recognize this back then, but now I hear the intensity of a twenty-year-old singer and songwriter who had been waiting and waiting, often despairingly, often impatiently, for the stars to align, for an opportunity to do the thing she was born to do. And here’s that moment! She has a band, a producer, a studio and a crack engineer, and after all those years of singing in her bedroom, she takes the microphone and she nails it. She throws down harmonies and they are amazing. She is the real deal.
The article also has a premiere of the Take Me demo (originally titled Take Me, Take Me) from the project.
A reminder that the demos collection is the main item in an ongoing PledgeMusic campaign.
NT: Many present day bands list Blake Babies as an influence and have even name dropped the band in interviews . For example, Bully comes to mind recently. How does that feel for you all and to what do you attribute your lasting sonic legacy?
Strohm: I’ve met the people in Bully before – they are a local band here in Nashville – and they’ve given me no indication that they know our band! But I do hear an influence, whether it’s direct or they are mining similar influences as us. I’ve seen the references in the press. When young bands or music writers acknowledge us as influential, that feels amazing. That’s the best thing, really. We felt at the time that a big reason we were toughing it out – and it was very hard to do this band for a lot of reasons – was to build some sort of musical legacy that could become more important over time. We didn’t necessarily expect it to happen, but I think we really hoped it would. Now that we’ve built our lives in other directions it matters less than I would have expected, but it’s still very satisfying. I can only really speak for myself, but I’m such a geek music fan that it just blows my mind to think that something we did as kids decades ago actually has a life and continuing influence today. The very best thing that could happen is to inspire young people to want to make music, or to influence the music they make. That sort of thing really validates the whole experience, and everything we put into it.
Smith: I’m proud of the initiative we took in the early days of our career. How when nobody would sign us, we put out our own record. Also, how we worked hard and worked together because we cared so much about what we were doing.
Hatfield: I am just glad no one got killed, that we didn’t kill each other, or kill ourselves.
Also of note at NoiseTrade there's vintage audio of a 1989 Blake Babies studio session for WERS.
From an interview with Juliana by Melissa Giannini for Nylon:
Giannini: You still have an eternal youthfulness about you. Do you think that’s helped or hurt you?
Juliana: Immaturity keeps me young! A lot of people who do what I do, musicians or artists in general, hold on to that youthful nature deep inside of them. Friends of mine in their 50s who make music, they still have that childlike aspect. They’re mature in other ways, but they never lose that sense of hopefulness or openness to ideas. Art is about playing and experimenting. Plenty of people play their old songs without any feeling and make a lot of money doing it, but I never really made a lot of money doing this, so it’s not worth it to me to just go out there and bang out the songs and not care.
The photo is by Tony Luong. There's a higher res version together with another shot not used in the article at tonyluong.com
From a cover interview by Kevin Finn in this month's edition of The Noise, which goes over the JH3 reunion and the recent US shows:
Noise: A couple of my favorites on the new record are “Invisible” and “I’m Shy.” I know there can be a danger in assuming a song’s narrator and writer is the same person, but is there a challenge in putting songs with such personal emotion out there?
Juliana: No, that’s easy. The hard part for me is to display emotion in real life. It’s easy to put it in a song. You’re safer expressing things in song because you’re not actually one-on-one. You’re not truly vulnerable when you’re singing a song. There’s that remove; there’s distance from yourself to the other person who’s receiving that information.
Also of note: at the end Juliana mentions the possibility of JH3 gigs in October for those of us in Europe.
So, there's that.
thanks to Andrew for spotting this and sharing the interview link at the This Is The Sound Yahoo Group
Ahead of the JH3 show in the North Carolina city next week, Creative Loafing Charlotte has a feature by Jeff Hahne:
It's worth noting that Hatfield wasn't sitting on her laurels for the last 22 years though. She's released 11 solo albums since then, reunited with her original band Blake Babies and kept up a consistent touring regiment. One might think Hatfield could be a little upset in a "I've been here all along, if you were paying attention" kind of way, but she's not.
"I'm not pissed off," she says. "It's nice when people appreciate what you do. If people are interested in this, that's fine. It's not a huge buzz. We're not going to set the world on fire. It's a nice level of interest. It's nice that people care and want to see it."
A lengthy interview with Juliana by Leslie Michele Derrough for Glide covers a lot of ground from high school songwriting, the Blake Babies and the JH3 reunion:
Which one of the songs almost didn’t make it onto the record?
Well, I think “Blame The Stylist” was one. I was thinking of leaving it off. I just didn’t know if it fit among all the other songs cause it has a different sound and the subject matter is kind of different from everything else on the record. But then I put it on because I was trying to tie this record somehow back to the first record and some of the songs have similarities to songs from Become What You Are, and “Blame The Stylist” has a little bit of dramatic similarity to “Supermodel” from the first album. It’s about image and stuff like that so I left it on the album.
Is that a newer song or one of the older songs you already had written?
That one I had an acoustic demo of that for a long time. The demo actually is on a cassette. I made a version of it on a 4-track recorder a long time ago but I never really finished the words so I really just had the title and some chords. Then when we went back into the studio I rediscovered it on this old cassette and I thought like, wow, this is really still totally relevant and we could make an interesting song out of it.
Tom Lanham, in a short, oddly themed article for San Francisco Examiner:
Hatfield won’t allow herself a bedroom TV set, and she won’t subscribe to cable. The few free stations she does receive beam in through her rabbit-eared digital converter box. “And a couple of them are really great – one plays obscure old movies, and another plays cool shows from the ‘60s and ‘70s. I have a DSL line, so I do have the Internet, which I would love to get rid of, because I have fantasies of being off the grid one day. But right now, I’m still trying to make a living, so I kind of need it.”
Shaun Tandon, in a syndicated piece on Juliana for AFP at Yahoo:
She feels similarly about her musical skills. For years, she tried to make her voice raspier -- even taking up smoking -- but has come to terms with her strengths and weaknesses.
"There is nothing I can do about it," she said of her voice. "I don't sound like Courtney Love -- I just don't. I love Courtney Love's voice."
The article is a bit of fluff but has some decent photos by Timothy A Clary taken at the recent Juliana Hatfield Three Bowery Ballroom show in NYC. Larger, higher res versions can be found in the same syndicated piece which appears on the Daily Mail's website. I'm not linking to that publication so search that out if you want to.
