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From an interview with all three Blake Babies at NoiseTrade:

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.

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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

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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

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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."

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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.”

View image | gettyimages.com

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.

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/

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”