Juliana, speaking to Geoffrey Himes for an article in Paste Magazine:

“For my whole career, without consciously realizing it,” Hatfield says, “I’ve been trying to integrate Olivia and X, the sweet pop and the messy punk. I’ve always had those two sides to me, not only in what I play but also in what I listen to. I veer back and forth like a pendulum. On this new record, I felt the need to rough up Olivia’s songs, to muss up their hair, to add a little grime. Because that’s who I am; I’m not as pristine or as strong a singer as her. So I had to play to my own strengths—to my scrappiness.”

Juliana, interviewed by Victoria Wasylak for Vanyaland:

VW: As someone who’s been an influence on you, what qualities of hers [Olivia Newton-John] have you tried to put into your own music?

JH: I don’t know if I’d call her an influence, it’s more like I liked what her music made me feel. It made me feel happy in a visceral way, like the sound of her voice was just very pleasing to my sensibilities. I just felt an affinity with her sense of melody and harmony, because I also love to sing really wide-ranging melodies, with lots of layers of harmonies and vocals. I think it’s like a shared sensibility, maybe. Her voice is not rock and roll, and my voice is not rock and roll either. I always wanted to have a rock and roll voice but I didn’t, so I guess I was truly drawn to her because she also had a kind of non-rock voice, and that was part of the affinity I had for her.

VW: When you went about recording this album, did you change anything in any of the songs?

JH: It was a challenge to decide with each song how much I wanted to veer away from the original and how close I wanted to stay. There were choices I was making for each song. Some of them are pretty faithful to the original versions, whereas other ones I kind of reinterpreted a little. There’s a song called “Make A Move On Me,” which Olivia’s version is kind of swing, but we straightened it up so it’s more of a caveman rock feel. “Hopelessly Devoted To You” is really pretty close [to the original], I didn’t change a whole lot, except I added one distorted guitar in the chorus. Just little choices. It depends on the song how close it is to the original. Like an instinct, each song seemed to tell me what it needed.

Ahead of Juliana's show at ONCE Ballroom on April 6, she has been interviewed by Blake Maddux for The Somerville Times. Topics include the new album, further reflective thoughts on Pussycat, and this little curiosity about writing:

TST: It has been 10 years since When I Grow Up: A Memoir was published. Do you plan to write another book?

JH: Well, I’m always writing, and I think at some point I’ll try to get another book together, but nothing is really taking shape yet as a book. But I’m definitely writing all the time. I’ll make another book at some point, but it’s not really happening yet. I’ve actually written a couple books since my last book came out, but I didn’t want to publish them.

In an article by Ed Symkus for Wicked Local, Juliana talks about her band line up for next week's Somerville show showcasing the Olivia Newton-John album:

“Usually at my shows it’s me, bass, and drums,” said Hatfield. “But this time I’ve got more people than usual. I’ll be singing and playing guitar, and there’s Ed Valauskas on bass, Magen Tracy on keyboards, Mike Oram on guitar, Eric Edmonston on drums, and a couple of other guests. We’ll do a lot of the new album, but not every song. And we’ll probably go as far back as my first (solo) album ‘Hey Babe,’ which was just reissued for its 25th anniversary.”

There's also reference to planning her next album.

Juliana, interviewed by Robert Ham for Billboard about the new album:

RH How was the process of recordings these songs? To hear the album, it sounds like it was a lot of fun to put together.

JH It was actually very challenging, especially after coming off of my last album. With Pussycat, the recording of that was really fast and seamless. This stuff was really challenging. The songwriting, for one thing. Some of it is pretty complex. A lot of chords and melodies. I wanted to do as many songs as I could in the original key she sang them in. Some of the melodies are just so sick, a lot of stuff is really high in my range which is kind of a weak spot for me. It was hard. There were moments where I thought, “I don’t know if I can do this.” I almost wanted to quit because it was so challenging. For me, it was just a puzzle. What do I want to reinterpret? What do I want to copy?

Then there was the problem that some of the songs were so iconic, like “Hopelessly Devoted To You.” My first instinct was to just copy all of her vocal inflections exactly. But then I thought, “I can’t because it’s too iconic. There’s no way I’ll ever measure up.” It’s a little bit my own but I’m not disrespecting the original.

RH Were there songs you wanted to do but had to abandon because they were too hard to pull off?

JH There was the duet with Cliff Richard, “Suddenly.” That one has like a billion chords. It’s kind of nuts. We recorded the basic tracks and then there’s the question of who can sing it with me. I asked a few people. One person said, “No,” and a couple of others were interested. Then other songs needed my attention so I ended up abandoning it because it was just going to be too complicated. I hope to get back to it eventually and finish it.

The interview also touches on the Hey Babe vinyl reissue, Become What You Are, and Pussycat.

Juliana, interviewed by Emile Menasché for Premier Guitar:

> “Touch You Again” and “When You’re a Star” have very distinctive riffs. Were they part of the song from the beginning?

Riffs usually come later. On “When You’re a Star,” we had the guitar and bass recorded. Then with that riff, it was like a light bulb going on over my head—I ran into the tracking room and recorded it. That happens a lot. The song will be recorded and I’ll hear a riff, melodically, in my head. I just have to transfer it from my brain onto the guitar.

> Do the vocal melodies come first?

Not always. Sometimes songs start with just chord progressions. But usually, once I have any kind of chord progression, the melody comes also. I often have melodies written ahead of the lyrics, which makes lyric writing more difficult because I have to fit them into these melodies.

I’ll get attached to sounds and then it takes a while for me to wrench my brain away from that and realize it’s okay to get unstuck. There were a couple of songs on the album where I was really stuck. “Everything Is Forgiven” moves around a lot. It was hard to fit words into that melody.

Sometimes I have a title and a melody, and I’m like “I’ve gotta get this goddam title in there!” “When You’re a Star” had to use those words: “When you’re a star, they let you.” It was like a puzzle. I figured out the only way to make it work was to change the order of the words around.

It's an excellent article split over 3 pages that covers many aspects of the Pussycat recording process from studio setup, guitar tuning, and song construction.

Also, given a little time has passed there's some retrospective thoughts on the lyrics and themes of the songs.

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Juliana, interviewed by Christopher Mathieu for Nouvelle Vague:

NV - Il y a des artistes musicaux qui t’intéressent en-dehors du monde du rock ?

JH - Honnêtement, je ne suis pas très inspirée par beaucoup de musique récente parce que je n’en écoute pas beaucoup. Il y a bien du jazz et des vieux compositeurs pour piano que j’aime…

NV - Pas de musique électronique ou hip hop ?

JH - Il y a des artistes comme Kendrick Lamar que je trouve inspirant… en fait, j’écoute plein de choses diverses mais rien vraiment de bien précis.

It's a lengthy interview, where Juliana mentions that if she ever were to gain the rights to God's Foot she would intend to release it (yes!), future (hypothetical) collaborators on new music, and many other matters with questions covering her career.

It's in French but the linguistically challenged among us should be fine with a translator tool - the built in translator in Google Chrome does a grand job.

nouvelle-vague.com/juliana-hatfield/

 

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

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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.