Zoe Camp, writing for a Bandcamp feature describing Juliana's transition from an 8-track machine to a new recording process for Blood:

Unfortunately for Hatfield, the apparatus, a since-discontinued model, broke several years prior to the pandemic and she wasn’t able to find a replacement by the time the shut-downs began: “I was like, ‘Shit, I either go on eBay and try to find the same machine, or I just bite the bullet and learn the stupid GarageBand so I can at least have that ability.’” Hatfield decided to “bite the bullet,” and with Davis’ help, she began to master the machine. ”It was like pulling teeth,” she says. “There were those moments where the system of GarageBand was assuming I understood certain things, and I didn’t, so I’d write to Jed like, ‘WHAT DO I DO?! WHY IS IT DOING THIS?!,’ and he would calmly explain things to me—he’s a great teacher—and he’d send screenshots and places to find help. So I basically figured out what to do with GarageBand, kicking and screaming every step of the way.”

Juliana, speaking to Duncan Seaman for The Yorkshire Post:

People think that being a citizen is being a consumer. There’s too much money involved in everything... Even before the past few years I’ve always had a part of me fantasising about disappearing, and some day I probably will, not into the woods but into the shore somewhere, maybe on a houseboat. Just take off and be off the grid, surviving quietly. It seems a really nice freedom. Quiet would be nice and not always having to think about commerce and exchanging money for things, or goods for money.

Charley Ruddell, writing for The ARTery at wbur.org:

For someone who has lived in Cambridge for the better part of 15 years, Juliana Hatfield feels remarkably far away. “It’s hard to resist the pull of modernity, although I keep trying,” she tells me from her home in Central Square after redialing me from her crackling landline. One day, she says, she’ll be totally off the grid; for now, though, leading up to the release of her 19th solo album “Blood” (out May 14), she maintains her social media out of necessity, and still rocks a Nokia flip phone she purchased in 2004. She fantasizes about living in a small stone home by a clean water source in a foreign country. “You have to have dreams to sustain you sometimes,” she says hazily.

Erin Osmon, interviewing Juliana for The Guardian:

On Blood, she channels these complex emotions into tuneful, three-minute vignettes whose lyrics often teem with anxiety, horror and existential dread. “A lot of bad stuff has been happening over the last four years, and the last year in particular, and writing was a way for me to deal,” Hatfield says. “Writing these songs didn’t cure me of all the anger but it definitely helped.” Throughout the album, she dreams about stabbing the former president, describes life in a world controlled by fascists, bites her tongue until it bleeds and is paralysed by love. Hard truths are conveyed through fantasy and imagined brutality, like a cleverer Game of Thrones. “In my real life I’m obviously not a violent person, and writing these songs doesn’t mean I want to go out and stab someone,” she says. “It’s a metaphorical stabbing.” Hatfield is doing what she’s always done: relaying dark, vulnerable and embarrassing feelings with remarkable insight.

Juliana’s response to this section of the article:

this is great thank you but i do want to make it clear that there is nothing in the lyrics that refers to any specific, actual person or people being stabbed.. and claiming that any song does refer to a particular person is conjecture https://t.co/gV35GS37Sf

— Juliana Hatfield (@julianahatfield) May 12, 2021

Other posts you may have missed in recent days:

Jed Gottlieb's interview with Juliana at Boston Herald.

Kevin Wilson's review of the Blood themed livestream at My Shuffled Life.

Jeff Gemmill's initial thoughts on the new album at The Old Grey Cat.

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Juliana will be one of the performers at Hot Stove Cool Music on May 18, 2021, an event which also features Eddie Vedder, Bill Janovitz, Kay Hanley, and more.

Foundation To Be Named Later:

100% of the proceeds go to supporting our non-profit partners working on the frontlines with youth and families in disadvantaged neighborhoods and our Peter Gammons College Scholarships for urban young people, helping them to realize their dreams of a brighter future.

Event Details: A fun, uplifting event celebrating music, baseball and giving in a meaningful way with surprise guests from the world of MLB and Music!

This year's event is online only. Ticket information and other details are at https://www.yot.me/events/9355

Vincent Scarpa, interviewing Juliana for Performer Mag:

VS: It’s interesting to see this record and Pussycat as bookends of the Trump era, though of course they’re so much more than that, and about more than that. (I’ve long argued for the political nature of all your music, whether it be front and center or a more covert kind of personal politics.) Were you still feeling some of the rage we talked about when we spoke together in promoting Pussycat? How had your outlook changed, if at all, as we approached the end of the Trump presidency and entered the present one, into which this album is being released? A song like “Nightmary,” in which you describe “hour after hour bombarded by lies / it’s a desecration of your mind,” seems to testify to some lingering — and certainly justified — rage.

JH: The album is definitely inspired by the last four years and all of the ugliness and all of the dirt that floated to the surface. Now it’s all out there, floating around. All the rocks that have been overturned, all the scum that floated to the top. And now we’re living with it, and we have to deal with it — or not. I’m really glad that there’s new leadership, but I don’t feel like that solves anything, really. Well, it solves one big problem, right? But most of the bad guys still need to be punished. And the songs “Chunks” and “Had a Dream” are about that; about wanting those guys to be punished. And that still has to happen. There’s a lot of unfinished business, and ongoing corruption and lies and murder and greed. It’s not ending because we have a new president.

I think this album is my most misanthropic album of all of them. I’m not kind to my own self on this record. I think I came out of the past four years with this feeling that it’s more clear to me than ever that people are not going to leave this world a better place. People can’t be trusted to do the right thing. People are selfish. Humanity, as a whole, is going to ruin this world. It’s happening. And we can try to do the right things, we can try to change, but ultimately you have to contend with the fact that people are selfish and we’re on kind of a downward spiral. We can make little fixes, elect different presidents, but it’s a Band-Aid on a deep wound.

performermag.com/new-music-and-video/interviews-and-features/mouthful-of-blood-an-interview-with-juliana-hatfield/

Recently uploaded to YouTube, this TV appearance from 1995 is probably new to most of us.

Part of the Only Everything promotion, Juliana performs My Darling acoustically with Lisa Mednick on accordion and then there's a brief interview with the hosts Regis & Kathie.

Thanks to Carlos Lopez for spotting this, and to Simon Tibbs for the upload.

From the broadcast on Wednesday's Full Frontal with Samantha Bee show on TBS, here's Juliana's solo performance of Mouthful of Blood.

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Confiriming her announcement during last week’s livestream for In Exile Deo, Juliana will be back at Q Division Studios on Saturday May 8, 2021 at 4pm EDT to perform songs from the new album Blood.

Writing on her official website:

This show will be a bit different than the previous ones in that I will not be performing a whole album start to finish. I will play a handful of songs from the "Blood" album, but I will also pick a selection of songs from my vast decades-spanning repertoire that all somehow touch on the idea of blood. ("Anemia" will be one of them.)

As ever, this is a pay what you want affair with donations accepted via julianahatfield.com

As broadcast on WCR FM earlier this week, here's Garry Foster's interview with Juliana.

The whole hour is devoted to Juliana's music and the interview section begins at 18:20.

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Released today, here's Gorgon, the 2nd single from Juliana's forthcoming album Blood.

Quoted at Stereogum, Juliana says:

“It was fun building it up from scratch and then letting it all hang loose in the long free-pop/jazz outro. Recording at home, there’s no one stopping me from indulging in every wacky musical whim that pops into my head.”

From an interview with Juliana by Dan Moffat for Allston Pudding:

AP: A lot of our readers are musicians that are trying to figure out how to record albums during a pandemic. I heard a lot of Blood was recorded at home. What instruments were recorded at home?

JH: I usually start off with a drum machine beat, just one beat that repeats over and over. Because I don’t know how to program a whole complicated drum beat. I have an old drum machine that I use. I might find a beat on that and record a few minutes of it. Or I find a beat on GarageBand and then lay down 4 minutes of a drum beat. And then start adding maybe acoustic or electric guitar, and then I just add onto that as I see fit. A little keyboard, bass, vocals.

After I had done a lot of it at home I took the stuff to Q Division Studios and added real drums to the fake drums and I added some more guitars that I wanted to do in the studio because I can’t really play guitars through loud amps in my apartment.

There are a few songs that I collaborated on with Jed Davis [Sevendys, Collider]. You can tell the songs he worked on because he programmed more elaborate drums like on “Shame of Love” and “Had A Dream.” The real simple drums are me, like on “Nightmary” and “Gorgon.” I have more of a simple groove, like on Nightmary there’s one cymbal crash at the end and that was me. That’s my style. I’m not a flashy drummer.

Juliana in conversation with Chuck Clough and Ike Walker for Above The Basement.

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Juliana’s 5th livestream show will feature her 2004 album In Exile Deo, live from Q Division Studios.

The show will be on Saturday April 24, 2021 at 4pm EDT (that’s 9pm BST / 10pm CEST.)

Once again PayPal donations are accepted at Juliana’s official site, and the show will be live on Q Division’s YouTube channel where it is intended to stay online for roughly 2 weeks.

Another podcast interview! From the Dirt from the Road description::

Juliana Hatfield (ex-The Lemonheads) and Brett Newski discuss splendid isolation, reincarnation, why death won't be bad at all, and being an introvert in an extroverted world.

I’m curious as to how this podcast came about given that Brett admits to only having a limited familiarity with Juliana’s career. Thankfully though it’s a good chat because he doesn’t blag it and the only hint of interviewer’s cursory Wikipedia research that shows this up is the “ex- The Lemonheads” bit in the description.

It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and elsewhere.

Separately, the written word survives the podcast era with Juliana interviewed by Tatum Jenkins for WERS:

(WERS): WE HAVE A BIG EMPHASIS ON COMMUNITY AND STAYING LOCAL HERE AT WERS. DO YOU FEEL THAT BOSTON HAS HAD ANY SORT OF IMPACT ON YOUR ART AND HOW YOU DRAW INSPIRATION FROM YOUR ENVIRONMENT?

JH: Well, I really like the changing of the seasons. I find it invigorates me, the cold and autumn, and the seasons can really influence my writing. I mean, I wrote a whole song about the heat wave a couple years ago, but it was all about suffering through one of our horrible, humid heat waves. Also, I like that artists in Boston are all about the work and not about networking. It’s not about desperately striving for fame. Everyone is low key and they just want to put their heads down and do the work. It’s not about hype, and I really like that.

Another week, another JH podcast interview! From She Rocks Podcast’s episode description:

When COVID hit musician and singer/songwriter Juliana Hatfield took it upon herself to learn the recording process. She wrote and recorded most of her upcoming album, 'Blood,' as she learned. Her sing-songy melodic style hides stinger lyrics that delve deep into touchpoint issues. 'Blood' is Hatfield's 19th solo album and is due out May 14, 2021. Based in the Boston area, Hatfield is formerly of the indie rock bands Blake Babies, Some Girls, and The Lemonheads. She also fronted her own band, The Juliana Hatfield Three, along with bassist Dean Fisher and drummer Todd Philips, which was active in the mid-1990s and again in the mid-2010s. Here we sit down to hear much more about the creative process and her outlook today.

Listen in the embedded player above or at all the usual clients including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast.

Queen of Shit Mountain aka Queen of S-Mountain (“a music podcast hosted by LG, the front-woman for the greatest, all-female, queer, southern rock band of all time, Thelma and the Sleaze”):

Juliana Hatfield is a legendary musician of the bands Blake Babies, The Lemonheads, and The Juliana Hatfield Three, and more. Her career was born out of a music scene she helped to shape in the 80s and 90s with fellow trailblazers like The Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. In part one of this episode, LG chats with Juliana about her trajectory, the rock music scene of that era, and her songwriting/recording process.

This is another great podcast where a fellow musician interviews Juliana. Looking forward to part 2 already.

Listen in the embedded player above, or clients including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast.

For more on supporting LG’s podcast, see her Patreon.