From Freda, John, and Juliana’s interview with Dave Rayburn for Alliance Entertainment to mark this month’s vinyl reissue of Sunburn:

JOHN: We have a couple more albums to reissue in the future, EARWIG and GOD BLESS THE BLAKE BABIES. We also have a set of demos for SUNBURN that are really strong. I don’t see why we wouldn’t make those available at some point as well.

JULIANA: There is one demo-ed song called “Radiator”, from the way early days, and there are maybe some live things we could share. As for other unreleased songs, I do remember one long multi-sectioned prog rock song we created and practiced, and I recorded us playing it live into a boom box in our rehearsal space in I think 1987 and I think I still have that cassette.

The LIFERS Podcast · 54. LIFERS - Juliana Hatfield 2: The Quickening

Local H, on Juliana’s return to their LIFERS podcast:

Second chances are rare, man. And you ought to take advantage of them. On the one year anniversary of our first episode(s), we get a second chance with our first guest — Juliana Hatfield. On this episode we try to truly nail down what makes Juliana the quintessential LIFER. It’s also just an opportunity to catch up and hang out. We tried really hard not to mess it up this time. Topics include: ELO, the crippling nature of being your own point AND counterpoint, Scott finally watches “Wolf Like Me”, sharing plumbers with Damon from Galaxie 500, colonoscopies, acting on “My So-Called Life”, Dinosaur Jr., Scott’s Evan Dando story, “Breaking Away”, and Ben wins the game of “Iron Maiden vs. The Replacements” once and for all. So let it be written — so let it be done.

As with Juliana’s appearance last year, this is highly recommended.

Among plenty of other discussion Juliana confirms that work has begun on a new album.

Put on the spot about songs from her career she’s most proud of, Juliana picks a couple you probably won’t be able to guess!

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or via the SoundCloud embed above.

Laura Kidd interviews Juliana in the latest episode of her Attention Engineer podcast.

As many of you’ll know, Laura has recenlty released an excellent album titled Exotic Monsters under her new artist name Penfriend. She previously performed as She Makes War and supported the JH3 in London and Bristol on the 2019 UK tour.

Attention Engineer:

In this conversation, we discuss:
• writing about the truth, rejecting society’s expectations and demonstrating alternative ways of living
• finding creative freedom in limitations • sensitivity as a superpower
• home recording – Juliana’s tough transition from analogue to digital recording, and how her new album “Blood” is her most misanthropic yet

Sheroes Radio:

Now nearly three decades into her career, Juliana Hatfield is back with her excellent 19th solo album, Blood, and joins us this week as our SHERO in the Spotlight.

Another in depth feature with a guitar site, this time with Paul Robson for Guitar.com:

Hatfield has gone through quite a few guitars in the years since that Challenger, but very few of them remain in her custody now. “I have the new Yamaha Revstar 502 I’ve been playing on the most recent livestreams,” she tells us. “I like the simplicity of it and I like the P-90 pickups. I had never played a Yamaha electric before, so it was kind of an experiment for me, and it’s brand new but, so far, I like it.

“I only have two other electric guitars right now, and they’re both really different, but they’re great. I only used one electric guitar on the new album and that was my First Act Delia LS, which was made for me about 10 years ago, and my other guitar is a 1968 or ’69 Gibson Custom SG.”

Gregory Adams, interviewing Juliana for Guitar World:

In terms of the tangibles, then, and working outside of the box, what were you using in terms of guitars and amps?

(JH) Like I said, some of it started with me sending these crappy recordings to Jed. Some of that was on acoustic guitar, just playing into the built-in mic – I think on the song Torture I probably set up a mic to get a decent acoustic guitar sound.

Some of it me was videos of me playing an electric guitar. I was mostly using my first First Act electric, a Delia LS.

[For tone] I really pared it down, mostly using one sound from GarageBand, because I didn’t really like the others. I’m not comfortable making noise in my apartment, because of my neighbors, so I started off using this GarageBand sound, but later on I went into the studio and started using amplifiers.

There’s this one sound, it’s called ‘World’s Smallest Amp’ on my version of GarageBand. It’s kind of a cruddy sound, which I like. Not too clean, and not distorted in an icy way.

There’s a lot of that on the album, but there’s some choice, biting stuff on there, and for that I was using a tiny Fender Mini Twin. Smaller than a bread box, just a few inches across. It’s cute, but it makes really great fuzz sounds. I think I plugged that into my [ZZ.Fex] Fuzz Factory for a couple things, too. You can hear it in certain spots, like the bridge of Shame of Love.

Speaking of SPIN, they have just published a newly formatted online version of their Juliana cover feature from March 1994.

Writer Rob Sheffield:

Hatfield calls me a couple days later from Idaho, where she’s been skiing. She sounds much mellower, out in the open air and on the slopes, calling from a room of her own. She tells me about a particularly cool ski trip she once took with Dando and J Mascis. “We’re pretty equally matched—we all have the same ability, but different styles. J skis like he plays guitar, it’s really cool. Really reckless, but also really graceful.”

Juliana, on Pretenders' self-titled debut album:

It is immaculate and untouchable! It has tons of attitude but also subtlety. Chrissie Hynde’s voice is sublime, timeless, and unique, really one of the best voices ever in rock, or in women in rock specifically, if you want to be categorizing like that. She’s a model for how to be cool and a boss and good at what you do. I am always hoping to someday get to the place where I am as on top of my game as the Pretenders were at that moment in time.

Read Juliana's thoughts on 4 other albums "she can't live without" in the article at SPIN.

Juliana, talking about the track Suck It Up to Morgan Enos for a Grammys article:

"Suck it Up" is more specific to the idea of a creative person—an artist—going to a bank and trying to get a mortgage. This whole society is based on certain things: marriage, cohabitation, capitalism, consumerism, and also including homeownership. People are bred to believe that owning a home is something everyone should aspire to.

But it's not for everyone; that's one thing. If you're the type of person who doesn't have a weekly paycheck, no matter how much money you have, it's going to be difficult for the system to approve you for a big loan like that, because you don't have a steady weekly paycheck. That's exactly what the song is about.

It's kind of like "Mouthful of Blood" in the way that the system doesn't allow for nuance in speech or thought. Also, the financial system doesn't allow for nuance in ways of living. You can't just call and have a conversation. They punch your data into the computer, the algorithm feeds it back in numbers and you either cut the mustard or you don't.

The interview includes Juliana's thoughts on all 10 songs from Blood, and therefore well worth a read.

The Record Store Day Podcast with Paul Myers:

On Episode #42, Boston music icon Juliana Hatfield talks about her brand new album Blood (American Laundromat), while comedy producer Dan Pasternack talks about Jonathan Winters: Unearthed (Comedy Dynamics) the three-disc, vinyl-only compilation that he produced and curated for RSD Drops #1 June 12. And RSD's Carrie Colliton talks about the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, and the Almost Famous "Stillwater Demos" EP also dropping on RSD Drops #1.

From Warren Kurtz's interview with Juliana for Goldmine:

JH: I drew this female in a bikini with a black pen and Jed Davis colored it, including the blood bubbles coming off the hands in the background. I drew it from a photograph where the woman was actually in the sky with buildings in the background, so I don’t know if it was a circus or what the event was. She looks like a warrior, going through harsh times, but emerging victoriously, flying, and who needed those hands anyway?

GM: It is an interesting contrast, just like your music.

JH: Also, the pose she is in seems really joyful and playful as she soars.

Alex Green Online:

Hatfield is one of the sharpest writers around—she’s funny, smart, caustic, observant and deeply, deeply wise. In this conversation Juliana talks to Alex about being in a post-love state of mind, if she gets recognized at the gym and the reverse of seasonal affective disorder. They also talk about cupcakes and muffins….

Juliana, talking about the track Chunks, from an excellent interview by Grant Walters for Albumism:

It’s got a couple of different inspirations, but I guess the most obvious one is just the feeling of wanting to punish the bad guys—and just taking it to a cartoonish extreme. I mean, I hope people can see the humor in it and understand that I don’t actually want to do these things to people. It’s just a feeling I know a lot of people are having, you know, this feeling of rage and a burning desire to punish the bad guys because we’ve seen so much exposure of rottenness in the past four years. Just so much hatred, and corruption, and greed, and nastiness.

People feel unable to do anything about it and this feeling of futility, so I just put them into a song. But then, also, there’s a feminist reading, and sometimes I look at it as a song about how women are expected to behave in this society and meant to be friendly, polite, accommodating, quiet, pleasant. And, you know, if you raise your voice or if you take offense to something, someone will say to you, ‘why can’t you be nice? Why are you so rude?’ So, it could be seen as a feminist reaction to society’s expectations of womanhood. That’s another kind of reading on female anger and how people are dealing with women’s anger.

Continuing this little burst of interviews to promote Blood, Juliana has spoken to Blake Maddux for The Arts Fuse:

AF: Rather than recording an album’s worth of covers by a single artist, as you have with Olivia Newton-John and The Police in recent years, which album by any artist of your choice might you like to cover in its entirety?

JH: Oh shoot, I just had an idea the other day about that. I thought of an album that I would record. Now I can’t remember it. Damn. I don’t know … Nothing is coming to my head. I like the idea of doing that though. Maybe the first Weezer album. The Blue Album.

Juliana, speaking about her livestreams with Scott Lapatine for Stereogum as part of a career spanning Q&A:

I always feel like I didn’t do a good enough job. I have the same old self-criticism that I have of all my performances, so that’s the only problem I have. I feel like I haven’t really completely nailed a show yet, a livestream show, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with the format.

It’s kind of nice to be able to just get up and drive a couple miles to the studio, and then play an album, and have people all over the world be able to check it out for free, and it seems to make certain people happy, which is good.

I’m not using any third party or middleman. I’m just doing it. There’s no ticketing system. It’s just directly to the people, so that makes it easier for me. I initially was checking out a couple companies that did the ticketing and the broadcasting of it, but I just couldn’t deal with… I didn’t have enough autonomy within their systems, and I just wanted the freedom to have it just be my own thing, so fortunately Q Division [Studios] was able to do it with me, and they’re my friends, so it’s good.

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.