BED

1. Down On Me
2. I Want To Want You
3. Swan Song
4. Sneaking Around
5. Backseat
6. Live It Up
7. You Are The Camera
8. Running Out
9. Bad Day
10. Let's Blow It All

Japanese version only:

11-16 Please Do Not Disturb album
17 Anemia
18 Mean And Evil

First full album proper after the God’s Foot wrangle, recorded within days and like 1997’s Please Do Not Disturb an emotionally raw release.

Personnel

Juliana Hatfield – guitar, keyboards, vocals
Todd Philips – percussion, drums
Mikey Welsh – bass

FURTHER READING:

Bed 10th anniversary blog by Jeremy Richey - April 2008

excerpts from 'a bit on bed' - June 2012 (link only available to pledgers on Juliana's 2012 covers album):

it was definitely my “i hate the music business” album, for sure. most people don’t get that about it. they think it’s all about some guy or guys (well i admit that ‘i want to want you’ and ‘sneaking around’ were about specific guys) and not a series of metaphors for hating the record company and the industry (and the public) who dropped me/failed me/bailed on me.

On Swan Song:

that’s the classic “you can’t fire me because i quit” scenario. i tell everyone that i begged atlantic records to let me out of my contract, to set me free, and i did--i did have that meeting with one of the big cheeses. but in the end what it amounts to is that they dropped me--they agreed to let me go --which means that they dropped me. i had read a book compiling real actual suicide notes and one of them said, simply, concisely: dear bill, i hate you. love, jane. (those weren’t the names--i can’t remember the names , but you get the point) . i thought that to use the names of jack and diane form the john cougar song would be funny--like, this is what happened to those two young lovers--they grew up and it all went to shit.

On Bad Day:

i see myself as a saboteur of relationships. also my brother and i had been held up at gunpoint behind fort apache studios one afternoon and that made itself into the song. (the gun part). it was the first and only time i’d been mugged. there were about five kids--teenagers--and they pointed the gun at my brother’s head. we calmly gave them our wallets and then they ran away. i felt so grateful to them for having not shot us (or my dog, who was with me and off-leash and running around). somehow this became part of a larger bad day idea and also i guess i drew a line from the the muggers back to a bad boyfriend, maybe, and in doing so was able to empathize w/the bad boyfriend by understanding that we are all damaged somehow by something--by things in our pasts/childhoods/past lives---so we are not to blame for all of our damaging relationship behaviors.

On May 7, 2018, Juliana played a show at The Burren in Somerville, MA to mark the 20th anniversary of the album.

She performed the entire LP.

Here's a promotional flyer she designed for the show:

Photos from the show are here: