Posts tagged blood

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/

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

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, discussing "Bed" in an interview with Brett Milano for Boston Herald ahead of today's acoustic livestream:

...I realized that the only time I feel power is when I’m making music. So it was an explosion of frustration, but also an abandonment of my past life and the start of doing whatever the hell I wanted to. I can have loud annoying feedback at the beginning of a song, I can stack together five vocal takes that don’t really fit together, and nobody is going to stop me.

The interview includes a bit more about what to expect with the new "shockingly dark" Blood album, and that the next covers project remains likely to focus on R.E.M.