Pop music is a young person’s game. Graph the typical trajectory, creative or commercial, of a musician, and you’ll see a handful of slow burners and a boatload of downward spirals.
And then there’s Juliana Hatfield, whose 20-year career arc is as messy — and fruitful — as her mental state. Hatfield has been, in chronological order: a college radio darling (with the Blake Babies), major-label ingenue, Spin magazine cover girl, almost-rock star, short-lived nostalgia act (the Blake Babies reunion), indie supergroup band member (Some Girls), and an alternately raw and ruminative cult artist.
Her sales clout peaked in 1993, with Become What You Are, which sold roughly 400,000 copies; Hatfield will be happy if How to Walk Away, which she released last week on her own Ye Olde Records label, reaches 20,000 people.
As a cultural artifact, Hatfield hovers in the celebrity purgatory reserved for artists who aren’t hot commodities but still matter. You don’t hear her songs on the radio anymore, even though they keep getting better. Hatfield can’t get a record deal, but she’ll be on Leno Monday night, and newspapers from coast to coast noted her 41st birthday last month.
But as a singer, a songwriter, and a human being, Hatfield is just getting started.
“I’m on the edge of something, and it would be so much easier to explain if I had overcome heroin addiction or had some other radical change in my life,” Hatfield says over tea at the Four Seasons. “My growth as an artist and a person has been so slow and gradual it’s hard to make a story out of it.”
But she has. On Sept. 29, Wiley and Sons will publish Hatfield’s memoir, When I Grow Up. The book is a far cry from the sex-and-drugs tell-alls that litter the marketplace. Originally conceived as a tour diary of a month on the road with her band Some Girls, When I Grow Up expanded into a broad and often brutal portrait of Hatfield’s musical and personal odyssey so far. Scabs are picked, wounds reopened, hidden scars revealed. Names and some dates and several locations have been changed to protect the innocent (bad boyfriends, callous record company executives), but conveniently, there’s only one guilty party: the late-blooming author.
“I’m not trying to settle any scores. My intention wasn’t to hurt or expose anyone but just tell the truth about my life,” says Hatfield. “I blame myself for everything.”
And therein lies the essence of Hatfield’s brand of tormented artist — the self-inflicted sort. Hatfield began life as an affluent, outgoing Duxbury girl. She believes that something went wrong, really wrong, when she hit puberty. The self-described leader of the pack grew dark and quiet, and 25 years later she hasn’t quite snapped out of it.
Bountifully musical and pathologically shy, scathingly honest and averse to judgment, Hatfield is a one-woman war zone: the part of her compelled to make music locked in mortal battle with the part of her that’s utterly ill-equipped to deal with life in the public eye. In 1986, Hatfield enrolled at Berklee College of Music. Withdrawn to the point where she wouldn’t eat in the cafeteria even though her parents had paid for a meal plan, Hatfield managed to meet Freda Love and John Strohm, and the threesome formed the Blake Babies.
There’s a secret meaning to the title of Hatfield’s new album, an atmospheric collection of pop tunes organized around a theme of leaving. How to Walk Away refers to another possible departure. Hatfield — who makes her living from music and financed the recording with an unexpectedly big royalty check from song placements in various films and television shows — has been flirting for years with the idea of retiring. She went into the studio last year thinking that this album, the 10th of her solo career, might well be her swan song — a state of mind that thrilled her producer, Andy Chase.
“I told her, ‘If you make a record that’s a leap, you may have a chance to reinvigorate your career. Or let’s go out with a bang.’ My agenda was to do something much more refined, something groovy and evocative, and bring out what I thought was a beautiful textured voice, which had been buried in a rock guitar pastiche or because Juliana wouldn’t sing out,” Chase said.
Hatfield always hated her thin, girlish voice, at least until recently. But Chase put her songs into lower keys, and Hatfield discovered that she has a deeper, silky range. Ironically, she’s so pleased (as she should be) with how the album turned out, Hatfield is reconsidering her decision to walk away from music. It doesn’t seem to faze her that every major and independent label that Hatfield sent the album to passed on it.
“The rejection doesn’t make me second guess myself anymore. I know it’s a good album, and I got really good feedback, and I realize that the music industry is sort of falling apart, so I was able to not take it so personally,” says Hatfield. But she admits that her diminished stature continues to haunt her.
“I say I’ve made peace, but it’s like I don’t want to admit that there’s still a part of me that still doesn’t understand why I don’t get much notice,” Hatfield says. “I don’t want to seem like I’m complaining. Up until now I thought, ‘I’m cool with everything. I’m an artist, man. I don’t care if people buy my records.’ But I wonder why I don’t get much recognition.”
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