By the time Juliana Hatfield gets to the phrase “emotional disabilities,” she’s laughing a little—like she knows just how heavy that sounds, but also how true it is. “Everyone has them, I assume,” she says, almost like she’s daring the rest of us to admit it too. On Weird, her umpteenth album (she’s lost count, and why shouldn’t she?), Hatfield gets real about solitude, self-image, and what it’s like to look in the mirror and not see a Barbie, but a blood-spitting, crown-cracked, slightly-rumpled human being.
“This was going to be the anti-Free Bird album,” she says early in the conversation. “I wanted to explore the wonders of staying in a small radius, the same few blocks. The comfort of four walls. The freedom of not roaming.” Call it Homebody Rock—a record that celebrates the joy of limited options. Hatfield, whose career has now spanned more decades than most indie-pop hopefuls stay in the game, is leaning hard into her weird—and her quiet.
“I’m always working on something,” she tells me. “Even if it’s never released. People with regular jobs don’t get to take months off—why should I?” She says this with the same shrugging directness that comes through on songs like “All Right, Yeah,” which sounds like a heatstroke pep talk from a friend who hates summer but knows you need to move your body or lose your mind. “It was miserable,” she says of the Boston heatwave that inspired it. “So I just danced around in my sweat, waiting for the break.”
And then there’s “Broken Doll,” a jagged little pill of a song that starts with beauty standards and ends with blood in the sink. “I wrote it thinking about how I’ve never been able to present myself in a perfect, polished way,” she explains. “I’m not a Barbie doll—I’m a broken doll. And I’m okay with it.” It wasn’t until later that she realized the song was also about aging. “I mean, the teeth just go,” she says. “You get root canals, crowns that don’t fit right, hairs in weird places… Is this too much information?” she asks, already knowing the answer.
What’s radical about Weird is how utterly unradical it is. It’s not trying to reinvent Juliana Hatfield. It’s just Juliana Hatfield doing what she’s always done—telling the truth in songs that sound like private confessions left out on cassette tapes for the mailman. “I don’t do character studies,” she says. “It’s always just… me.” And while she jokes about not listening to much music these days—too afraid of subconscious melody theft—she’s aware of her influence on a whole generation of artists who do. “People tell me they hear it,” she says, without much ceremony. “I should probably check some of it out.”
One of the only times she’s ever been caught off-guard was meeting Liz Phair for the first time. “It was just a few months ago,” she says. “We’re the same age, same scene, tons of mutual people—but we’d never met.” Blame the ‘90s industry sexism that treated women artists like Pokémon cards—one of each, please, no duplicates. “There were times I was taken off a bill because there was already a woman on it,” she says, still baffled. “Like two women would cancel each other out or something.”
We talk about her contributions to Reality Bites and My So-Called Life—two soundtracks that remain peak ‘90s cultural artifacts—and she lights up when she mentions the Reality Bites gold record hanging on her wall. “I had to badger my manager to get one,” she laughs. “I’m on that damn soundtrack. I deserve one!”
She’s never had a gold record for one of her own albums. She’s fine with that. Or at least, not bitter. Her songs have always occupied their own space—lived-in, a little strange, deeply felt. They don’t need validation. They just need four walls and a window cracked open, maybe a fan humming in the corner, and a guitar within arm’s reach.
“I think life gets better when you stop fighting who you are,” she says, as the interview winds down. “At this point, I’m not trying to be anything other than me.”
And Weird sounds all the better for it.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below!
