Twenty albums in, Juliana Hatfield still sounds mildly surprised she wants to keep doing this. Not burned out, not circling the nostalgia drain, not quietly coasting on goodwill. Still listening for the moment when inspiration clicks in—or doesn’t—and knowing exactly when to walk away if it hasn’t shown up yet.
“That feeling,” she said, “that’s how I know I should be making records. If I didn’t have it, I’d stop. I’d know they’d fall flat.”
Her new album, Lightning Might Strike, doesn’t sound flat in any sense of the word. It’s sharp, melodic, and relentlessly listenable, even while it opens with songs titled “Falls Apart” and “Long Slow Nervous Breakdown.” That’s not metaphor. “I felt like I was having a long, slow, nervous breakdown,” Hatfield said. “That’s what it felt like. I wanted to express that I was in the middle of it, not after it.”
That distinction matters. This isn’t hindsight songwriting. It’s reportage. “I wasn’t writing from the other side,” she said. “I was in it. But I knew from experience that it doesn’t last forever. I’d been very depressed before, and I learned that if you’re lucky, you do come out the other end.”
Hatfield has always written from the ache forward, dating back to her days in Blake Babies, where she admits the emotional volume was… unregulated. “That catalog is hard for me to listen to,” she said. “I was so angsty. I didn’t know how to deal with my emotions. The sound of my voice was pinched, pushing so hard.” Perspective arrived later. Control followed. Not restraint—just intention.
On Lightning Might Strike, she was often writing lyrics as the music was being recorded. “The music I can tap into pretty easily,” she said. “The lyrics take longer. That’s the trickiest part. There was a lot of stopping, filling in melodies with words, figuring out what I was actually saying.”
What she was saying was that things were not great. But Hatfield refuses to diary-dump. “I don’t just throw diary entries out there,” she said. “I want finesse. Nuance. Humor. Even if the humor isn’t as obvious this time.”
Take “Long Slow Nervous Breakdown,” a phrase that sounds grim until you sit with it. “It’s kind of funny,” she said. “When you think of a nervous breakdown, you think of something sudden. This was slow. A long unraveling.” Her brain supplied its own imagery—dripping, melting, uncontained. Which brings us to “Popsicle.”
“It feels fun,” she admitted. “That’s intentional. But it’s not what people think it’s about.” The song’s sugar rush hides a darker image. “I’m equating a dripping popsicle with my mind melting,” she said. “My hopes and dreams melting away.” Then she laughed. “But you don’t need to know that. The act of singing it, playing those crunchy chords—that’s levity. That counteracts the heaviness.”
The album was largely recorded at home, after Hatfield moved out of the city and into a house in the woods. Freedom came with tradeoffs. “I wanted space to make noise and not worry about neighbors,” she said. “But being alone made it take longer. I’m slow when I don’t have studio days booked. Sometimes I’m only good for an hour of recording a day. All the tech drains me.”
Still, she finished it. “It arrives right on time,” she shrugged. And it does—two years after her last release, which by her standards is practically a sabbatical. “I was trying to put out an album every year,” she said. “I didn’t make it this time.”
If there’s a loophole, it’s her cover albums. Newton-John. The Police. ELO. The next idea is already hovering behind her. “I keep talking about it, so I guess I have to do it,” she said, referring to a long-teased R.E.M. covers record. “It’s daunting. They have a lot of albums. I’d have to do research.”
Hatfield has also learned how to separate herself from her songs—especially the older ones fans still cling to. “I think of the musical persona as separate,” she said. “There’s the person, and then there’s the singing voice. I think of my songs as something that came out of me, but isn’t me.”
That distance is survival. Fame, even at manageable levels, scrambles the nervous system. “It’s like an aura around people,” she said. “They can’t brush it off. I always think fame must be a curse. Or a punishment for success.”
What isn’t a punishment is still wanting to do the work. Still trusting that writing through the breakdown—slow, dripping, uncertain—might lead somewhere listenable. Hatfield didn’t wait for the storm to pass. She hit record while it was still raining.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
