With new CD, memoir, and outlook, Juliana Hatfield charts progress
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 tomorrow 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, who plays at the Brattle Theatre on Sept. 14. "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. She glares at cameras; photographs bring out the harshness in Hatfield, who's softer and prettier in person. She has worn skinny jeans, a loose black top, and a delicate silver necklace to the Bristol Lounge. One fingernail is painted red. Hatfield smiles, but only halfway. She wonders out loud if she's mildly autistic.
Since the mid-'90s, when she was thrown off the rails by a debilitating depression, Hatfield has tried everything she could think of to get better: medication, therapy, puppies, health food, exercise. "Everything's been a struggle for me," she says. "Everything but the writing, and that's why I kept doing it. It's the only time I ever felt sane, like a whole person who was useful, who had any power, who was in control. When I was at BU right after high school, I had these horrible panicky nights where I thought if I didn't find a band I was going to kill myself. The two choices were find a band or die. That's how it felt."
The following year, 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.
"She wore the same thing every day: a leather biker jacket, jeans and a white T-shirt, and clunky shoes, with her hair in a ponytail," says Love. "Juliana didn't look like anyone else at Berklee. There was an aura about her, and I was drawn to her air of mystery. We were 18, but we didn't wait until we were ready. We just jumped in."
The Blake Babies ruled the college-rock roost with their punchy guitar pop for five years, and almost immediately after the band split Hatfield's solo career began to take off. "Hey Babe," her 1992 debut, was a surprise MTV hit and landed Hatfield a deal with Atlantic Records. "Become What You Are," released the following year and widely expected to be Hatfield's mainstream breakthrough, produced the singles "Spin the Bottle" and "My Sister." But by the time "Only Everything" came out in 1995, alt-rock's popularity was dimming, the album quickly slipped down the charts, and Hatfield - who had slipped into a depression - canceled her European promotional tour.
"While Juliana seems very fragile in many ways, she's really not," says Hatfield's then-manager, Gary Smith. "She's a tough broad, attitudinal in a big way, and I don't think she was really willing to do things that one needs to do. Those things are stay on point, mostly. She made some unfortunate decisions, which she would say were circumstances - for instance, to cancel a tour right when she needed to be doing it. Maybe I was a [bad] manager in that I didn't make her do it. On my business card for years it just said 'enabler.' I wanted to be an artist's advocate, but I now kind of wish I'd gotten things done."
Hatfield's third album for Atlantic, "God's Foot," was shelved. She writes in her book that the label had a new female face to attend to, the far more marketable Jewel, and that Atlantic eventually agreed to release her from her contract. During our interview, though, Hatfield says that Atlantic dropped her, and "I couldn't blame them."
Three albums for the Rounder Records-affiliated Zoe label followed, and in 2005 the artist struck out on her own, founding Ye Olde Records in her Cambridge apartment.
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 don't blame her for feeling at the end of her rope," says Chase, a member of the band Ivy and a massive Hatfield fan, who courted her (as a collaborator) for half a decade before Hatfield said yes. "She's been playing to the same audience year after year, and when sales are going down rather than up, you're wondering why you're even doing it. Who's going to buy this? Does anybody really care? 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."
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."
Hatfield craves acknowledgement, but not at the expense of her integrity. She's never fit in, nor has she given in to anyone's idea of how her music or life should unfold. Hatfield jokes that she'll probably get married when she's 60 and have it all together when she's 70.
"I'm trying to break through with my music," she says. "It's just taking a while. Maybe I'll be peaking in September, maybe in 10 years. That's why I haven't quit, because I don't feel like I'm there yet. But I'm closer than I ever was."
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, go to www.boston.com/ae/music/blog. 