juliana
Now then, queen of hearts, is this your Pink Moon? Maybe it’s your Nebraska. Sitting at home like Bruce, testing the depth of the vacancy around you... “I’m just singing into the void.” Your last record was lush and radio-ready, a prosperous grown-up noise, but for this one you were alone, alone, alone and etiolated in your second-floor Cambridge apartment, faintly multitracking your own voice and guitar, keeping it down so as not to disturb the neighbors, surrounded by – I’m imagining -- a soft glimmer of the immaterial, a hush of late-night presence, because now you’re singing of the spirit world. Your dogs are wandering about somewhere, ticking across the wooden floors, or watching you perhaps in that quizzical doggy way. Cables, leads, scratched-at notepads. The spirit world. Not ghoulies and ghosties, and the long-departed aunt knocking with phantom knuckles beneath the table; none of that; but the private, invisible world within (that joins us to each other, amazingly.) The songs are their spirit selves, pale unelectric blueprints: no band, no rock thump. No barrel of laughs, actually. They describe sorrowfulness, loneliness, faintness of heart, the old brain chemistry blues. And a great, great concern with oblivion: “I want to sleep awhile...” “Why can’t you sleep...” “I’m trying to get through this night...” “You stopped sleeping very well...”

It starts with plucked Elizabethan chords, solemn and spare as a John Dowland pavane, and a guardian angel is announced, stooping soft over the singer’s heart, checking it throughout the night “with an ear to my ribcage.” Is the grip on life so tenuous? It might just be. Diaphanous wings getting ripped by the rain in “Butterflies”; the small, fleshless voice of “I’m Disappearing” singing about “my bluest veins.” Dwindling to spirit-hood, fatally transparent. Keep checking the pulse.

Then again, for this to be your Pink Moon, it would have to contain despair – the actual taste and texture of giving up. And it doesn’t. The title, to begin with: Peace and Love. Ironically, it’s not ironic. The mercies are there, trusted in, available somehow, even if temporarily barred from your consciousness: they’re on the tip of your tongue, at the back of your mind, round the corner, in the strengthening of the light at the breakfast table, or the wry, descending piano figure that anchors “Why Can’t We Love Each Other.” John Berryman, once a depressed brain in Cambridge, MA, wrote that “the hardest challenge, let’s say, that a person can face without defeat is the best for him.” Or her. Like George Michael says, you gotta have faith.

And you gotta have music. Survivor-music -- because even at their most palpitatingly fragile, your songs have always been built to last. Well-made, strong-boned, fit to be played on streetcorners and station platforms. I like the healthy corpuscular chug of “Let’s Go Home”, with its infusion of New England autumn, the clanging pipes and violently colored trees. (“The street is like a painting, you should see it...”) The electric guitar, that fine old friend of yours, makes a crackling cameo halfway through “What Is Wrong” – a fusillade of neural fire. Guitar-playing friends of mine always love your solos.

 

 “I survived the famous fall...” What fall might that be -- the Fall of Man? Or the fall from being famous. The vinegary strains of “Dear Anonymous” suggest a persistent problem with people finding you special. Time to be confusing, perhaps – even more confusing. Time to release Fade Away: Juliana Hatfield sings the songs of Noel Gallagher. I think it would be phenomenal. But what do I know? I just write the liner notes.

         -James Parker

 
Click on a thumbnail to download that hi res JPEG (suitable for publication):
Photo Credit (directly to the left): Brad Walsh
Photographer – Jonathan Stark

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October  22, 2009

 

JULIANA HATFIELD’S PEACE AND LOVE
SET FOR FEBRUARY 16th RELEASE 

 

Peace And Love, Juliana Hatfield’s latest album, will be released on February 16, 2010 on Ye Olde Records. Hatfield, of course, has a long history of DIY endeavors – from her trailblazing days with Boston indie band the Blake Babies to her recent releases on Ye Olde Records, the label she founded in 2005 – but with Peace And Love she reaches a new level of independence. She produced and engineered the album herself and played all the instruments, including acoustic and electric guitars, piano, harmonica and drum machine.

“I’ve produced records before but I was always in a studio with professional engineers. So it was definitely a learning process for me,” says Hatfield, who was ready to strip things down after her critically acclaimed 2008 album, How To Walk Away, which was a full studio production. “I always like to try things I’ve never done before and I‘d been yearning to record myself.”  

Hatfield had just purchased her brother’s eight-track digital recorder and moved into a Cambridge apartment with a back room that had excellent natural acoustics, so the time was right. “I was able to follow every instinct without worrying that anyone was going to think it was a kooky idea,” she recalls. “I just wanted to do something simple.”

The result is an incredibly intimate collection of songs, expertly capturing the loneliness and collateral damage borne of broken relationships yet adamantly refusing to remain broken. In the liner notes, Boston Phoenix music writer James Parker gives it a name: “Survivor-music – because even at their most palpitatingly fragile, your songs have always been built to last. Well-made, strong-boned, fit to be played on streetcorners and station platforms.”

Just as Hatfield stripped down the recording process, the characters that populate Peace And Love are ready to shed their convoluted lives. The lilting “Why Can’t We Love Each Other” answers its own question by acknowledging that love is a choice: “we can make our lives a song/will it be a blues or a hymn/a dirge or a psalm/it could be so simple.” But there’s the rub, of course: it could be so simple…if it weren’t for our propensity to muck things up.

From the plucked Elizabethan chords that introduce the opening “Peace And Love” and the feedback-drenched “What Is Wrong” to “Unsung,” Hatfield’s first-ever instrumental, and the closing “Dear Anonymous,” written from the point of view of a victim who finds empathy for her stalker, the collection is both compelling and surprising. “Faith In Our Friends” celebrates those who “think you’re just right the way you are” while Hatfield gains fresh perspective on her complex relationship with longtime friend Evan Dando on the exquisite, ethereal “Evan.”

Peace And Love is Hatfield’s 11th solo album and follows last year’s How To Walk Away, which was hailed as “rueful and gorgeous,” by Entertainment Weekly, which gave the album an A-. “After 20 years, the songstress still packs a wallop on her 10th album, featuring edgy tales of heartbreak sung with that classic sweetness,” said Newsweek, naming it a “Checklist” pick of the week upon its release while Spin pronounced it “vital,” awarding it three out of four stars. Her autobiography, entitled When I Grow Up, was published by Wiley & Sons in September 2008.

Hatfield first came to prominence in her teens as a founding member of the Blake Babies. After four independent albums with the group, she signed to Atlantic as a solo artist and had a string of modern-rock hits (including “My Sister,” “Spin The Bottle” and  “Universal Heartbeat”). She left the label in 1998, signing to Zoe Records (a Rounder Records imprint) and releasing four well-regarded albums, including 2004’s In Exile Deo, named as one of that year’s 10 best albums by The New York Times’ Jon Pareles. In 2005, Hatfield came full circle, returning to her independent roots and founding Ye Olde Records.

The track listing for Peace and Love is as follows:

  1. Peace and Love
  2. The End Of The War
  3. Why Can’t We Love Each Other
  4. Butterflies
  5. What Is Wrong
  6. Unsung
  7. Evan
  8. Let’s Go Home
  9. I Picked You Up
  10. Faith In Our Friends
  11. I’m Disappearing
  12. Dear Anonymous

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For more information on JULIANA HATFIELD, please contact:

Bobbie Gale
Big Hassle Media
310-204-0200
bobbie@bighassle.com

or visit:

http://www.julianahatfield.com/
http://www.myspace.com/julianahatfield



  
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