Juliana Hatfield announces new album 'Weird' out this March
Nearly a year on since the release of the beloved Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John comes the eagerly anticipated studio album Weird.
“I often feel cut-off from other people, from my feelings, from technology, from popular culture,” Hatfield explains in a recent press release. “I feel weird, I feel like I’m dreaming my life and that I am going to wake up some day.”
Juliana Hatfield is best known for her alt-rock hits My Sister and Spin the Bottle, both from the Juliana Hatfield Three 1993 album Become What You Are, and for her lending her bass skills to Lemonheads (1992) on It's A Shame About Ray. Hatfield didn't take a bow at the close of the 90's, instead she doubled down with back-to-back releases.
The singer-songwriter has expressed her love of pop songcraft and grimy blasts of distortion, respectively, a dichotomy she wields masterfully. This newest, seventeenth album, Weird explores both the confinement and freedom of solitude. While Hatfield’s songs—melodies and lyrics and structures—are meticulously crafted, her guitar parts are loose and sometimes a little unhinged; first-take expressions of this temperamental uneasiness. Again, dialectics.
Freda Love Smith (Blake Babies, Sunshine Boys) and Todd Philips (Lemonheads, The Juliana Hatfield Three) each played drums on multiple songs while Hatfield played all of the other instruments (and some additional drums).
“Personally, I feel like a malfunctioning machine. There’s a screw or two loose. I want my guitar playing to reflect that.”