Juliana Hatfield

Juliana Hatfield (born July 27, 1967) is an American musician and singer-songwriter from the Boston area, formerly of the indie rock bands Blake Babies, Some Girls, and The Lemonheads.

Hatfield acquired a love of rock music during the 1970s, having been introduced by a babysitter to the music of the Los Angeles punk rock band X, which proved a life-changing experience.

She was also attracted to the music of more mainstream artists like Olivia Newton-John and The Police.

While still at Berklee College of Music in 1986, she formed the band Blake Babies with John Strohm and Freda Love.

The band released 4 albums between 1987 and 1991, and gained critical notice in Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, local radio airplay and press, and label support from Mammoth Records in North Carolina.

She also fronted her own band, The Juliana Hatfield Three, along with bassist Dean Fisher and drummer Todd Philips, which was active in the mid-1990s and again in the mid-2010s.

The band broke up in 1992, but had a brief reunion in 2001 to produce another album.

After the break-up of the Blake Babies, she joined The Lemonheads as their bass player, replacing founding bassist Jesse Peretz, and played on their breakthrough album It's a Shame About Ray in 1992.

In 1992, she released her debut solo album Hey Babe.

She gained notoriety in 1992 for saying that she was still a virgin in her mid-twenties in Interview magazine.

It was with the Juliana Hatfield Three that she produced her best-charting work, including the critically acclaimed albums Become What You Are (1993) and Whatever, My Love (2015) and the singles "My Sister" (1993) and "Spin the Bottle" (1994).

She has performed and recorded as a solo artist and as one half of Minor Alps with Matthew Caws of Nada Surf.

She left the band after about a year, but returned in 1993 as a guest vocalist on several tracks of Come on Feel the Lemonheads.

Her commercial breakthrough came in 1993 with the formation of the band The Juliana Hatfield Three along with high-school friend Dean Fisher on bass and former Bullet LaVolta drummer Todd Philips, with herself performing lead vocal and lead guitar duties.

The band produced the album Become What You Are and two hit singles, "My Sister" and "Spin the Bottle".

"My Sister" was based on Hatfield's older brother's girlfriend, Maggie Rafferty, who lived with the family while Hatfield was in high school.

She enjoyed Rafferty's eclectic record collection.

Rafferty also took Hatfield to see the Del Fuegos and the Violent Femmes, which inspired her to form a band.

"Spin the Bottle" was used in the soundtrack of the Hollywood film Reality Bites (1994).

Hatfield also made the cover of Spin magazine.

Hatfield was profiled in a number of girls' magazines, most notably Sassy, at this time and addressed serious issues faced by young women in her songs and interviews.

About this period she says: "I was never comfortable with the attention. I thought it had come too soon. I hadn’t earned it yet."

In a 1994 interview for the magazine Vox, she said she was surprised by the effect 'outing' herself had: "I think there are a lot of people out there who don't care about sex, but who you never hear from, so I thought I should say it. The magazine I did the interview for is full of beef-cake hunky guys and scantily-clad models, so I thought it would be really funny to say that I didn't care about sex in a magazine that's full of sex and beauty – but no one really got the joke."

Over the years Hatfield's virginity became a recurring theme in her press coverage, often accompanied by speculation that she had lost her virginity to The Lemonheads' leader Evan Dando who had referred to her as his "friend and sometimes girlfriend."

In 2006, Hatfield sent a letter to The Weekly Dig in critique of writer Debbie Driscoll's scathing review of Soul Asylum's latest album, The Silver Lining.

Kevin Dean from the newspaper responded by bringing up the subject of Hatfield losing her virginity to Dando; Hatfield fired back at Dean for bringing up her sex life, while stating that she and Dando never had sex, and that it was in fact Spike Jonze that she had lost her virginity to.

She later admitted that she lost her virginity when she was 26 and "damn ready."

Hatfield also attended art school at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2012 in a year-long, post-baccalaureate certificate program, to study painting.

In December 2014, Paste named her cover of Elliott Smith’s "Needle in the Hay" number 10 in a list of the 20 Best Cover Songs of 2014.

In 2014, she reformed The Juliana Hatfield Three, announcing the new album Whatever, My Love for 2015.

In late December, Stereogum named the album "one of their most anticipated albums of 2015", and on January 4, 2015, Consequence of Sound named it "one of the 50 most anticipated albums of 2015."

In 2016, she formed a collaboration with Paul Westerberg under the moniker The I Don't Cares to release the album Wild Stab.

More recently, she has released an album of original work titled Weird in 2019, sandwiched between two albums of cover songs, Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John (2018) and Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police (2019).

Hatfield was born in Wiscasset, Maine, to Phillip M. Hatfield, a radiologist, and Julie Hatfield, a former fashion editor for The Boston Globe.

She grew up in the Boston suburb of Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Despite recording a song titled "My Sister", Hatfield has no sisters but she does have two brothers.

Her father claimed his family descended from the West Virginia Hatfields of the Hatfield–McCoy feud following the Civil War.

Her father served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War.

Hatfield went to Duxbury High School in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

She attended Boston University before transferring to Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.