Confounding grunge expectations

The music press used to mock her innocence, but a new album and memoir show singer Juliana Hatfield facing her demons while still refusing to conform, writes Priya Elan

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT Juliana Hatfield that makes you want to wrap her in a blanket, hand her a cup of tea and tell her everything will be all right. It may be due to her emotional, open-hearted songs, or to the sadness about her that suggests she's seen the worst side of the music industry.

Hatfield, who is about to release both her tenth album and her autobiography, shone brightly during the post-Nirvana grunge goldrush of the early 1990s, when her sugary indie anthems brought her into the so-called "women in rock" revolution, alongside acts such as PJ Harvey and the Breeders. Her new album, How to Walk Away, is a collection of the sort of grown-up pop songs you would more readily associate with Aimee Mann. It's a big step forward for a singer whose girlish voice sometimes seemed at odds with her subject matter. Thanks to producer Andy Chase, she's now singing in a lower register.

The album and the book - When I Grow Up, a tour diary-cum-memoir which paints an unflattering portrait of "toilet" venues across the US - follow a year-long hiatus in which Hatfield stopped making music altogether.

"When I stepped away from it I was pretty burned out," she says. "My whole life was writing, recording and touring over and over again. At some point I realised I wasn't enjoying myself any more."

The break also allowed Hatfield to confront issues that had been plaguing her for most of her adult life, although they had very little to do with her music. Their source was a quote published in a 1992 profile in Interview magazine. Hatfield, who was 23 at the time, had been linked to grunge pin-up Evan Dando of the Lemonheads since the late 1980s, when Dando would occasionally play in her band, Blake Babies. It was assumed that the lovesick songs on her first solo album, Hey Babe, were written about their relationship. When Hatfield said she had "never gone all the way" with anyone, let alone with Dando, the music press appeared astounded at the idea of a twentysomething virgin. Melody Maker pictured Hatfield and Dando cuddling on its cover, with the strap-line: "Birds do it, bees do it, but have Evan and Juliana done it?"

In the book, Hatfield, who is now 41, sheds little light on the relationship, apart from a casual mention that she and Dando had "fooled around". In fact, Dando is hardly mentioned at all.

"That was intentional," she says. "Because in the 1990s that was the only story people wanted to tell about me. With the book, I wanted to tell the story as I saw it." Has she seen him recently? "No. I haven't talked to him in a few years. He's living his life and I'm living mine."

Aside from the rumours about her personal life, Hatfield was uncomfortable with the image she felt she had to adopt as a female rock star. In her Blake Babies days she never wore make-up for photo-shoots or album covers.

"I never felt happy with the idea that part of what I do is to be an object to be looked at," she says. "I thought of my public persona as an entity separate to myself."

THE PRESSURE TO conform intensified when her indie label Mammoth was bought by Atlantic Records. As a solo artist on a major record label, Hatfield felt she was expected to develop her stage persona.

"I was playing on these bigger stages and on TV," she says. "I thought I needed to do something to make myself look more fabulous and more sparkly."

And so for her third solo album, 1995's Only Everything, the mousey-haired singer bleached her hair blonde. "And it was so shockingly painful! No one really talks about that. There were actual scabs on my head and in my hair. It was horrifying, really, like a form of self-abuse."

A decade later, as she released her 2005 album, Made in China, Hatfield posted a message to fans on her website, expressing her annoyance that some of her contemporaries had resorted to getting breast implants.

"I was aghast at what was happening," she says. "Women in music videos looked more like strippers than musicians. It gave out the message that you had to look like a stripper to sell records."

Hatfield's refusal to play the game has only exacerbated her lifelong struggle with depression. It was only when her father died, in 2001, that she confronted the condition, and began a course of cognitive behavioural therapy.

"My dad was depressed a lot of the time," she says, "and there were a lot of things in his life that he never resolved. He died alone in a small house, way up in northern Michigan. The only way they knew he had died was when he didn't show up for work the next day. And I just thought that I needed to get my life together now. I don't want to wake up when I'm 60 years old battling those same demons."

Hatfield's catalogue feels like a work in progress: in How to Walk Away, she is like a bolder version of the woman of her early work. She's battled her demons, and come out the other side.

"I still have a lot of those depressive thoughts," she says, "but now I have the foresight to tell myself, 'don't think like that', and things seem better.

- Guardianservice

How to Walk Awayis out now on Ye Olde Records. When I Grow Up: A Memoiris published by Wiley, €17.99