Juliana Hatfield was born the 27:th of July, 1967 in Wiscossett, Maine, but grew up in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a town outside Boston. She has two brothers, Christian and Jason, but no sister. Her mother is a fashion editor and her father is a physician. Juliana's parents separated when she was 11.
Her first musical idols were Donny & Marie Osmond and Olivia Newton John. She has always loved music for the melodies and not because it's trendy or correct. During high-school she was a sort of a loner with few friends. She was the singer in a cover band called the Squids, that mostly played Rush and Police covers. One day she knew how she was going to spend the rest of her life:
When I was 16, I had a mystical experience. I came home from school one afternoon and lay down on the floor. Sun was streaming in through the sliding glass doors onto me. I was starting to drift in and out of consciousness when suddenly I was gently jolted awake by something in the corner of the room. I looked over and saw a vision of myself in the future, singing. This gave me a feeling of deep down security and happiness, as if the sender of this musical vision was telling me, "I will watch over you, don't worry, go for it." From that moment on, I knew that dreams could become reality.
Juliana had taken piano lessons for a long time and had also started to play the guitar. She started at Berklee College of Music to study voice and piano. There she met John Strohm and Freda Love Boner and formed her first real band; the Blake Babies, in which Juliana sang and played the bass. They recorded and produced an album themselves called Nicely, Nicely. Later they were signed by Mammoth Records and released two records; Earwig (1989) and Sunburn (1990), which combined Juliana's dark lyrics with pure pop melodies.
The Blake Babies were reaching for a commercial breakthrough, but Juliana was tired of touring and the democracy in the band. The Blake Babies released Rosy Jack World EP and then split up. Strohm and Love formed Antenna, and Juliana joined the Lemonheads. She was a good friend with Evan Dando, the singer in the Lemonheads, with whom she had shared a room earlier.
But playing the bass in someone else's band wasn't enough for Juliana. She wanted to make her own music, so she started a solo career. She released Hey Babe in 1992. This wasn't a happy time in Juliana's life. She didn't have a band and felt sad about being alone. Her relationship with Evan Dando also affected the lyrics which were much more personal than in the Blake Babies. Because it was so personal, Juliana felt embarrassed about the album, almost as if somebody had read her diary. But the album was praised by almost everyone and sold 60,000 which is quite good for a new independent artist. At this time, there weren't so many other female solo artists and suddenly Juliana was a favourite in the media. She didn't knew how to take the press and said some things that she still has to answer questions about. Most famous is (sadly enough) her virginity.
After Hey Babe, Juliana wanted to be in a band again, so she formed the Juliana Hatfield Three, with drummer Todd Phillips and bassplayer Dean Fisher. With Scott Litt as a producer (famous from REM) they made Become What You Are, a successful album. For the first time Juliana played all the guitars herself. The songs are a little bit heavier and she tried to write the lyrics about certain subjects instead of always writing about herself. Since her label Mammoth had been bought by the big label Atlantic, the album was heavily promoted and had two minor hit singles; My Sister and Spin The Bottle (from the movie Reality Bites). Become What You Are sold 250,000 copies which is not bad, but not as good as the label expected.
After touring around the world and moving to New York, Juliana started making her next album, Only Everything, now solo again. With producers Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, she felt that writing and playing was easier than before and the songs are more complex and experimental with a lot of contrasts between the heavy and loud and the soft and quiet. The reviews were mixed, but most were positiveand many guessed that this would be her big breakthrough. The single "Universal Heart-Beat" did quite well in the charts, but the rest of the album didn't have the 'commercial potential'. It was quickly forgotten and only sold 135,000 copies.
This was followed by a rough period for Juliana with nervous breakdowns which caused her to cancel a tour. Instead she quickly started to write music for a new album, but the big label Atlantic wasn't interested in Juliana anymore, so they dumped the co-operation with Mammoth. By then Juliana had finished a whole new album, the rumoured God's Foot. This caused a label war between Mammoth and Atlantic. Obviously Atlantic still saw some commercial potential in Juliana, even though they have damaged her career by still holding God's Foot in prison, and still no-one knows when it's going to be released, if it's going to be released.
Juliana herself continued to write new songs, while new female artists like Alanis Morissette and Jewel appeared, took her place and sold millions of records. This was obviously a bit frustrating, when she knew that she had a lot of music, but didn't have anywhere to release it. So she spent her time touring around with Lilith Fair and touring herself acoustically and eventually she put out an EP on the Bar/None label called Please Do Not Disturb with a lot of references to the music industry. In August 1998 Juliana Hatfield released Bed on the label Rounder/Zo? an album she wrote and recorded in just a few weeks. The sound is very raw and unpolished and Juliana is yet again exploring new territories in the lyrics and song structures.
