Making the Most of a Mid-Life Crisis
By Andrew Clayman
Published in Chicago Innerview, December 2008
Though never a superstar, Juliana Hatfield was in many ways the quintessential alt-rock woman of the ‘90s. Her appealing blend of raucous guitar-pop and school-girl vocals made her more approachable than Liz Phair, cooler than Sheryl Crow, and a good deal cleaner than Courtney Love. In retrospect, many of Hatfield’s soundtrack and TV appearances now read like a pop culture summation of the era-—Reality Bites, My So-Called Life, 120 Minutes, The Adventures of Pete & Pete. The nostalgia runs deep, but it also does its disservices. At 41, Juliana Hatfield is no longer in the MTV “Buzz Bin” or palling around with Evan Dando. She is still making great music, however, and also sharing the unique tale of her 20-year career in a new memoir called When I Grow Up.
“When I started writing the book, I was in my mid thirties,” Hatfield says, speaking via phone from her home in Cambridge, MA. “And I think that I was just starting to assess my life—how far I had come, what I had accomplished, and what I had failed to accomplish. I really wanted to take stock of my career, because I had found myself suddenly hitting a wall. I had always enjoyed the work—writing, recording, touring—but all the sudden, I was burned out.”
Like many of her contemporaries, Hatfield had phased back into cult status when the “alternative” bubble burst. But despite a loyal fanbase and excellent critical responses to much of her later material, the inevitable midlife crisis was setting in.
“Actually, it was more pre-midlife crisis,” she says. “I’m hitting the real midlife crisis right now.”
Just days before this interview, Hatfield finished a rehabilitation stint at a clinic for victims of depression and eating disorders. She has battled depression all her life, and has regularly addressed it in her songs. Now, she’s begun writing weekly blogs on her website as another emotional outlet, often inspiring her fans and gaining inspiration from them at the same time.
“I’ve been really shocked and overwhelmed by the amount of support and well wishes that people have been offering me,” she says. “I don’t think I realized how much I needed it.”
A self-described “socially awkward” person, Hatfield doesn’t find it unusual that a shy woman would wind up as a confessional writer, let alone a rock star.
“I think it makes a lot of sense. For me, music and writing are ways of communicating things that I have difficulty communicating verbally to people. People who have social phobias feel afraid and nervous, like they’re not in control. But when you write a song or prose, you’re in control of what you’re saying. So I can present my words in an artful way, and I can be the person that I want to be. It’s a way to have control over who I am.”
Hatfield also has total control over her career these days, having released her latest, well-received LP How to Walk Away on her own label, Ye Olde Records. It’s one of the benefits of being a “female lone wolf.”
“Right, the unknown archetype,” she laughs. “The good part is there’s no box I’m supposed to fit in to hold on to my fans. I’m not like Joan Jett. I don’t have to wear leather pants and dark eye makeup to be the image that people want me to be. I can do whatever I want, basically. The negative is that I don’t fit in anywhere. I can’t really be categorized, and that makes it hard to sell myself. You know, I make these raw, sloppy rock records, and then I make these pretty pop records. And it doesn’t really make sense over the long haul. So, in that way, I’m an outsider, and I’ll probably always be on the fringes.”
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