Last year, Tobias Jesso Jr. made an album with his former gardener. Now, Juliana Hatfield is sharing a surprise record she made with her contractor. It’s called Bets, and it arrives on the heels of December’s Lightning Might Strike.
…The beginning of the project is as fascinating as its music. While Hatfield was renovating her home, she found out that her contractor also loved music. This shared interest turned into a creative partnership and they created Bets. They spent several months working together, combining Hatfield’s unique style with new ideas from her collaborator.
Bets mixes Hatfield’s indie rock background with a variety of other styles, creating music that feels both familiar and new. The album…
Tag Archive: Juliana Hatfield
It was a difficult time for me when I started working on this album. I had just uprooted myself from the city apartment building where I’d been living for twenty years to a house in a more rural town two hours away where I knew no one when one of my best friends died (“Ashes”), and then my dog died (“Constant Companion”), then my mother was diagnosed with esophagus cancer (“Scratchers”). I was pretty depressed for a solid year (“Long Slow Nervous Breakdown”) and lost and very lonely (“Harmonizing With Myself”). I was thinking about fate and circumstance and about how I’d ended up where I was (“Where Are You Now”).
However much or hard I try, it seems, I’ve never had much control over much in my life. I should say here that my mother’s younger brother was…