Juliana Hatfield Artistfacts

July 27, 1967
Born in Wiscasset, Maine, and raised in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Juliana Hatfield comes from a creative and professional household. Her father, Phillip M. Hatfield, is a radiologist, and her mother, Julie Hatfield, is a former fashion editor for The Boston Globe - a background that may well have informed the sardonic eye Juliana turned on the image industry in songs like "Supermodel." Despite recording one of her most celebrated songs under the title "My Sister," Hatfield has no sisters - she has two brothers.
Hatfield studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she met bassist Evan Dando and drummer John Strohm, forming the indie rock band the Blake Babies in 1985. The band became a fixture of the Boston underground scene before dissolving in 1991, with Hatfield going on to launch both her solo career and the Juliana Hatfield Three.
Hatfield's relationship with Evan Dando of the Lemonheads - her Blake Babies bandmate - became one of the most discussed entanglements in 1990s indie rock. She told the Los Angeles Times in 1993 that the two had never actually slept together, a candid admission that drew considerable attention at the time. Their creative and personal closeness was nonetheless evident: she contributed bass to the Lemonheads' 1992 breakthrough album It's a Shame About Ray.
In the early 1990s, Hatfield told Interview magazine she was still a virgin - initially an attempt to deflect persistent rumors about her relationship with Evan Dando, but a revelation that instead generated a wave of media attention she found both baffling and uncomfortable. She later revisited the episode in her 2008 memoir When I Grow Up, which Magnet Magazine described as the memoir of "America's most famous 23-year-old virgin."
Hatfield has been a committed vegetarian for many years and has spoken publicly about animal rights as a cause she feels strongly about. Her convictions have been consistent across decades of interviews.
Hatfield has guest-starred on several television shows over the years, most notably making a recurring appearance as an angel named Julie in the cult Fox comedy-drama My So-Called Life (1994-1995), the show that starred Claire Danes. The role fit neatly with her image at the time as a kind of otherworldly, waif-like figure in alternative rock, though Hatfield herself consistently resisted that romanticization of her persona.
She has released music with remarkable consistency since the early 1990s, building a catalog as a solo artist and bandleader with the Juliana Hatfield Three. Frustrated with major label pressures early in her career, she moved toward independent releases and eventually launched her own label, Ye Olde Records, giving her full control over her output.
Hatfield has struggled with depression and eating disorders across her career - subjects she addressed obliquely in the song "Addicted" on Become What You Are (1993). In When I Grow Up she wrote candidly about the psychological toll of the music industry, body image pressures, and the difficulty of sustaining a creative life. The book is one of the more honest accounts of life as a woman in 1990s alternative rock.

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