"She was a willowy beauty with charming shyness and a slightly tragic air". So says Brett Milano, of Juliana Hatfield in her starting-out days, in his recent book The Sound Of Our Town: A History Of Boston Rock+Roll.

Juliana Hatfield- no less an intriguing, compelling character today- has been working as a recording artist for twenty years. Starting in her teens, with her first band, the critically-acclaimed Boston-based indie rock band the Blake Babies (who self-released their first album before moving on to the North Carolina-based independent Mammoth Records) Hatfield has paved her own unique way. From the beginning she has distinguished herself as a pop/rock artist with brains, determination, and an unwavering dedication to her craft in the face of a rapidly-evolving music industry.

Hatfield made waves in the mid-nineties on Atlantic Records with her modern rock hits "My Sister", "Spin The Bottle", and "Universal Heartbeat", which reinforced her status as a respected, uncompromising songwriter, guitar player, and producer with impeccable pop instincts, a disdain for artifice, a completely original voice, and a contrarian streak.

After leaving Atlantic in 1998, Hatfield was the first signing to Zoe Records, a Rounder Records imprint. Zoe's fourth and final Hatfield release was 2004's In Exile Deo, named one of that year's ten best albums by Jon Pareles in the New York Times. The Boston Globe called In Exile Deo "a lush, brash collection that lashes Hatfield's formidable alt-rock cred to irresistible pop hooks…smart, swaggering, gorgeously-written and produced (by Hatfield) in sonic technicolor…the breakthrough work of an artist at the peak of her powers".

In 2005 Hatfield came full circle, back to full DIY independence, starting her own label (Ye Olde Records) and releasing the catchy but somewhat abrasive Made In China ("her most urgent, refreshingly unpolished output in years, seething with hooky, garage-rock vitriol"- Time Out New York)

How To Walk Away is Hatfield's tenth album as a solo artist (not including side projects like Some Girls, as well as four Blake Babies albums). Amazingly, Hatfield's work improves with each passing year.

How To Walk Away finds Hatfield's singing in top form. "Finally," says Hatfield, "I feel like my voice has grown into itself and I'm not struggling so much against its little-girl-ness. It's sounding fuller and more grown-up, to reflect the woman that I am, now."

HTWA features guest appearances by two other distinctive vocalists: Psychedelic Furs' Richard Butler- on "This Lonely Love" and Nada Surf's Matthew Caws- on "Such A Beautiful Girl".

Other featured guest musicians were Fountains Of Wayne guitarist Jody Porter (some lead guitar); Jeff Hill, of Rufus Wainwright's band, on bass; and Ethan Eubanks of the Grey Race on drums. Tracy Bonham (who, like Hatfield, began her career in Boston and had a modern rock hit in the '90's ("Mother Mother"), guested on violin, and Jason Hatfield, Juliana's brother, played the piano on two songs which he co-wrote.

"Jason's a great songwriter and musician, though he doesn't do it for a living," says Juliana. "For this album, he gave me these two fully fleshed-out demos with all the chord progressions and also titles: 'Remember November' and 'Such A Beautiful Girl'. So all I had to do was come up with words and melodies."

Sonically, the song is possibly Hatfield's first recorded power ballad. "Yeah," she says, "we tried to be careful about not letting it get too cheesy. We wanted to keep it fairly raw- more like the Beatles than American Idol (with the sounds and the mix) 'cause sometimes there's a really fine line between the two, you know?"

The album was recorded at Stratosphere Sound, the downtown NYC studio co-owned by Adam Schlesinger (Fountains Of Wayne), James Iha (formerly of Smashing Pumpkins), and Andy Chase. Chase, founding member- with Schlesinger- of revered alt-rock/pop band Ivy and acclaimed producer (Ivy, Tahiti 80), had much to do with the sound and feel of How To Walk Away, as producer. His smooth, lush sensibility is a far cry- a full 180 degrees, almost- from Hatfield's last full-length studio work, Made In China. How To Walk Away is evocative, layered, unhurried, and yet Chase has managed to retain Hatfield's essential rawness of spirit, smoothing out some rough edges but not all- witness, for example, the loose, danceable Rolling Stones-meet-Sheryl Crow-meets-old school Liz Phair groove of "Now I'm Gone", sung (and played) by Hatfield in one inspired improvisational take.

Hatfield has always straddled the line between meticulously-composed pop and scrappy rock- she has been characterized as a cross between Chrissie Hynde (of the Pretenders) and Belinda Carlyle (of the Go Go's). How To Walk Away has its share of unbridled rock and roll moments- kiss offs and heavy guitars- but the overall feel is smooth, rich, soothing and contemplative. The songs and performances have been polished without sacrificing any of the stark honesty or truth. In fact, this is some of Hatfield's most candid writing ever.

"The songs are very autobiographical," says Hatfield, "although I do recognize that whenever I'm writing about myself I am, in a sense, writing about- or for- everyone else; I know that other people out there are just like me, in that they're human."

Walking away- and the loneliness that sometimes results- is a theme in these songs. Escape, and the difficulty and necessity of doing so; moving on, learning from mistakes, enduring- all factor in giving the album a certain gravity and poignancy. A sense of inevitable and amost willful aloneness pervades this collection of songs.

"I do feel very much alone," says Hatfield. "I always have. I think it's part of my genetic makeup; I live in a kind of self-enforced exile. It's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, I get a whole lot of work done when I'm alone and not tangled up in the dramas and complexities of relationships. I feel wonderfully free when I'm alone, but I pay for my freedom, sometimes, in loneliness."

Hatfield has always written about troubled relationships- romantic and otherwise- but rather than agonizing over a sad state of affairs How To Walk Away seems to take a fatalistic attitude. It is set in a vaguely purgatorial post-relationship- or maybe pre-relationship- landscape. The protagonists of the songs don't expect to find wisdom and serenity and forgiveness at the end of every long, rocky road (there are no Hollywood happy endings here) but at the same time they know that understanding and sureness may come. These songs' characters press on- because they must- with the full knowledge of all that has gone wrong in their lives and all that cannot be repaired, only stepped over, after having been resigned to the trash heap of experience.

Fatalism's flip side is faith, and even in an outwardly sad song like "Such A Beautiful Girl" ("She's such a beautiful girl/but she lives in an ugly world"), hope is not dead; the girl of the title waits patiently for a future that she knows- odds are- will be better than where she finds herself now, in a volatile, frightening, dysfunctional family situation.

Escape can be rejuvenating, exhilarating, and even triumphant, as in "Now I'm Gone", with its concise, confident, matter-of-fact chorus which says, simply: It was you or me So I left Now I'm gone.

How To Walk Away is not all earnestness, however. Hatfield's dry, biting sense of humour comes out in "Just Lust" ("It's just lust; it doesn't mean I love you"), a sort of post-feminist anthem that takes back, for women, a sentiment that men are assumed to have claimed as their own. The song's message: Sometimes girls, too, just want to get it on with no strings attached. The song turns the idea of women as the emotional, needy sex on its head, addressing an emotional, needy male.

Another song, "Shining On", was mixed by veteran hit-making producer David Kahne (Kelly Clarkson, Paul McCartney, Sugar Ray, the Strokes, Regina Spektor, the Bangles, Romeo Void, etc. ad infinitum). The song's unsentimental insistence on remembering the good rather than the bad is bittersweet but life-affirming, and shows a hard-won resilience and a will to forge ahead after disappointment and betrayal. "Every light in my mind goes shining on/Every star at dawn goes shining on" could be a metaphor for Hatfield's refusal to feel bitter or battered or cheated by a fickle music marketplace that has seen Hatfield toiling in relative obscurity while she does some of the best work in her career.

"I feel really lucky to have made a living at this for so long," says Hatfield. "And I generally believe that where I am is where I'm supposed to be. The bottom line is I love what I do; making my music brings me joy and fulfillment, over and over again. And I'll continue to do it until I don't love it anymore."

updated bio, from somewhere
just copied and pasted from another forum
lewl

SIMPLICITY IS BEAUTIFUL

Simplicity is beautiful. That was just a thought I had one day. As far as I know, it was an original thought, but I’m sure a lot of people have thought the same thing at one time or another. I guess you could say it’s a philosophy, or a way of life. Or could be, if I could stick to it and live by it day to day. But often there are just too many piles of unanswered, unanswerable questions, and problems, and emotional and residual gunk clogging up my head and heart.

I may seem complicated and inconsistent but really I’m just a simple girl. Give me a plate of fried clams and a Corona and a sunset (or, in the absence of a sunset, a Red Sox game on the TV) and I am happy as a pig in shit.

Someone once asked me, “What is your idea of perfect happiness?” I answered, “Floating on my back in the bay.” And I meant it. It’s such an utterly simple pleasure. There’s nothing better. When I am floating, alone, on my back on a hot day in cool salt water, looking up at the sky or closing my eyes, all sound (kids splashing, gulls squawking, the far-off motor of a motorboat motoring, a dog barking on the shore) softened and muffled by the water covering my ears, it’s like I am back in the womb, but with lots more freedom and leg room. Buoyed, my head feels like it weighs practically nothing and for once there is no tension in my neck. My limbs are fully relaxed and extended in four directions like a supine Vitruvian man and there is no harsh, stinky, eye-burning chlorine, no rules, no tomorrow, no yesterday; nothing but now, nothing but floating. Life is beautiful. I am beautiful, perfect, efficient. God or evolution gave me a body that floats on water! I am back to our primordial immersion, back whence I came. If I’m thinking at all, I’m thinking, “This is the best. This is so much better and more comfortable than being upright.” The ripples and waves of the salty water carry me gently up and down and I drift so slowly and imperceptibly with the water that, with my eyes closed, I don’t even realize I am drifting because the whole thing — the whole vast bay which meets the ocean — is part of me. And there’s just nothing else that makes so much sense.

Unless it’s the smell of the fur on Betty’s head when I lean down to kiss her

or the sound of the tufted titmouse (”ee-er, ee-er”) in the springtime

Louie Louie

I will always love you

Do you really want to hurt me

Wild thing

What I like about you (an aside: try playing this Romantics song back to back with the Pretenders’ “Middle of the Road”)

I can see clearly now

You’ve got a friend

You are the sunshine of my life

Please please me

What goes on

I want you to want me

One plus one equals two.

“the inalienable dignity of light and air” (John Cheever)

I am unhappy here with you so I am leaving.

I am hungry so I am going to eat something and then when I have had enough I am going to put the fork down. (took me the longest time to learn how simple that one is)

Jack Purcells

Levi’s

bread

rice

walking

morning

blue

yellow

snow

rain

light and air

I have certain rituals that help keep me sane in the absence of a 9-to-5 job or anything else that I am obligated to do regularly and which would conceivably help to structure my time and my thinking and my moods. These simple rituals soothe me and make me feel that life — the world — has some kind of order, and a functioning system of day-to-day, month-to-month. They bring me comfort and joy, over and over again:

I read a John Cheever story every day.

I have the Boston Globe delivered each weekday and I read it at breakfast with my cup of peppermint tea which lasts exactly all the way until the last page of the paper, when I swallow the last drop. And, incidentally, I don’t read the paper from front to back. I have my own system, which I repeat every morning: the arts section first, then sports, then business, then city/region, then the front page, at the end.

I either go to the gym or run every other day.

On the days that I don’t go to the gym or run, I lift small weights at home — not much (six sets of fifteen repetitions); just enough to get the blood pumping and so my muscles get some practice.

I take a nap on the couch every afternoon at about three o’clock. Well, I am narcoleptic, so I guess “nap” isn’t really the right word. “Crash” or “Suddenly feel violently tired and fall onto the couch and surrender instantly to deep, luscious, dreaming, drooling-on the-pillow sleep” is more like it.

I make my bed every morning.

I do all the day’s dishes every night.

And now I post one of these things every Monday.

One reason that I sometimes hate the internet and computers is that they are not at all simple. When my computer goes on the fritz I go completely mental because I don’t understand how computers work, and so I can’t repair them. And I don’t know how I am supposed to get my head around even the idea of something that doesn’t seem to even exist in real space/time. How can the Interweb possibly work? It’s more vast and complicated and mind-fucking (mind-fuckable?) than the waste and sewage and water systems of the island of Manhattan (I don’t get how that could possibly function, either). What is cyberspace? Where is it? Can you take me there? (I just looked up “cyberspace” in the dictionary and this is what it said: “the notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs”. So then I looked up “notional”: “hypothetical or imaginary”! So cyberspace doesn’t really exist at all, just as I suspected. It’s an imaginary environment. No wonder I can’t get my head around it.) When my file disappears, or when I put it in the “trash,” where does it go? Anywhere? If it can’t be traced and if there is no record of it and I can’t touch it, was it ever real? And don’t any of you who are computer geniuses try explaining it to me, because I won’t understand. My brain doesn’t like that technical stuff. I prefer my imaginary environments to be less technical/technological, and less prone to physical/mechanical breakdown. My dream is to shut it all down one day and go live my own personal Walden. The World Wide Web is a web of intangibles that will — mark my words — be torn one day, sending much of the developed world spinning and tumbling into anarchy and mayhem and suicide and bankruptcy.

But so, I was saying, when my computer breaks and starts acting weird/drugged/possessed/recalcitrant, and the little swirly spectrum pops up every time I click on anything, I get hysterical because I feel so helpless (because I am unable to fix the problem) and then I have to call the Geek Squad (who know things I will never understand). Though the Geek is a total stranger (and possibly a serial killer or a rapist) I have to let him into my home and my computer (which is really personal — though it is a Mac, it is a personal computer — my personal computer — Juliana’s computer — and letting a stranger into it is kind of like letting a stranger into my underwear drawer) because only he has the power to save my computer and all the precious info it is hiding from me somewhere inaccessible to me and the Geek knows it, knows he has this power over me, knows I have no choice but to trust him, to give him free reign, to take as long as he says it takes and charge as much as he wants to fix my godforsaken broken computer.

But if I’m riding my bike and the chain falls off I can put the chain back on and then Voila! Tada! It’s fixed! Simple. I like things I can understand.

And, hey, tell me, why do we need microwave ovens? There is something so sinister/creepy and science fiction about them, about the idea of radiation or radio waves or whatever getting all up in my food — that I am about to put into my body, my temple, my one and only one precious god-given body. I’d rather light the fire or turn on the gas and put the food in the pan on the flame and take the five or ten or thirty or even sixty minutes to re-heat the leftovers or cook the food that way — and see or smell or sense when it is done to my taste. Who are we and why are we so special that we can’t wait five or ten freaking minutes to heat something up on the stove or in the toaster oven? Do we really have to have it in one minute? Are our lives so frantic and runaway that we can’t put a damn pot on a damn fire and exercise a little gustatory TLC? Is convenience so important that we are willing to be rendered essentially helpless/impotent when our machines break? How are the children of tomorrow going to feed themselves when the national electrical grid is attacked by terrorists? They won’t know what to do. They think dinner happens in the microwave — they think cooking means punching a couple of buttons and then waiting for the beep, the poor things.

And that’s why I don’t have a dishwasher, either. I want to be self-reliant, above all, and to be able to survive when the power runs out. I can wash dishes easily with my hands and actually do a better, more thorough, less toxic and less wasteful job than any machine.

The same can be said for washing clothes in the sink and air drying them on a clothesline.

My mother didn’t actively teach me not to waste, but I learned from her example. Food was never thrown away — what wasn’t used (eggshells, avocado skins, apple cores, etc.), or was rotten, went into the compost heap. She would even go so far as to scrape the bits of mold off bread that had been around a little too long, and eat the “good” part. (But I — I am almost ashamed to admit it — had to draw the line somewhere — at mold.) When socks got holey, you darned the socks — sewed them up, and kept wearing them. When you left a room, you turned out the light(s). Old, not-needed-anymore clothes went to Goodwill or the Salvation Army or the thrift store whose proceeds went toward college scholarships for local high school students. The heat was turned way down at night — in the cold snowy New England winters — when we were safely under our blankets and covers.

I think “Simplicity Is Beautiful” is beautiful. The whole thing involves only five chords, though neither the vocal arrangement nor the guitar solo — or the overall effect of the recording — is simple, so the song kind of contradicts itself.

The lyrics are so uncomplicated as to be borderline retarded and so I fear telling you all the words. They are not meant to be read but to be part of the whole vibe of the song.

The vocal arrangement, as it builds on itself and the harmonies come in, is a tad complex, and that is why I have only played the song a handful of times ever, live. It’s hard to hold those long low notes at the beginning — the ones that go up a step at the end of each long held phrase — while playing guitar. And I never trusted any of the guys/gals in any of my bands to get the vocal harmonies exactly right. If there had been two or three me’s maybe We could’ve done it justice on the stage. But even then it would have been difficult for Us because the vocals — melody and harmony — had to be just so and perfectly tight with each other, like hands in gloves, to work. And the song won’t work without all the parts.

I think I played it in London a couple of years ago when I did some solo shows over there (just me and a guitar). I attempted the song because people were calling for it, and I felt sort of obligated since I hadn’t been to Europe to play in ten years, and I never toured there on Only Everything (the album containing “Simplicity is Beautiful”). I felt I owed it to the Euros, or that they deserved to hear it, after waiting so long, and I sort of let myself by convinced to do it, and I am afraid it just didn’t work without all the parts. It was probably a mistake not doing it the way it was meant to be done. But if it made some people happy, good.

The guitar solo, too, is a tricky, complicated mess. I don’t think I could ever reproduce it. It was a few takes — a few moments — of inspired improvisation that the recording engineers/producers happened to capture on tape (yes, tape — it was a 2-inch analog tape recording).

Anyway, the solo is two (or more? Three, maybe?) solos that I liked (I couldn’t decide which was the best), on top of each other — sometimes doing different things and sometimes — like in the beginning and at the end of the solo — coming together. It’s the opposite of simplicity, I guess. Intertwining melodic leads with no real rhyme or reason, without a plan. There is some order, and some lovely, unharnessed chaos. Just like life. I think it is really pretty, simple or not. It says something to me — and I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. Something about the pain and ecstasy and heartbreak and joy of living. It’s a mystery where this feeling comes from or how it got there in the song — how chords and melodies can convey so much that resonates with so many people from all over the place. It’s magic. But it’s not my magic — I didn’t make it up or create it — it is the magic that already exists. I just happened to find some of it and grab onto it for a few minutes.

I started off the guitar solo with a theft. I took the vocal melody from Dinosaur Jr.’s “Tarpit” (from the You’re Living All Over Me album, one of my biggest musical inspirations) and played an interpretation of it at the beginning of the solo and then I went where it took me — into some other world, into my world.

The song had been conceived when I picked up my guitar one day and went to play the two verse chords of “Tarpit” on my guitar using barre chords but, unbeknownst to me, my guitar was in drop D tuning and what came out of my guitar as I attempted to play the “Tarpit” chords with a drop D tuning was something so pretty and sad and wonderful that it had to be a song, my song. An excellent accident.

MABEL
If you want to understand what I was thinking when I wrote “Mabel” you have to watch a movie called “A Woman Under The Influence.” I first discovered it when I was in my early twenties and every time I have seen it since, it has affected me very strongly, partly because of parallels between the film’s subject matter and my own life, and partly because it is just so heart wrenching.


Mabel Longhetti is the main character in the film. She has some mental problems that are not explicitly defined or labeled, but it seems Mabel is dealing with a spell of mania, and, as the film progresses, with some attendant paranoia and delusion (mild, though). Could be manic-depression. (The verse and chorus of my song mimic manic-depression: the verses are slow-moving and the choruses are frenzied, distorted, agitated.) Or it could be that Mabel is just an unconventional, uncategorizable woman, with a fluid self/personality and a unique way of expressing herself (or trying to) and that peoples’ uncomfortable and sometimes unkind reactions to her — their misunderstanding of her — is Mabel’s real problem. Whatever you call it, Mabel’s “dilemma” seems to have been a long-running thing. It is part of who she is.


The material and the story are handled vérité-style (John Cassavetes, the director, is known for this) so it all seems really fresh. (The effect is both surprising — surprising because it is so rare to see something so lifelike in a fictional film — and familiar — because I’ve lived these movie scenes.) It’s a glimpse into the strangeness and randomness and untidiness of real life as opposed to idealized life or life in shorthand, as is often depicted in more conventional mainstream movie treatments whose stories and scripts/dialog and characters are so controlled and formulaic and boring/simple/cartoonish and unlike any life I’ve ever known.


Mabel has trouble acting “normal” — in the ways “civilized” society demands and expects. Sometimes she goes outside of the bounds of what is generally deemed to be “appropriate” behaviour and her “eccentricities” are especially noticeable in social situations and outside of her home. In a scene on an L.A. sidewalk, Mabel paces, muttering to herself, occasionally darting out into the street, waiting anxiously for the school bus to deliver her kids home from school. She asks a few random passersby for the time but none of them answers her — they all try to avoid her – the “crazy” lady — and widen their paths to go around her.


Mabel has an awareness of her condition, which frightens and confuses her just as it frightens and confuses her loved ones. It is fascinating and heartbreaking to watch as her family tries to reel Mabel in — back to reality — and tries to manage this crisis as Mabel starts to kind of lose her grip. She wants to be a good mother and she wants to be a good wife but it is hard for her to play these roles and perform her motherly/wifely duties when there are so many other sides to her.


“A Woman Under The Influence” is a very authentic depiction of someone struggling with her reality. It’s not a screaming lunatic being dragged away in a straight jacket but rather a family just trying to keep it together. These are real-seeming people, a real couple, real children, like you and me, who are trying to deal with an extremely complicated problem.


Mental illness is probably almost as frightening and difficult and agonizing for the family of the sick person as it is for the sick person. Having a mentally ill loved one can make the family crazy — crazy with worry, crazy with fear, with anger toward the sick one who can’t or won’t just pull it together! and stop acting/talking crazy/irresponsible, etc.


Mabel lovingly calls her kids “banana” and “spaghetti,” sometimes — tender nicknames. Mabel has a lot of love for these three small children and for her husband, as they all have for her, but as the film shows, sometimes love isn’t enough — or sometimes mental illness stretches the limits of love, and breaks it, damages it — shatters the normally safe haven of family. The illness can be so strong and overpowering and disruptive that a person must be removed from the home and planted in the funny farm/psych ward for a while, for her own good — for everyone’s — to protect her and those around her.


When Mabel runs into the bathroom and grabs a razor and Nick, her husband, runs into the bathroom after her and pries the razor out of Mabel’s now-bloody hand, we can see just how dangerous it can get. And when Nick is off on an all-night job Mabel gets drunk at a bar and then brings a strange man — a man she met in the bar — back to her house. She didn’t particularly want or mean to bring the man back home with her — her judgment was impaired. Who knows what might have happened to her? She could have been burgled and/or raped and/or killed by the stranger.


No one who loves a sick-in-the-head person wants to have to put her in the hospital — to authorize locking her up; it’s agonizing for a husband/sister/parent/child to watch, helplessly, as a doctor or emergency medical technician sticks the patient with a needle (like the doctor who is called to Mabel’s house does) full of haldol/seroquel/thorazine/risperdal/depakote but sometimes there is no other option, and that is why Mabel is ultimately committed.


The film came out in 1974. I think it was easier to commit someone back then than it is now. Mental patients today have a lot more awareness of their rights as patients — rights regarding four-point restraints and involuntary commitment and enforced medication, etc. and more knowledge about all the different kinds of specific mental illness classifications and the DSM — patients have empowered themselves. But still, when someone is really mental, she’s really mental, and there’s no getting around it. And the authorities can and/or must step in, however gently/caringly/sympathetically.


Mabel is complex and Nick, Mabel’s husband, isn’t. Nick, understandably, can’t handle the situation. He has three young kids and a demanding job and his wife is going off the rails and can’t necessarily be trusted to always do the right thing. The neighbors are suspicious of her odd behaviour. In one scene she freaks out the father of her kids’ friends. The man removes his kids from Mabel’s house because he doesn’t feel his kids are safe there alone with Mabel. (No one knows exactly what to do — how to deal — with Mabel when she gets kooky and oversteps the bounds of decorum.)


When Mabel gets up on the couch and puts her arms out like wings and pretends to be a bird — a dying swan, humming (music from “Swan Lake”, I think), to herself, in a kind of trance, appearing to be losing her grip on reality, you could say that it is just her way of coping — with anxiety, with her condition, with the sometimes overwhelming demands of living with a family and having to love and be loved while holding on to your Self — but all befuddled Nick can think to do then is to slap her, hard, and knock her to the ground, to try and snap her out of it.


When I sing ”Check out that lady, she’s talking to herself,” I am taking the attitude of a judgmental stranger observing someone like Mabel — someone who seems to be acting “funny”; who is not correctly composed in public, who is muttering things to herself; a woman who is jumping up and down, happy, so inappropriately happy, when she sees the school bus approaching with her kids on it. The onlooker sees a weirdo ( a beautiful weirdo, though [Gena Rowlands was so beautiful]) pacing back and forth, going from the sidewalk into the street and back again, but really she is just a woman wanting so badly to do the right thing, to be a good mother, at that moment, in the only way she knows. She may seem unstable or nuts or scary — her clothing, behaviour, mannerisms and speech are unconventional, without context or historical precedent —and though it may be easy and tempting to write her off as “batty” or “not normal” or “not like me,” she is one of us. She is someone, like you, with a family — with children and a husband and parents and in-laws and friends, all of whom worry like crazy about her and are baffled and torn-up and not sure what to do to help. They can see Mabel is in a lot of pain and that she is confused and agitated and that she can’t express it and that she fears others wouldn’t understand, and would maybe even condemn her, if she could make it clear to them what she is going through.


There are no easy answers and I love the film for not forcing any on us and for not tying the story up at the end in a neat little bow of resolution and happiness and “closure.” Life isn’t simple like that and brain chemistry problems (and existential crises) are not fully understood, even by the medical/psychiatric/psychopharmalogical establishment.


I don’t like movies with happily ever after Disney endings (like “Pretty Woman,” etc. — ugh). Those kinds of films don’t comfort me, as they are intended to do. I am comforted, rather, by realistic depictions of the human mess. Because it is a comfort to know that I am not alone in my occasional misery and confusion — to know that my family is not the only one struggling with problems that are never really solved — to know that I am not the only one who has ever wanted to jump out of a window — to know that I am not the only one who ever wished someone close to me would disappear.


There is no such thing as a definitively happy ending. Life keeps going on and nothing is ever finished, especially if you have a chronic, incurable, hard-to-manage problem. Nothing is ever finished. We have to keep struggling or else give up. Those are the two choices. Fight or give up.

i'll send you something by her, if you want. she's great.

"She's far too skinny."

I must remember that when I listen to the new album.

“Hotels” isn’t really a song about hotels. It is a sonic longing for “home.” Not necessarily for a physical place, but for the feeling of belonging, safety, assuredness, comfort.

Sometimes, between tours, I would go to my mother’s house — the house I grew up in — to decompress and also to try and find some of that nice “home” feeling, but I would find that that place wasn’t really “home” anymore. I wasn’t a kid anymore and I didn’t really belong there anymore. But that place was the only home I had ever known.

I wondered, writing the song, if I would ever have my own home, my own family. I had just been dumped by somebody, and this, and my romantic track record, did not bode well. I’d been on the road for so long — in an endless cycle of write/record/tour — that I hadn’t established a real substantial life of my own outside of the road. And I don’t know if you can even call the road “life.” It’s more like avoiding life — keeping real life at arm’s length by escaping it; by putting it on hold while you dart around the country and the globe.

I missed my effortless childhood friendships, and the fun games we used to play outdoors in summer as we raced to make use of the remaining light as dusk turned to dark. It makes me kind of sad to think that I don’t play any of them anymore, and probably never will. No kickball, no tag, no Red Rover. Now, at summer’s end, as I put together the song, the sound of the maple tree leaves swishing in the dark quiet of the summer night (“the night wind in the trees”) broke my heart. The sound was so evocative of things I missed and things I knew I might never get the chance to experience. And of all the things I might’ve dreamed of as a child.

I’ve always been very sensitive to nature, and the weather and stuff. It stirs strong emotions in me. God — my idea of god — is in nature. Not in church, but in the wind in the trees, in the falling snow, in thunder and lightning, in rainstorms, in phosphorescence, in the aurora borealis, and in the cedar waxwing, the coolest-looking punk rockest bird you’ll ever see. (Now that — the cedar waxwing — is intelligent design.) That’s why I think crimes against Nature are so heinous and hard to understand. Nature never sinned, so Nature doesn’t deserve punishment.

I can’t even kill bugs except in clear-cut cases of self-defense: I will defend myself from a mosquito or a tick or a louse or any other similar bloodsucker-type aggressor, if it is in the act of attacking me. But ants? Daddy Long Legs’? Beetles, worms, bees, roaches, pinchers, ladybugs? I leave them alone. What harm are they doing? They are just trying to live their lives. If I find one indoors I scoop it up and put it back outside.

We had this game we would play, outdoors, that involved one person (“It”) closing his eyes and counting while the other four or five or however many kids were playing went and hid in various (hiding) places of their choosing, scattered around the house — crouching behind bushes, behind trees. And then the designated “It” person, done counting, would take off running a path around the house and kids would jump out from their different points along the runner’s route and try to tag “It” while “It’ tried to make it all the way around the house — 360 jagged degrees — without being tagged. Whoever tagged “It” first go to be “It” next. As “It,” just before I took off running, I would feel a scary/thrilling surge of adrenaline, kind of like right before going onstage.

This game was best played in the dark or near-dark.

There was a thick nautical-type rope attached to a big high tree branch in the back yard. It hung down to about five feet above the ground. The rope was looped and knotted at the bottom. I would grab onto the loop tightly with both hands and go running in one direction and fly up into the air and do a half turn and then come back down, hitting the ground running and then flying back up into the air on the other side. There was a dirt groove worn into the ground underneath the rope. As I got going and building up speed and height, I would whip my body around and try to do as many 360 degree twirls as I could while I was up in the air — to do more and more rotations each time, as I gained momentum — like a skateboarder or snowboarder would do with his board on the turns up above the ramp.

We were always outdoors, as kids, in the warm months. My dad even had outdoor punishments. If one or any of us was being too loud/argumentative/rambunctious at the dinner table Dad sometimes would order the offender, “Go outside and yell at a tree for two minutes.” Or “Go run around the house three times. NOW.” And we would obey. It made being punished kind of fun.

My father also concocted a punishment involving something he called the “apple butter paddle.” It was really just an extra-large wooden spoon that hung by a nail on the wall in the kitchen. I don’t know why he called it the apple butter paddle because it was a spoon not a “paddle” and no one in our house ever ate apple butter nor did Dad ever make it, or churn it, as the name — and the hugeness of the implement — implied that he might. As far as I remember, the apple butter paddle was used only for one thing:

When one of us was being bad at dinner, sometimes Dad would announce that it was time for the apple butter paddle and the offender would have to prepare to be whacked on the butt with the big thick wooden spoon. Whoever was in trouble would have to assume the position — bending over, standing on two feet, next to the fridge, by the point at the wall on which the apple butter paddle hung. Dad would make a big production out of it. He’d roll up his sleeves, push his chair back from the dinner table and walk over to the apple butter paddle and take it slowly, deliberately, from its post on the wall. While all this was happening, the one about to be whacked would run into my dad’s office and grab a few magazines — Sail, National Geographic (ones with hard bindings) — from the magazine rack and shove them down the back of his pants and then run back into the kitchen and bend over, giggling, the magazines clearly visible — sticking out up above his waistline — to Dad and all others observing the spectacle. Then Dad would reach his hand up, holding the spoon, reach it up, way up, dramatically, and then he would bring it down and “tap” on the padded ass of the victim. One little tap. It wasn’t a real punishment but more like a comedic dramatization of a punishment, or a symbolic punishment. (Meant to teach us something, I’m sure, but I’m not sure what. Maybe to teach us that authority figures should not be taken seriously.)

I felt kind of lost when I wrote “Hotels.” I felt that I was in a transitional phase but I also felt that my whole life was a transitional phase; always on the road — to somewhere, from somewhere. All I could think to do — all I knew how to do — was music, more music about wanting to go back to a time and place when everything seemed possible and I had all I thought I wanted and I had no worries.

I don’t actually think that time or that place or that feeling ever really existed — memory is part fantasy — but I wanted to feel that way. I wanted to go back. To some idealized childhood that probably never really happened. Back to nine or ten years old. Before my parents’ divorce. Before troubles. Before worry and depression and anxiety and boyfriends. But I knew it was impossible.

Always leaving, always traveling, never home — that was my life. Even when I was “home,” I wasn’t home. My restlessness (wanting/needing to escape from my Self and into the music, into the Road, into this vast country) was pathological. I needed always to be somewhere else, to search for the geographical solution (even though Dad had warned me, “There is no geographical solution.”) because when I stayed in one place for too long, I got scared. When I was still I had time and space to think and then I would start thinking about the emptiness — about what I missed and what I wanted but didn’t have. So I would move (to try and physically escape the fear and sadness), but by moving, constantly, I gave up being able to make a home for myself anywhere and so I perpetuated the cycle of loneliness/rootlessness/homelessness.

It was scary, at that time, when writing the song, to think that “I may not find an answer”; that my longings may never be resolved, and that maybe this — this spiritual homelessness — was my fate and my life, for now and forever. Scary to think that “there’s only in between” — between journeys, between destinations, between point A and point B — because there is nothing and no one at either end; nothing and no one to go home to but an apartment. The only life I had was hotels and recording studios and rock clubs, and that’s no life, after a certain point.

My life was like the tree branch rope: always swinging back and forth.

It’s easier for me to deal with these uncertainties now. I have learned how to handle my situation. It has stopped feeling so scary and begun to feel more like a kind of unlimited freedom. I’m not stuck anywhere. I can do whatever I want, go wherever I want, whenever I want. Instead of seeing my not-belonging as a curse, I can look at it as a wonderful kind of freedom. It means the future is still unknown, and completely open. And that’s kind of exciting. Anything could happen.