Juliana Hatfield with Bird Streets
Fri
June 21, 2019
8:00 pm
EDT
(Doors: 8:00 pm )
The Magic Bag
,
22920 Woodward Avenue, Ferndale, MI
All Ages
$35.00
Juliana Hatfield is heading out on the road for a limited run of dates in celebration of the release of her brand new album, Weird, including a date at the Magic Bag on Friday, June 21. For more info on Juliana Hatfield, check out her website at https://www.julianahatfield.com/ "When I wanna block out the world, I do it to music," Juliana Hatfield sings in the final track on Weird (2018), "just a set of headphones and a girl." Her words incarnate the spirit of an album that translates solitude and renunciation into soaring melodies and cunning guitar parts. The marriage of guitar rock to Loner Philosophy is a classic Hatfield move. Radical solitude—not quite the same as loneliness—is this musician's great theme, one she has explored from many different angles over the course of a 30-year career in music. But on her latest full-length solo release, radical solitude is the stuff of manifesto. Why wouldn't you want to block out the world? Hatfield asks us. Outside the home are people who misread your facial expressions ("Staying In"), whose gestures of love feel like efforts to possess you ("It's So Weird"), who drag you into a vortex of lies and gas-lighting ("Paid to Lie"), and who have allowed every last shred of human experience to be commodified, from dignity, religion, and privacy to fake IDs and opioids ("Everything's For Sale"). Outside the glowing orb of independence are other people's demands, their power plays, their lies and misinterpretations. Who needs it?