Juliana Hatfield has never been one to shy away from the difficult truths of life. On her 21st album, Lightning Might Strike, she turns personal upheaval into songs that confront loss, powerlessness, and the search for meaning. The album is her first collection of original material since 2021’s Blood, and it arrives shaped by grief and change.

"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."

That sense of inevitability and fragility runs through the album. Even the title ties back to a family tragedy. "I should say here that my mother’s younger brother was struck and killed by lightning at the age of 16 and when I asked her how this affected her worldview, she told me that it made her believe that there is a predetermined plan for each of us. With this album I was contemplating these ideas: fate, powerlessness (‘Popsicle’), the effects of trauma (‘Wouldn’t Change Anything,’ ‘Fall Apart,’ ‘Strong Too Long’), the ways we can’t and don’t change."

The songs capture Hatfield’s interior life with unflinching honesty, but they also find light in the process of creating. "I hold on to humility and gratitude (most of the time) rather than (constant) bitterness, and I have hope, mostly in the form of the music that I make, even if its subject matter is sometimes kind of grim. This practice of putting songs together has always sustained me and given my life — as uncontrollable as it feels — meaning and purpose, even in the darkest times. Lightning Might Strike is largely about that; the music itself is pulling me out of a big hole (‘All I’ve Got’) in real time, in the time it took me to make the album."

Hatfield recorded the bulk of the album herself at home, layering guitar, keyboards, vocals, percussion, and some bass. "Chris Anzalone played and recorded all the drums from Arlington, Massachusetts. Ed Valauskas played and recorded most of the bass from Cambridge, MA. I did the bass on a few songs, plus all the guitars, keyboards, vocals, and percussion, in my house (‘My House Is Not My Dream House’) in western MA. The talented Pat DiCenso then mixed and mastered it all. The whole thing took about two years — broken up in pieces and chunks (I went on tour for six weeks last autumn, etc.) — to complete."

With twelve new songs, Hatfield reflects on trauma, resilience, and the strange hand of fate. Yet at its core, Lightning Might Strike is an album about survival through music. For Hatfield, the act of making songs remains not just an outlet but a lifeline.