Now then, queen of hearts, is this your Pink Moon? Maybe it’s your Nebraska. Sitting at home like Bruce, testing the depth of the vacancy around you… “I’m just singing into the void.” Your last record was lush and radio-ready, a prosperous grown-up noise, but for this one you were alone, alone, alone and etiolated in your second-floor Cambridge apartment, faintly multitracking your own voice and guitar, keeping it down so as not to disturb the neighbors, surrounded by – I’m imagining – a soft glimmer of the immaterial, a hush of late-night presence, because now you’re singing of the spirit world. Your dogs are wandering about somewhere, ticking across the wooden floors, or watching you perhaps in that quizzical doggy way. Cables, leads, scratched-at notepads. The spirit world. Not ghoulies and ghosties, and the long-departed aunt knocking with phantom knuckles beneath the table; none of that; but the private, invisible world within (that joins us to each other, amazingly.) The songs are their spirit selves, pale unelectric blueprints: no band, no rock thump. No barrel of laughs, actually. They describe sorrowfulness, loneliness, faintness of heart, the old brain chemistry blues. And a great, great concern with oblivion: “I want to sleep awhile…” “Why can’t you sleep…” “I’m trying to get through this night…” “You stopped sleeping very well…”It starts with plucked Elizabethan chords, solemn and spare as a John Dowland pavane, and a guardian angel is announced, stooping soft over the singer’s heart, checking it throughout the night “with an ear to my ribcage.” Is the grip on life so tenuous? It might just be. Diaphanous wings getting ripped by the rain in “Butterflies”; the small, fleshless voice of “I’m Disappearing” singing about “my bluest veins.” Dwindling to spirit-hood, fatally transparent. Keep checking the pulse.Then again, for this to be your Pink Moon, it would have to contain despair – the actual taste and texture of giving up. And it doesn’t. The title, to begin with: Peace and Love. Ironically, it’s not ironic. The mercies are there, trusted in, available somehow, even if temporarily barred from your consciousness: they’re on the tip of your tongue, at the back of your mind, round the corner, in the strengthening of the light at the breakfast table, or the wry, descending piano figure that anchors “Why Can’t We Love Each Other.” John Berryman, once a depressed brain in Cambridge, MA, wrote that “the hardest challenge, let’s say, that a person can face without defeat is the best for him.” Or her. Like George Michael says, you gotta have faith.And you gotta have music. Survivor-music – because even at their most palpitatingly fragile, your songs have always been built to last. Well-made, strong-boned, fit to be played on streetcorners and station platforms. I like the healthy corpuscular chug of “Let’s Go Home,” with its infusion of New England autumn, the clanging pipes and violently colored trees. (“The street is like a painting, you should see it…”) The electric guitar, that fine old friend of yours, makes a crackling cameo halfway through “What Is Wrong” – a fusillade of neural fire. Guitar-playing friends of mine always love your solos.“I survived the famous fall…” What fall might that be – the Fall of Man? Or the fall from being famous. The vinegary strains of “Dear Anonymous” suggest a persistent problem with people finding you special. Time to be confusing, perhaps – even more confusing. Time to release Fade Away: Juliana Hatfield sings the songs of Noel Gallagher. I think it would be phenomenal. But what do I know? I just write the liner notes.-James Parker https:\u002F\u002Fwww.julianahatfield.com\u002Fpeaceandlove.html