Juliana Hatfield was raised in Massachusetts. As a child she learned how to play piano, and during high school she played guitar in a covers group called the Squids before discovering alternative rock through the Velvet Underground. Following high school, she attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied voice. While at Berklee, she met guitarist John Strohm and drummer Freda Boner, with whom she formed the Blake Babies in 1986.
Hatfield left the band in 1990, and her 1992 solo debut, Hey Babe, was critically praised and became a college radio and MTV hit, leading to a major-label contract with Atlantic. Later in the year, Hatfield formed the Juliana Hatfield Three with bassist Dean Fisher and drummer Todd Phillips, and the group recorded its debut for Atlantic with R.E.M.'s producer Scott Litt. With the release of 1993's Become What You Are, Hatfield achieved alterna-rock stardom as several songs from the album received regular airplay on major North American rock stations. Hatfield's song "My Sister" became the biggest hit of her career, with a #1 placing on the Modern Rock Tracks chart; the video became an MTV staple. As she worked on the record, Hatfield became a minor media sensation; her songs were accepted as friendly, more accessible distillations of the feminist alternative rock movement known as riot grrrl.
In 2014 the Juliana Hatfield Three was reformed after two decades of hiatus, and Hatfield, drummer Todd Philips, and bassist Dean Fisher began practicing new material for an album. Whatever, My Love marked the band's first release in twenty two years. Stereogum named the album "one of their most anticipated albums of 2015,"and Consequence of Sound named it "one of the 50 most anticipated albums of 2015."
