"Just do what feels right"
About this Quote
"Just do what feels right" lands like a guitar chord you don’t overthink: simple, direct, and a little defiant. Coming from Juliana Hatfield, it’s not the mushy self-help version of intuition. It’s an artist’s survival tactic. Hatfield built a career in the alternative-rock ecosystem where taste can calcify into rules and women, especially, get handed a map of how to be palatable: don’t be too angry, too messy, too loud, too ambitious. “Feels right” is a quiet refusal of that external choreography.
The intent is permission, but it’s also a dare. The phrase assumes you’re already swimming in other people’s expectations - labels, audiences, critics, band dynamics, the invisible algorithm of what’s supposed to sell. Hatfield’s subtext is that authenticity isn’t a personality trait; it’s a daily practice of choosing your own meter when the world keeps changing the tempo.
What makes it work is the almost provocative vagueness. “Feels right” isn’t “do what’s easy” or “do what you want.” It implies discernment: the right feeling versus the convenient one, the brave one versus the compliant one. That ambiguity is the point. In art, certainty is often a lie; you move by feedback, by nerve, by the small internal click that says: this is mine.
In the broader cultural context of 90s alt and its afterlife, the line reads like an antidote to both corporate polish and performative “authenticity.” It’s not a brand slogan. It’s an insistence that the compass still exists, even when the noise is the whole business.
The intent is permission, but it’s also a dare. The phrase assumes you’re already swimming in other people’s expectations - labels, audiences, critics, band dynamics, the invisible algorithm of what’s supposed to sell. Hatfield’s subtext is that authenticity isn’t a personality trait; it’s a daily practice of choosing your own meter when the world keeps changing the tempo.
What makes it work is the almost provocative vagueness. “Feels right” isn’t “do what’s easy” or “do what you want.” It implies discernment: the right feeling versus the convenient one, the brave one versus the compliant one. That ambiguity is the point. In art, certainty is often a lie; you move by feedback, by nerve, by the small internal click that says: this is mine.
In the broader cultural context of 90s alt and its afterlife, the line reads like an antidote to both corporate polish and performative “authenticity.” It’s not a brand slogan. It’s an insistence that the compass still exists, even when the noise is the whole business.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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