By Emmaly Wiederholt
S
anta Fe is blessed with something many places try unsuccessfully to recreate: atmosphere. Between our food, art and scenery, enjoying a beautiful evening in the City of Holy Faith isn’t hard to do. One thing that goes handin-hand with atmosphere is music and, of course, there’s nothing quite like enjoying the gifts of a musician live and in-person. One such local favorite is Stephanie Hatfield. Originally from the Detroit area, Stephanie grew up singing. She trained classically, and was also exposed to folk music through her parents and to old country songs through her Kentuckian grandparents. She sang in her church choir and entered classical voice competitions. While pursuing a degree in classical music and performance at Michigan State University, she took a jazz improvisation class on a whim, where, she recalls, “They didn’t quite know what to do with me. Most of the improvisation in jazz happens instrumentally, and besides that, my classical teachers hated the thought of me doing the jazz thing.” However, this blending of styles and musical traditions would become emblematic of Stephanie’s musical craftsmanship. Stephanie moved to Santa Fe after college and fell in love with it, as many of us do. “Being from Michigan, I felt like the open sky
Photo courtest Anne Staveley
gave me the ability to see beyond myself,” she says. She learned guitar and began writing her own songs under the influence of Boris McCutcheon, a well-known singer/ songwriter based in Albuquerque. “He was creating new songs all the time, and I thought I should try,” recounts Stephanie. “Up to that point I never thought writing songs was attainable for me.” It turned out writing songs was more than attainable for Stephanie, as she hasn’t stopped since. “I draw on personal experiences for my lyrics, as many artists do,” she describes. “I had a plethora of love affairs throughout my 20s and 30s to draw from. Since my husband and I got married, a lot of it now is reflecting on dreams or other people’s situations — where they’ve been, what they’re doing, what their experience has been.” Stephanie’s husband is another well-known name in the Santa Fe music scene: Bill Palmer, lead singer and guitarist of the TV Killers and producer/sound engineer at the music studio Frogville. They met because he produced her first album. “Before him, I vowed to never date a musician, but it made so much sense when we first fell in love. He understood my passion, which is something I’d never had before. I like that we share a common language,” she says.
Today, Stephanie’s music lands somewhere in the indie/rock/folk category. She enjoys playing with many cultural influences. At a concert this past July, for example, she sang two songs with a mariachi band as well as a classical song in French alongside her usual musical fare. For a number of years, her band was called the Hot Mess. Today, her musical persona is just her name — Stephanie Hatfield. Perhaps the name shift is indicative of a larger shift in her music: “I’ve done rock and roll, of course, because it’s so much fun and there’s so much passion in the way the instrument is played and the voice is used. I was
really attracted to that for a while. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve wanted to do something a little more sophisticated and mature.”
her contributions to the music scene are far from it. Aside from teaching classical voice lessons, she continues to write songs and perform around the Southwest.
Another fun note from Stephanie’s wild past is she raced motorcycles professionally. “I love motorcycles. It’s a great way to see the desert. The races are 75 miles, and it’s highly technical riding,” she explains. She did that for years before breaking several bones and turning to other interests. She won the state championship for her class the last year she raced, which was in the male division, as there was only a beginning class for women.
Her thoughts on the music scene? “Musicians nowadays aren’t supported by labels the way they used to be. You don’t get signed and have someone pay you to make your work. Independent musicians nowadays have to crowdfund. We need people to fund what we’re doing. It’s like any art or creative endeavor. We’re all trying to figure out how to keep making this happen.”
Though her years riding motorcycles and playing hard core rock n’ roll might be over,
Fo r m o re i n fo r m a t i o n stephaniehatfieldmusic.com.
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