"I've produced records before but I was always in a studio with professional engineers. So it was definitely a learning process for me," says Hatfield, who was ready to strip things down after her critically acclaimed 2008 album, How To Walk Away, which was a full studio production. "I always like to try things I've never done before and I'd been yearning to record myself."

Hatfield had just purchased her brother's eight-track digital recorder and moved into a Cambridge apartment with a back room that had excellent natural acoustics, so the time was right. "I was able to follow every instinct without worrying that anyone was going to think it was a kooky idea," she recalls. "I just wanted to do something simple."

The result is an incredibly intimate collection of songs, expertly capturing the loneliness and collateral damage borne of broken relationships yet adamantly refusing to remain broken. In the liner notes, Boston Phoenix music editor James Parker gives it a name: "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."

Just as Hatfield stripped down the recording process, the characters that populate Peace And Love are ready to shed their convoluted lives. The lilting "Why Can't We Love Each Other" answers its own question by acknowledging that love is a choice: "we can make our lives a song/will it be a blues or a hymn/a dirge or a psalm/it could be so simple." But there's the rub, of course: it could be so simple...if it weren't for our propensity to muck things up.

From the plucked Elizabethan chords that introduce the opening "Peace And Love" and the feedback-drenched "What Is Wrong" to "Unsung," Hatfield's first-ever instrumental, and the closing "Dear Anonymous," written from the point of view of a victim who finds empathy for her stalker, the collection is both compelling and surprising. "Faith In Our Friends" celebrates those who "think you're just right the way you are" while Hatfield gains fresh perspective on her complex relationship with longtime friend Evan Dando on the exquisite, ethereal "Evan."