She’s probably written or co-written 300 or 400 songs since Allen Ginsberg offhandedly suggested a name for her first band — Blake Babies — more than 30 years ago. From grunge-era charmers such as “Cesspool” and “My Sister” to “Staying In,” a misanthropic manifesto from her 17th solo album (last January’s “Weird”), Juliana Hatfield has remained about as prolific as any of her peers.
Yet she has always craved the out-of-body experience of recording songs originally made famous by other musicians. Early on, with Blake Babies, she cut signature versions of the Stooges’ “Loose” and the Grass Roots’ “Temptation Eyes.” In 2012, Hatfield recorded an album of covers, with radical remakes of songs by Foo Fighters, Teenage Fanclub, and E.L.O., among others. (She self-titled the album, ironically enough.) Two years later she earned wide praise for her version of Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay,” recorded for a Wes Anderson tribute album.
“I almost feel like I’m better at other people’s songs than I am at my own,” Hatfield said recently.
Last year she made an album of songs by her biggest childhood musical crush, Olivia Newton-John. Newsday called it “a match made in female-rocker heaven.” Ms. Newton-John herself tweeted her approval.
Following the flurry of fresh songwriting that constituted the tracklist on this year’s “Weird,” Hatfield found herself ready for another covers project. At first she considered the big-boom, totally-’80s oeuvre of Phil Collins.
“I like to choose things that are not, quote-unquote, ‘cool,’ ” Hatfield said recently, sipping tea inside a busy cafe near Harvard Square. “I don’t want to do the cool thing that’s too easy.”
While revisiting Collins’s solo album “No Jacket Required,” she heard the maudlin ballad “Long Long Way to Go” for the first time in years. That song features Sting singing backup vocals. Hatfield was instantly transported back to her teenage years, when she was a sucker for Sting’s voice and the dark love songs and brainy social commentary he wrote for the Police.
So she switched gears, dumping Phil Collins in favor of “Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police.” Just released, the album has already won plenty of acclaim — partly because of the goodwill carried over from the Olivia Newton-John project, partly because it’s hard to deny the enduring appeal of all those great Police songs.
But Hatfield gladly admits that it took her friends a little time to come around to the idea.
When she mentioned the Phil Collins covers, most of them were enthusiastic: “That’s gonna be sick!” she said, paraphrasing.
“But with the Police, most people were like, ‘Why?’ Or, ‘Oh, that’s going to be fun for you,’ ” her flat voice mimicking their lack of sincerity. “I’ve since learned that the Police are kind of divisive. People either love them or hate them. Or maybe that’s Sting.”
Nevertheless, she persisted. As with Newton-John’s music, her youthful love for the Police was genuine.
“I was a huge fan,” she said. “I had everything. All the B-sides. I had all the bootlegs on cassette. I knew every second of every bootleg. Every nuance.” While still in high school, she saw more than one Police show at the “enormo-domes,” including the 1983 gig the band played at what was then Sullivan Stadium in Foxborough, with the Fixx and A Flock of Seagulls.
Hatfield’s new album includes her crisp takes on some of the band’s biggest blockbusters, from “Roxanne” and “Every Breath You Take” to “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.” But it also features the punk noir of “Murder by Numbers,” the tumbling French lyrics of “Hungry for You (J’aurais Toujours Faim de Toi),” and the deliriously bouncy impeachment hearing of “Rehumanize Yourself.”
“I’m still trying to figure it out, why I loved them so much,” Hatfield said, pulling her Columbo-style trench coat back on to ward off the cafe’s chill. “On one level, it’s just a really visceral, almost animal affinity for the sound of Sting’s voice. For me, it feels really natural to sing his melodies.”
She also loves the fact that the band’s songs covered a range of subjects.
“There were love songs, but also a lot of political stuff, a lot of commenting on the culture — songs about people in power abusing their power,” she said. “That’s something I always felt — a very strong sense of justice.”
Some of that, she figures, came from her relationship with her late father. Her parents divorced when Hatfield was 11. (She grew up in Duxbury with two brothers; her mother was a longtime feature writer for the Globe.)
“I was always pushing back against the idea that my father had authority over me,” Hatfield recalled. “He tried to exert his power, and he also tried to teach us not to obey authority figures. He was complicated.”
She’s always been defiant. These days, however, Hatfield is quick to admit she doesn’t live a very rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. She loves the public library in Cambridge, where she lives. She just borrowed Liz Phair’s new book: “I was going to buy it, but I was in the library and I saw it, so I checked it out.”
“I do have kind of a rebel spirit, but my lifestyle is quite . . . sober,” she said. “Not sober — I do drink. But I’ll drink, like, half a beer. With dinner. Half a beer is exactly right for me.”
Since finishing the latest album, she has turned her attention to some new long-form writing — essays, mainly, about the process of making a record from an artist’s perspective.
“I’m writing all the time, but I never show anything to anyone,” said Hatfield, who published a memoir called “When I Grow Up” in 2008.
Though she’s long shown a knack for identifying songs that would pair well with her deceptively sweet, I’m-not-having-it voice, she claims she often prefers silence to music.
She doesn’t use streaming services, she said. “I don’t even like to download music. It’s not about money. It’s more like I resent being forced to upgrade my technology. MP3s sound like crap to me.”
While she’s made a career of being quoted saying mischievous things — about virginity, about women in rock — here’s one that may come as a real shocker.
“I don’t care about music that much,” Hatfield said. “Seriously. I don’t need to seek out all the latest things to be a contented human.”
Instead, she said, “I find things that I like, and then I love them to death.”
Police: Take notice.
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.