Right Back To It
On the eve of a new Waxahatchee album, a look back at everything that came before.
Tonight is Tiger’s Blood eve, the night before the release of singer/songwriter Katie Crutchfield’s — stagename Waxahatchee — sixth studio album. Her fourth album Out in the Storm was/is a pivotal listening experience for me, when I caught it shortly after its 2017 release date. I’ve let that album stand on its own ever since, only letting Crutchfield’s other work come to me of their own accord, mostly because Out in the Storm is sonically a unique piece of the discography. 2020’s Saint Cloud became a different pivotal part of my life when I started dating, and eventually moved in with, my partner Caitlin, who listens to that Waxahatchee project the most. Floating through my living space, that second album and sonic version of Cruitchfield has nestled into my life very comfortably, now.
But in preparation of this new album, who’s three singles I have deeply enjoyed, I decided to listen and read through the entire Katie Crutchfield ouvre, from her first releases as the co-lead and majority songwriter of her and her sister Allison’s band The Ackleys, or their next band together P.S. Eliot, to her solo work, starting in 2011, when she was 22 years old; through her different producing partners, record labels, and on again/off again collaborations with her Allison.
Before, after, or during your reading, take a listen to this playlist I made of music spanning Katie Crutchfield’s entire career. I pieced it together chronologically, picking out songs that stood out to me for sonic significance reasons, career connectivity reasons, or just because they are bops.
Part I — The Crutchfields
In high school, in Birmingham, Alabama, at age fifteen, twin sisters Allison (two minutes older) and Katie (two minutes younger) stopped hanging out with basically anyone but each other, and started a band. The Ackleys was a four-piece pink rock ensemble that played at a tattoo-parlor/concert venue, which also happened to run a small music label. Noisy and inexperienced, but leading with sharp lyrical work from Katie on lead vocals, the manager of the label helped them inch along their path. A couple of years later, college came calling, and the band split up, but Allison and Katie weren’t done yet, even if their mom hoped this phase of their life would come to an end.
Personally, I think this record absolutely rocks. The second track of this first group’s first album bears some sonic resemblance to the Waxahatchee work that has, at this point, yet to be imagined:
Quickly, the sisters formed a new band: P.S. Eliot. The band toured the country, and recorded two albums and one EP, from 2007 to 2011. They blazed their own trail in a punk/pop/rock space, and we’re doing well, but the conditions were harsh, and uninviting for women. Slowly, but surely, P.S. Eliot reached their creative endpoint, and both sisters are ready to move out of Birmingham, and work on something with more individual control. “When I’m in my 30s or 40s,” she told the NYTimes in 2012, “I want to have taken things from punk and then taken them to wherever I’m going to go with my life.”
Part II — Solo Work, Swearin’ Cohort
In early 2011, just twenty one years old, “not really getting anywhere good in life”, Katie takes a trip to the family vacation home near Waxahatchee Creek, where snow begins to fall, and where snowfall records will be broken, and where she will be shut in, and where she will decide to start recording songs. “It was a bender,” she would later say. With a guitar and an 8-track recorder, Waxahatchee was born.
American Weekend (2011), (Katie) Crutchfield’s fist solo record, is completely raw, in recording quality and storytelling both. It reveals her fears, her desires, her talents, and her style, at least lyrically. It’s crude, and imperfect, but it is also moving, and telling. It features many traits that have since proven to be indelible to the Waxahatchee sound, but most notable are the mathematical twisting and squeezing-in of syllables into otherwise straightforward time signatures; a free-form poet.
In 2012, both sisters were living together, with many other musicians, in a house in Philadelphia. Allison had started her own band, Swearin’, and Katie was dating one of the members, Keith Spencer. After touring American Weekend as a duo with her friend Katherine, Crutchfield wanted to expand her sound, and worked out the next collection of songs with Spencer. Together with the rest of Swearin’, including her sister, Waxahatchee became a band, and the sound found its expansion.
Cerulean Salt (2012) was the result, Waxahatchee’s second album. Percussion and synthesizers and a bass and more guitar allowed for much more creativity to surround Crutchfield’s biting songwriting, which continued to focus on relationships, peaks and valleys, and just being honest with who she was in that moment, a trend she has never bucked. Crutchfield was growing up, and this album reflected that, sonically and lyrically. Lindsay Zoladz, then writing for Pitchfork, is a critic I adore, and her career is on a similar timeline to Crutchfield’s, and Zoladz has always appreciated the work, and has found ways to always be insightful, descriptive, and accurate. Of Cerulean Salt, she wrote that it was “the work of a songwriter skilled enough to make introspection not self-centered, but generous.”
The album garnered good attention, and after an amicable split with her record company, and with no pressure from the suits, Crutchfield and Spencer quarantined themselves in Long Island for months to work on another project. The Swearin’ guys were back to be the backing band — Allison was not part of the recording, but would play guitar with the group on tour — and, with more time and more experience, Waxahatchee produced the glossiest and most expansive record to date.
Ivy Tripp (2015), named for the young-adult malaise that affects 20- and 30- and 40- somethings, features some sharpening of ideas, and some explorations of others, but is also controlled in a new way, one that holds it back from reaching the depths that Crutchfield had previously mined. “I love it,” she says of Ivy Tripp, “but I was also masking a lot. I think because of personal stuff and things I couldn’t quite say.” The record had a similar malaise that it was named for.
During the recording and writing process, she ended her relationship with producer Keith Spencer. The two continued working on the record together, but it would be the last collaboration Crutchfield would have with him, and with her other band members.
Part III — Peak, Valley
Waxahatchee would go on an international tour for Ivy Tripp, and Crutchfield would move back to Philadelphia. Then, fast and fluid, she wrote another album, this one with a more focused and narrow sound, and more focused and emotional and honest writing. “It was boiling over. I needed to make it.”
With a new, all-female and non-binary backing band, and recorded live, Waxahatchee created Out in the Storm (2017), a loud, rocking, atmospheric album. It’s a breakup album, among many things, and is cutting in its accusations and reflections. Crutchfield also develops and employs a simpler vocabulary, a lyrical sparseness that juxtaposes wonderfully against the blazing guitars, or settles hauntingly into the quieter barebones tracks.
The album feels like a reckoning, and a self-recognizing, and a career coming together. “She’s still pulling on the same thread she was on American Weekend,” wrote critic Lindsay Zoladz. “But she’s gained a sense of perspective over the years. ‘I take it back,’ she sings with warm grit on that song about her sister, ‘I was never alone’.”
Part IV — “Second” Life
Out in the Storm was a success, and Crutchfield played the biggest shows she had ever seen. She had been writing, recording, and performing music for well over a decade. There were long bus rides, endless hotels and motels, and most importantly, steady drinking. In 2018, she decided that she’d had enough. “It’s not a very dramatic story,” she said in an interview. “I had gone back and forth a lot about my substance issues, and I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m done with this forever’.”
She retreated from touring, became sober, and would move from Philadelphia to Kansas City, closer to her southern roots. She embraced downtime. Then, she started working on a new project. She found a new producer in Brad Cook, longtime collaborator of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and recruited Bonny Doon to be her backing band. She also had, for the first time, an intentional vision for her next album, a different sound that would embrace her roots, embrace different genres than she had worked in before, inspired by artists like Lucinda Williams.
Saint Cloud (2020) is the start of Waxahatchee’s “second life”, filled with a warmth and a twang that we hadn’t heard before. It places Crutchfield’s vocals center stage, stripped of the noise and experimentation of previous albums, and continues her journey of specific yet universal, of rhythmically complex but more understandable lyrics, and of self-exploration and self-discovery. She’s still “at war with herself”, and still revealing whoever she is at this moment.
Crutchfield has talked previously about the next generation of women musicians reaching out for advice, about how creating a safe and inviting and fruitful experience for women like herself to exist at shows and in the industry is important to her. “With Saint Cloud, though, Crutchfield seems to be reporting back to them from yet another frontier,” says Zoladz. “She’s come to realize that one can still write adventurously about a more balanced way of life. As she articulates on Saint Cloud, too, self-reflection is not a one-and-done activity to be checked off a to-do list. Like recovery, love and artistic growth, it’s a life’s work best doled out over the long haul.”
After a week of exciting rehearsals for the album’s release tour, the world was closed down by the COVID-19 pandemic. Waxahatchee would eventually tour, but in the locked-down months to follow, Crutchfield and friend Jess Williamson would talk on the phone, desperate to create something. So, they decided, to just create something, and Plains, the duo composed of the two, was born. They recorded and released I Walked With You A Ways (2022), a country-pop record produced by Brad Cook that was a fun throw-back project, and a continuation of Crutchfield’s exploration of the country-leaning sound.
Part V — Not a Fluke
Crutchfield, a new album recorded and ready to come out, says this new one, Tiger’s Blood, is coming from a much safer and relaxed and settled place. But that doesn’t mean the writing and recording process were smooth. Producer Brad Cook is back, but the duo struggled to pick a direction after the huge success of Saint Cloud: to lean in, or to pivot again? After painfully working through different arrangements, direction was found when new collaborator MJ Lenderman (Wednesday, and also a solo recorder/performer) was harmonizing on the album’s first single “Right Back To It”. They found the sound they wanted. Fleshing out the recording band with Brad’s brother and multi-instrumentalist Phil Cook and with drummer Spencer Tweedy (son of Jeff).
Two more singles have been released, both varying in verve and tempo and style, both very much “new Waxahatchee”. She is clearly settling into this new version of life, and embracing a measured approach. The band will go on tour this spring and summer, road-trip style, playing only in 2,500 seat spaces or smaller. As her profile has expanded, and as she leans into a country sound, which has been evolving and becoming “cool again” for the past several years (we see you Beyoncé), Crutchfield remains steadfast in her central mission. “If I was trying to give you a quick pitch on this record, you would be like, That sounds fucking boring,” she says. “But I’m on a lifelong mission to be extremely present with the current age I’m at, whatever place in my life I’m at, and just write about those things, even if they might seem a little mundane on the outside.”
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In all of my reading and interview/music listening for this piece, and for my own enjoyment, it has been touching and inspiring and plain fun to learn and to better understand this long career that has waxed and waned, sonically, so much. Crutchfield is already an elder of music, and she’s only 35. Her voice has gotten so much stronger with time, and will continue to change, as will, I’m sure, her sound and her interests and her lyrical experimentation. I’m thrilled to be more informed of this great artists, and to be in-line with their career, from Tiger’s Blood into the future.
Sources/additional reading:
Waxahatchee: A Lonesome Voice, Raised In Basements
Allison and Katie Crutchfield, D.I.Y. Punk’s Twin Elders
Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield Is Out of the Storm, Cleareyed
How Waxahatchee Made the Album of Her (Second) Life
Katie Crutchfield’s Substack (Started in January 2024)
Thank you, as always, for reading. I wish I started this project more than three days ago, because there is so much more content within the actual songs throughout the Waxahatchee catalog. I love looking for sonic details throughout someone’s career, and noting and tracking them with specificity. But, such is life in the mind of a Substack writer without a real plan for himself. I hope you find some tracks you dig here somewhere, and if not, I hope you return to others that you dig. I’ll be having my second ever album release party for Tiger’s Blood, and I could not recommend more inviting your friends and family over to do something simple and analog, like listening to an album, or reading a new book aloud, or sewing caftans together.
TTFN,
Bobby