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Examining her 30s with the help of a few new pals, WAXAHATCHEE has come roaring back with an assured new album that’s brimming with confidence.
Words: Martyn Young.
Photos: Molly Matalon
If releasing her album in the week the world shutdown in March 2020 wasn’t discombobulating enough, the fact that the record would go on to be her most successful and critically acclaimed was even more mindblowing for Katie Crutchfield. ‘Saint Cloud’ was a landmark release in Waxahatchee’s 15-year recording career. A bittersweet moment for Katie as she had the best work of her life but couldn’t fully enjoy it, while for many, it will go down as THE pandemic album alongside Dua Lipa’s ‘Future Nostalgia’. Fortunately, the world is in a very different place now, and Katie is looking to expand and capitalise on that record’s riches with her follow-up album ‘Tigers Blood’.
“I’m banking on the hope that there’s not another pandemic in the middle of this cycle. Of all the things that could go wrong, I’m hoping that that doesn’t go wrong,” she laughs. ‘Tigers Blood’ is yet another staggering work by one of the premier songwriting voices of modern times, but it’s a record that feels like an evolution of work Katie has been doing for a number of years now. “If I’m zoomed out looking at my whole catalogue, it feels like In 2018 I made this whole EP with Brad Cook called ‘Great Thunder’ and then from there, I made ‘Saint Cloud’, my album with Jess Williamson as Plains and now ‘Tigers Blood’,” she explains. “It feels like before I started working with Brad and after. Contextually, it fits within that family of post-working-with-Brad records so well. It feels like such a natural progression.”
With such a strong creative partnership firmly established, Katie and Brad set about crafting a record in the image of the previous ‘Saint Cloud’, which acted as something of a reset point in the Waxahatchee story. After some deliberation, they established the creative path for the record once again with a strong collaborative principle.
“With ‘Saint Cloud’, we didn’t have a ton of pressure. I knew I was going to make a pivot, and the sound of ‘Saint Cloud’ was going to be different than my last few things,” says Katie. “In that way, there was some freedom in it where we were like, people are either going to love it, or they’re not, but this is what I have to do creatively. There was a confidence in that. With this one, because of the reaction to ‘Saint Cloud’, we felt a bit of pressure to follow it up. We were really not sure what the approach should be. Should we go for something bigger and more ambitious, whatever that means? We had to figure out what that meant. We brought MJ Lenderman [from the band Wednesday] in, which happened on a whim early on, and after he left, we talked and said the confident choice is to do just what we’d done before and don’t get too fancy with it, bring some great musicians in the room and do what we did with ‘Saint Cloud’. MJ Lenderman’s aesthetic would carry through the record and blend with my songs.
After so long writing songs, Katie had enough confidence in her own songwriting ability to know that they could resist any desire or expectation to reinvent as the beauty of Waxahatchee was always present in her songwriting and melodies.
“I understand that pressure to reinvent because I felt that too, but I felt so relieved in that moment where me and Brad were having that conversation about let’s not do that, let’s keep it super simple,” she admits. “I don’t know what I’ll do for my next record, but I really enjoy bringing in artists that I really like. My songs are my songs, and they’re going to carry onwards, and if I’ve done my job, they’re going to be good enough, and they just need a bit of elevation to be as good as they can possibly be. Bringing in people that I’m really excited about in the moment has been working for me.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do for my next record, but I really enjoy bringing in artists that I really like”
Katie Crutchfield
The songs collected here are among the brightest and most expansive of her whole career, from the swelling anthemics of opener ‘Three Sisters’ to the heartstopping vocals of ‘365’. “I followed the melodies as they were hookier. I knew that, and I could feel that,” says Katie. The duo of Katie and Brad managed to harness these bigger songs while still capturing a gentle intimacy at the same time. “I don’t think we ever would have made a pop record, but when you have some kind of breakthrough, that door opens, and it’s tempting to walk through,” she says.
As she looks back on over 15 years as an artist, right back to when she was in punk band P.S. Eliot with her sister Allison and her first primitive recordings as Waxahatchee on the lo-fi wonder debut ‘American Weekend’ from 2012, Katie palpably feels a different person but in what ways does she still feel the same?
“I spend so much time thinking about how different I am that I don’t ever really think about how I’m the same,” she ponders. “With every album, I’m chipping away at a specific point of view, and a voice, and that’s all present on those early records. I made ‘American Weekend’ when I was 20. Everything in my life was different, so it’s hard to relate to that person, but I do think the original point of view I had of trying to find a way to be honest, access some darkness and try and write things really true to my experience, all of that is still there.”
With success on a sustained level now a very real thing, Katie has adapted to a changing musical landscape. “I’ve also changed, and as I’ve been doing this professionally for longer, my priorities shift around too,” she explains. “When I first started, it was all just for the love of the game. It wasn’t about making money or being able to do music full-time. Now it’s higher stakes and my job and my life’s work, so it’s a little more pressure, and there’s more eyes on it, and with that comes a certain amount of responsibility. TikTok certainly didn’t exist 15 years ago, and the way people present themselves is different. It’s a little more cult of personality now than it was in 2010. I just really want my music to be in the foreground and me to be in the background.”
Photo credit: Molly Matalon.
“It’s a little more cult of personality now than it was in 2010”
Katie Crutchfield
While she wants her personality to be largely in the background, it’s her personal reflections and ruminations that give her songs such huge emotional resonance. ‘Tigers Blood’ sees her going deeper into some of the themes she established on her last album.
“’Saint Cloud’ was a lot about my sobriety. In some ways, that was a bit of a crutch as it was just easy to say it was a record about my sobriety. It was, but it was about a lot of other things, too. It was deeper than that, and I took a lot of different paths through that, and this takes up where that left off,” she says.
As a companion piece to ‘Saint Cloud’, the album very much takes up the next chapter in the story. “I’ll have six years of sobriety this year. I’m in a different place with it. When I was writing ‘Saint Cloud’, my skin was crawling with anxiety, and I’m not really in that same place with it. I’m a bit calmer. It’s a state of the union of my life. Because my life gets stranger and stranger the longer I’m doing this, I’m trying to write in a way that’s true to my experience but ambiguous enough that it can be relatable to the listener. It’s a lot of classic mid-thirties stuff; being in a long relationship and ending some friendships with people I’ve known for a long time.”
With lucidity and calmness both in her work and her personal life, Katie Crutchfield is truly thriving, and her latest Waxahatchee record is a testament to her songwriting endurance and proof that if you’re actually really, really good at something, you’ll get your flowers. Let’s just hope this time she doesn’t have to endure a global pandemic at the same time. ■
Waxahatchee’s album ‘Tigers Blood’ is out 22nd March. Follow Upset’s Spotify playlist here.
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