COVER STORY | Waxahatchee Has More Stories to Tell

Katie Crutchfield didn’t intentionally name her latest Waxahatchee album Tigers Blood to piss off Auburn football fans, but she knows that the heads and the Bama fans are going to appreciate the dig nonetheless. The hues of crimson on the record’s cover are intricately placed—a truck in the background, a sign lording over Crutchfield, a house behind her that looks newly painted. The “KC” hat she’s donning contrasts with a red bra. All of it feels deliberate, and the songs of Tigers Blood perfectly echo the package they arrive in. Like she did on Saint Cloud four years ago, Crutchfield again is balancing two lives: her long, well-documented upbringing in Birmingham and her recent tenure in Kansas City, where she currently lives and roams. When we hop on Zoom together barely a week before her album is set to come out, she’s pretty candid that, after a long run of press, she’s ready for the final countdown to be over. “The part that I’m really looking forward to is tour and playing shows,” she admits.

It’s no surprise that Crutchfield is ready to get back on the road, as she hit a “hot hand spell” while writing much of Tigers Blood during an 18-month tour for Saint Cloud. Such an origin story speaks greatly to the really dynamic and compelling post-quarantine renaissance of music-making we’re seeing right now. But the truth of the matter is much less attractive, as Crutchfield very plainly admits that the songs came at the expense of her internal creative clock more so than some triumphant post-lockdown mirage of inspiration that hit once she could play gigs again.

“Musicians live their life on a cycle, and it’s like clockwork,” she says. “As somebody who has now been writing songs for 20 years and has been touring for 10, 15 years, the cycle is just embedded in me. Even though it was quarantine and COVID and we were pent up, I was living life, I was having experiences and emotions. By the time I toured Saint Cloud, it was time for me to write a record. It was very disjointed; had I been touring in that period that I was at home, then I would have very likely naturally finished that and then I would have been writing. But, the touring and the writing happened at the same time because it was time. The cycle was ready. I had been gestating this block of material and it was time for it to come out.”

As Crutchfield gets older and spends more of her life on the road, the emotionality and energy in which she experiences milestones and love and euphoria will continue to grow more and more distant from how folks who remain at home experience them. She’s admitted that living like that can make her stories, at least on the surface as she’s meeting them for the first time, less relatable. And musicians don’t often surrender to the finality of their own usefulness like that. When you make the decision in your early-20s to be the kind of songwriter who takes a memoirist approach, you have to be ready to chase the muse when it retreats—when the mortality of growing up forces you to adjust your style and be even more deliberate in the stories you choose to tell—and, as Crutchfield’s audience grows and her life changes, her self-awareness only continues to swell.

“My life is a little strange, compared to other people’s lives, just from being a longtime professional musician and feeling like I’m reaching this point of no return with it,” she says. “There are artists who, maybe, aren’t checking in with themselves—as it pertains to their work—about that, and I’m really trying to be hyper-self-aware of ‘Okay, my life’s a little bit weird. How do I find a way to cut to the core emotions of what I’m experiencing and relate them to other people?’ That’s what I’m trying to do and check in with the things in my life that I haven’t heard that many songs written about.”

A prime example of that line of thinking exists in the mundanity of “Right Back to It,” Crutchfield’s irresistible, timeless duet with Jake “MJ” Lenderman that explores the unromantic fixtures of a long-held love inspired by her longtime relationship with Kevin Morby (and serves as the album’s kinetic anchor). The verses stomp on eggshells, as Crutchfield relishes in the flaws of a familiar, unimpeachable partnership, singing “I’ve been yours for so long, we come right back to it / I let my mind run wild, don’t know why I do it / But you just settle in, like a song with no end.” The ebbs and flows of dating, of marriage and of togetherness in totality, are not always as canonically sexy as a honeymoon phase.

But that’s just the thing. “You come to me on a fault line deep inside a goldmine hovering like a moth” and the alchemy of reliance and trust and ordinary attraction becomes sexy at the bottom of Crutchfield’s pen. “I’m trying to find a way to make it compelling, because it’s so relatable. It’s something that so many people experience—and there’s so many love songs that are about the drama of it all and the heartache and the breakups and the falling in love. I really wanted to find the song that felt sturdy,” she notes. And with that, too, “Right Back to It” is the kind of loving ode that never feels like it’s expressing too much. Like most of her music, the vocal melodies are rhythmic and mathematical, and the passion of the story is not just incredibly flattering to hers and Morby’s relationship, but the song’s shape has intimate, homespun edges. “It’s me really saying ‘I love this person and there’s things that are hard about it.’ That’s true for every relationship, but we keep coming back to each other—how beautiful? There’s no part of me that feels like I’m oversharing,” Crutchfield continues.

Crutchfield was able to get herself into a “sharper songwriting place to then implement my precious little life story on Tigers Blood” while writing songs for I Walked with You a Ways, her collaborative record with Jess Williams as Plains, in 2022. Rather than make another batch of tracks about herself, Crutchfield found herself writing often about experiences Williamson had had and then relayed back to her. “It almost felt like a school assignment or something, in a good way,” Crutchfield says. “It was nice to write songs without the pressure of feeling like I have to perfectly and succinctly express exactly what’s going on in my life. It’s so nice to write without having to tell my precious little life story and to find a way to develop a shared voice and write from that place.”

The places we come from are very often embedded deep within us, and it’s a kismet I particularly adore. It’s the type of personal divinity that makes a Waxahatchee song like “Arkadelphia” resonate so well, as lyrics like “When we were kids, free as the air with a violence craving to turn up somewhere / A tap dancer, a memorized number, an avalanche of the deep red clay earth” sound a lot like both everywhere and nowhere particular at all. That’s the mark of Crutchfield’s writing, which has only grown up and sprawled out over the last decade and change of her career. I discovered the catalog of Waxahatchee when I was 19 years old and knee-deep in an American literature class reading Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, feeling firmly entrenched in language beholden to a gothic, Southern time capsule. But Crutchfield, who has often been typecast as a torch-bearing architect of Americana music in the Deep South, writes songs that are much more zoomed out than just the territorial limits of Shelby County or Kansas City proper, of Opelika or the car on the corner of a street in anywhere, someplace.

Sleepovers author Ashleigh Bryant Phillips really nails it, I think, as she has compared Crutchfield’s lyrical stylings to the prose of Carson McCullers—whose debut novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a vast treasure of oddities, as McCullers bends the fire around the meaning of love and home much like Crutchfield once did on Waxahatchee records like Cerulean Salt and Out in the Storm. While both writers use language to make the fringes of the Deep South revered in a way that’s immune to getting lost in the changing tides of time and culture, Crutchfield is not the same musician who wrote “Dixie Cups and Jars” 11 years ago, and the once-unnameable otherness she has been searching for in her work is, after six albums, herself. “As I develop as a writer and as I age, I’m really trying to just get to the root of whatever is true for me at any moment,” she says. “I’m trying to be really present with where I’m at. And I have changed a lot and I have grown a lot. I’m trying to track that. The thing I’m always chasing is some real honesty with myself. If I can get to the core of that, the more I feel like my audience is going to be able to relate to what I’m saying, because there’s some real raw emotion in that.”

Crutchfield’s music has been compared to that of Lucinda Williams time and time again, specifically Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, but I believe this album—and even Saint Cloud—exists more akin to Williams’ 2001 record Essence. When Entertainment Weekly reviewed the album 23 years ago, they called it “southern humidity as music,” and that’s the kind of blanket pulled across Crutchfield’s sound, too. But a lot of inspirations and influences come a-knocking regardless of if you want them to or not, and I won’t beat a dead horse about the Waxahatchee-Lucinda connectivity any longer. But it’s interesting to consider how a musician of Crutchfield’s stature considers the work of her peers or her heroes now that, more than a decade in, she has long been clued into the industry and the assemblage and the expectations of it all. And, when you look at her career timeline—how, 12 years ago, she was making lo-fi alt-country records and now she’s galavanting in a world full of idiosyncratic, emotionally back-breaking anthems perfect for cookouts and car therapy—it’s clear that how her surroundings and interests sink into her is vastly different on a molecular level now than when she was just a Cotton State kid sketching the bones of American Weekend.

“I try really hard to avoid any jadedness about it, because it is hard when you really know how the sausage is made,” she says. “Sometimes you’re picking things apart, and there are things about that that are really helpful as a songwriter—to be able to jot those ideas down and be like, ‘Let’s revisit that, because I really like what we did there.’ But, as far as my songwriting goes, it’s a little more mysterious to me—a little bit harder to trace. One of the most beautiful things about music is that you can write a three-minute song and people will revisit that song over and over and over again for their whole life. They’ll develop their relationship with the song, and I feel like I revisit songs that I loved when I was a teenager and I notice new things about them, because I’ve changed and grown as a person. That’s just a really special thing about growing and developing my relationship to music.”

Crutchfield said it herself in an interview with Lucinda Williams four years ago, that “being an artist presents a variety of pathways to an assortment of different definitions of success.” When it comes to what the success of a record like Saint Cloud was, Crutchfield chalks it up to, when she was in the studio making it, she refused to think about how it was going to land with listeners. She quit drinking after making Out in the Storm in 2017 and opted to make not just a record about that sobriety and a recent breakup, but about the exploration of her newfound self-revival. “Tomorrow could feel like a hundred years later, I’m wiser and slow and attuned,” she sang, in a steadfast, sublime key of celebratory measure on “Fire.” What made Saint Cloud such a miracle, too, was how Crutchfield slowly removed the mask. In 2020, unconditional love was nurtured and welcomed, but she couldn’t help but question whether or not it would ever be enough. Thus, Crutchfield turned the camera inward, demanding affection and care and respect from herself first and foremost.

“It felt like such a big pivot to me from Out in the Storm,” she says. “It was going the opposite direction, it was a total overhaul. A total reinvention. And, it made a lot of sense to me where I was in my life versus where I had been when I made Out in the Storm. Everything in my life changed between those two records in a major way. It made sense that I was resetting and doing something different. But because of that big swing I was taking, it was hard for me to think too much about what people were going to think about the record. There was a lot of total freedom in that [mentality] of ‘You know what, I know this is correct. This feels right for me. Whatever happens, happens. If it’s a total flop, I was true to myself.’ When that record became very successful and people validated it [by saying] ‘I think this is your best work’ when I thought it was, it gave me a lot of confidence to trust my intuition.”

When making Tigers Blood, Crutchfield asserts that she was at a creative peak and “in a really good zone of songwriting.” She wrote “Lone Star Lake” first—when she and Morby both had COVID during New Year’s in the California desert and were working on music on opposite ends of the house—and “Tigers Blood” last. She, Brad Cook and Lenderman decamped to Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas—a 1,700-acre pecan orchard on the border of the Rio Grande and Mexico where Crutchfield and Cook made Saint Cloud more than four years ago—and jammed over and over again on what would eventually become 12 of the strongest songs in the Waxahatchee universe yet.

But what best represents the success of Tigers Blood to her can be boiled down to Lenderman’s presence all throughout it, from the demoing stages to the in-studio execution. Crutchfield admits that she put the DIY scene and work ethic and values she grew up with on the backburner during the making of Saint Cloud, and it wasn’t until she and Williamson toured as Plains in 2022—and had Lenderman and his band open for them—that that ethos came back into focus. “The way they were approaching the buzz around them and their growing success, just keeping their hearts and eyes on the music and on what they were making and on just taing care of each other, it really helped me realign with some of that stuff and I really took that into this record,” Crutchfield says. “I wanted to have great people around me and make something that I think is really great. [I thought], ‘If we do those two things, whatever happens, I’m fine with. I’m totally at peace.’”

It’s not a stretch to say that Tigers Blood and Saint Cloud are Crutchfield’s best (Paste has the review scores to prove it), and it’s not a coincidence that both albums have such incredible players chooglin’ behind her—be it Bonny Doon on Saint Cloud or Lenderman, Spencer Tweedy and Brad and Phil Cook on Tigers Blood. When she was working on Saint Cloud, Bonny Doon were, in her own words, her “absolute favorite band.” (“They’re still my favorite band, and I love them so much as people. They’re family to me,” she affirms.) At the time, Crutchfield was still living in Philadelphia and felt that the cast of characters around her, musically, was growing stale. Bonny Doon—Jake Kmiecik, Bill Lennox and Bobby Colombo—had recently put out their sophomore album Longwave, and it was a project that harnessed a no-nonsense, bluesy kind of freewheeling Americana that hadn’t yet fully cropped up on any of Crutchfield’s Waxahatchee records. But she knew that that breed of worn-in, dusty pickup truck bed tenets was perfect for her next chapter.

“I needed a hard reset,” she explains. “I was listening to Bonny Doon’s first two records and, very simply, I was like, ‘I want this in my music. I want this in my songs. How do I get this in my songs?’ And it was really easy for me to just be like, ‘I’ll ask them to be in my band.’ And we were all so close, we had done a tour together where they backed me up. It was like Bonny Doon’s interpretation of all my old songs, and we had brought ‘Can’t Do Much’ into the mix as well, so I could hear how this new song I just wrote was gonna sound with Bonny Doon. It was super simple, ‘That’s how I want my record to sound.’”

Tigers Blood marks the second album in a row that Crutchfield has made with Brad Cook, and she’s quite animated about how her career exists in two halves: American Weekend through Out in the Storm and the Great Thunder EP through Tigers Blood. “The way I really look at my body of work is I really look at it as before I started working with Brad and after I started working with Brad,” Crutchfield says. “I definitely think Tigers Blood is very much in conversation with Saint Cloud. It feels connected to me. I’ve made them at the same place with the same engineer [Jerry Ordonez] and the same producer and a lot of the same energy in the room. Today, it feels like, ‘Okay, I’m in this new era and that includes Brad.’ I do feel like, in a lot of ways, Brad’s the collaborator that I’ve really just been searching for for my whole life as a songwriter.”

For Tigers Blood, the origin of putting the band together wasn’t all that dissimilar—as Lenderman was the first player Crutchfield added to the stable, and she knew that his energy was going to coalesce because she “took my favorite band of this moment and put them in my band” after having spent all that time with him on the road two years ago. “I was like, ‘Well, what if I get him in the mix and see what happens?,’ she says. “Then, when we were putting the rest of the band together, Spencer and Phil had both played on the Plains record and it was a playing style—a raw talent—with those two. I was like, ‘I know that spending three weeks with those guys in the desert is going to be really great and it’s going to keep the energy flowing through the room.’ Brad and I, we’ve really developed our approach to making my records, which is just putting together the right group of people for that particular set of songs.”

Lenderman, who met Cook through co-writing Indigo De Souza’s “Hold U” in 2021, is the difference-maker on Tigers Blood. It’s even palpable on his and Crutchfield’s recent performance of “Right Back to It” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. While most of their work together is, in Crutchfield’s eyes, “very abstract and magical” and them chasing an indescribable feeling, she was, during her demo session with him and Cook, immediately impressed with Lenderman’s guitar-playing style. “It’s a little more muscular than what I had been doing with Bonny Doon, in a way that really suited the songs, because the songs are a little bit more muscular, too,” she says. Crutchfield pulls out a food metaphor to best describe the flavors of her backing bands: “Bonny Doon is like salt and pepper—it’s heightening everything,” she says, laughing. “Jake is a potent spice—you’re gonna taste it, you’re gonna be like ‘Oh!’ But when he started singing, that’s when everything changed. We heard how our voices sounded against each other. Brad and I were like, ‘We can’t get enough, we’re addicted, we gotta keep it going. Our emotional reaction to this is so big, I think we need to follow that.’”

And follow that emotional reaction they did. When the dust settles on the album of Crutchfield’s career, what we’re left with is the deeply human beauty of Tigers Blood. There’s a verse on “Evil Spawn” I return to often, when Crutchfield sings, “If we stand out in some wild city street, dodging every car, every thief and disease / Catching tiny crumbs in the heartless breeze, say we’re tough as nails, say we’re both naive.” Making music is such a transformative act, and listening to it is just as wondrous and life-affirming. Whether it’s the rowdy intro riff from Lenderman on “Bored,” or the warmth of Crutchfield’s voice on a song like “Crimes of the Heart,” or the skeletal, phenomenal vibrancy of “365” and the grievous, profound weight she places on each measure of verse across three minutes that feel like an hour—Tigers Blood is a collection of stories burned like the Alabama heat.

All memoirists are collectors of raw emotions, and when we write about ourselves or about what’s around us, it’s like we’re picking up small treasures that we’ll polish up later down the road. Listening to Tigers Blood is like entering a house of emotional knick-knacks, each track more antiquated than the last. “There’s a lock on the door that costs more than my car, babe, and I ain’t ever come close to crossing that threshold anyway,” Crutchfield sings on “The Wolves. “I can’t hear our song on the radio without a clear recollection of the touch-and-go; I can’t prize my certainty and let bygones fade away, for my own sake.” The prose of it all fits like a glove, and Katie Crutchfield’s affections stave off clichés in earnest. Her mind wanders like a junker barreling down Route 31, and her tongue is whip-smart and filed into a vibrant knife; “Named after a city y’ain’t never seen, spellbinding copperheads banging a tambourine / It’s the kiss of death, but it’s the only way out / Galloped up to the mirror, looked her right in the mouth” sounds like cosmic poison pouring from her bodkin breath. All of it exists with a glimpse into a lifetime I feel like I’ve lived but not yet fully said goodbye to, and, hey, maybe you feel that way, too.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.