Waxahatchee & Good Morning at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater [Photos]

On Saturday, Waxahatchee and Good Morning played a gig together that Paramount Theater in Brooklyn. Good Morning released their album, Good Morning Seven, last month, and Waxahatchee are celebrating the successes of their critically-acclaimed new LP Tigers Blood.

In March, we rated Tigers Blood a 9.3 out of 10—our third-highest rated album of 2024 so far. In his review, Tom Williams wrote that “Tigers Blood doesn’t merely represent the natural progression from Saint Cloud or ring in a sober celebration. In fact, it reads as the triumphant culmination of every album Waxahatchee has released up until this point. Country and folk influences like Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams remain apparent here as they did four years ago, but also apparent are the rock stylings of Cerulean Salt and Out in the Storm. ‘Bored,’ which is the most anthemic Katie Crutchfield tune since ‘Never Been Wrong,’ is dominated by a driving percussion courtesy of Spencer Tweedy and Nick Bockrath’s pedal steel guitar licks. After penning so many self-lacerating songs in the 2010s, there’s something unmistakably satisfying about seeing Crutchfield turn her frustrations outwards here. ‘I can get along, my spine’s a rotted two-by-four / My benevolence just hits the floor / I get bored,’ she declares, somehow sounding both exasperated and above-it-all at the same time.”

At the end of March, too, we named Katie Crutchfield our final cover star of the month. In their in-depth profile of Waxahatchee, Paste editor Matt Mitchell wrote that “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.”

“The places we come from are very often embedded deep within us, and it’s a kismet I particularly adore,” Mitchell continued. “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.”

You can see pictures from Waxahatchee and Good Morning’s sets at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn on April 27th, taken by Emilio Herce, below.

Good Morning

Waxahatchee