A chat with Waxahatchee around Tigers Blood
A pair of studio glimpses bookend “Under a Rock”, a song from Waxahatchee’s 2015 album Ivy Tripp – it starts with a count in, and ends with instruments fading out for a clear 10 seconds or so, with a final twangy flourish. There have always been details like that in Waxahatchee songs; they’ve been part of the intimacy Katie Crutchfield has cultivated in the project, but here, they’re within the context of forward-looking confidence, something that used to be uncommon, lyrically, in the Waxahatchee catalogue. It was a refreshing album highlight then, but now it reads as the first steps into the new territory Crutchfield’s carved out.
When I meet her, she’s on her way home from Berlin, promoting a new album. Her 2020 record, Saint Cloud, won over critics and a new legion of fans, but the pandemic meant a delay to the traditional release-press-tour cycle, and Crutchfield thinks that might have helped. “I actually think it’s because people spent so much concentrated time with it,” she says, “it just feels like it slowly grew over the course of a year after it came out.”
By her own estimation, Saint Cloud doubled the number of Waxahatchee fans, even more remarkable as a ‘departure’ from her previous work. As Crutchfield puts it: “it’s validating in that I obviously pivoted pretty hard.” On the press tour for that album she talked about her then-recent sobriety; she was singing about a much more settled life, and taking musical risks. Early Waxahatchee releases were bedroom recordings, but Brad Cook’s much airier and more expansive approach to production put these new songs on markedly different footing.
“Well, it has been organic. It has been really organic.” she says, on this new form of Waxahatchee. “In a way that makes sense to me, it’s a little more organised now… the way that Brad approaches harmonics and just the sonic element of all of it, it’s all very thoughtfully done. In my younger years, it was smaller, but like, we were just throwing all kinds of shit at the wall.”
“Lilacs” from Saint Cloud, also begins with a count-in, though it sounds like it’s Brad, rather than Katie. Part of her thinking, in this new phase for the project, was to “have some self-awareness” as to what she should focus on and what she should let go of. “of course, when you’re dealing with your songs and your work, there’s like a level of control that we sort of like nervously want to have… but I really try and hand it off when there’s somebody that I’ve asked to join me, that I think might do something better than me.”
Another core part of that process on Saint Cloud was guitarist Bonny Doon, and that more collaborative shift has cemented itself since – her next release was as Plains, a project with Jess Williamson, and Tigers Blood features MJ Lenderman, guitarist in Wednesday, extensively. “We brought him in to the first demo session, which was Brad’s call. When I mentioned wanting him, I pictured bringing him in right before we went in the studio or something, when we had a really good idea of what we were doing. But Brad, he’s like this omniscient narrative presence where he’s like, no, like I actually think we need to bring him in earlier.”
“Lively”, from Cerulean Salt, is also counted in, though by no one in particular – it’s from a metronome that propels the rest of the song. In some ways, it’s the archetypal early-Waxahatchee song: vivid, dense, close, mournful. When we talked about that vein in her older work, Crutchfield said, “I think my songwriting comfort zone is about something that evokes sadness and is usually self critical. That’s a sweet spot for me. If I can get to that spot, I know I can write a good song. I’m trying to challenge myself a little to expand… trying to do that in a way that feels measured, and feels like it does keep me in check too was a challenge and is a new thing for me.”
It worked, and was still working. The recent choice to move away from that is a deliberate one, in part coming out of a more settled life. “There is a lot of stuff on the record that’s just very present for me. Something I’m really noticing as I age a bit is a lot of my platonic relationships are starting to look different. They’re like, relationships that were started in my 20s that don’t suit me anymore. I think like, you know, like the friend breakup is like a real thing that a lot of people go through. So I’m talking about that type of stuff on the record and talking about, being in the same relationship for a while and maybe, you know, there’s ebbs and flows and you kind of like land back in the same place with somebody, and that’s kind of lovely and that’s what love really is.”
Another consequence of a larger fanbase is a very different live show. “I feel like it’s all just a little more thoughtful now. When we were younger, when I was younger, even though the show was smaller, what was happening on stage was bigger, in my mind. It was louder and just kind of chaotic. It wasn’t even intentional. That’s just where I was at.”
The band’s different now, in part because the instrumentation is so different. “The style of player that I’m playing with now, I think there’s such a delicate understanding of maintaining the intimacy… I’ll play acoustic guitar, but it’s beautiful ’cause I have a band full of players who can just play everything so well. I feel so lucky, we’re gonna have Pedal Steel and Dobro and Banjo and a lot of the textures that are on the record will be present live. No one’s gonna really depend on me that hard to play guitar, so I probably will just sing a lot. Which is nice for me.”
That sentiment animates much of this new period for Waxahatchee. It’s not so much change for the sake of it, and while there are new ideas and new collaborators on board for Tigers Blood, they’re trying to see what’s next rather than looking for another new course. “A lot of my heroes did the same thing, you know, like Lucinda Williams, Tom Petty, like some of my favorite songwriters, they didn’t really reinvent themselves. They just sort of kept going down the road… I think a lot of like contemporary artists feel that pressure to just like, okay, what’s going to be my whole thing on this record? You know? And I totally get that. And I’ve certainly obviously done that. But I think I’m in this chapter where I’m going to try and just like honour the songs and not like, you know, work too hard to completely change the aesthetic just for the sake of it.”
With that in mind, I ask if she ever thinks about how older songs might fit into this new chapter. “I love that you asked me that because yes, it’s really important to me in the next year or two to do that. Not every single song by any means, but I have this vision and I just talked to Brad about it recently, where I want to take a handful of songs from each record, and have him like produce and really rearrange them – not try and remake them, totally reimagine them and just be like, how would we do this? Let’s strip the song down to its core and like, how would we do it now?”
She tells me it grew out of ‘Dixie Cups and Jars’, another song on Cerulean Salt. “When I wrote it, it was my favorite song from that record, but the way that we produced it – we were in a basement in West Philadelphia like with only the shittiest gear and, kind of a limited knowledge of how to produce an album, especially an album that we would have to look back on and talk about. So all respect to everyone who worked on that, including myself, but that song – I just really wanted to know what that would feel like with a totally different instrumentation, like what would Brad do with it, what would his ideas look like, what would my new ideas look like, what would our band, the band that we play with in the studio, what would they do with it?”
It’s likely to mean a little more space. “My songs, you know, they’ve always been really simple, really melodic. Sonically, it feels so much bigger. That part’s just been so natural, but I think our approach is just, it does have like more of a delicate touch now.”
