Katie Crutchfield, who records music under the name Waxahatchee, released “Saint Cloud,” her fifth solo album, in late March, just as the country went into coronavirus lockdown. In the long months since, the album has become a talisman of the self-isolation era. On the cover, Crutchfield is barefoot, wearing a sky-blue dress, sitting atop a pickup truck the color of butterscotch ice cream, its bed wreathed with red roses. Rooted and easy, the eleven songs, which have earned Crutchfield comparisons to Lucinda Williams and early Dylan, warm listeners with hard-won sunlight and unexpected peace. Crutchfield recorded her solo début, “American Weekend,” in 2012, in a single snowed-in week at her parents’ home, in Alabama; Waxahatchee is a reference to a nearby creek. But this is her first album that explicitly evokes the music she grew up with. The D.I.Y. fuzz that pervades the previous Waxahatchee albums—and the lo-fi punk records she made with her twin sister, Allison, under the name P.S. Eliot—has given way to the unadorned sound of an older country-blues tradition. The album’s first track, “Oxbow,” begins with a crisp, decisive drumbeat and a synth that sounds like a tape rewinding. When the first, deep chord kicks in and Crutchfield starts singing, it feels as if you’ve stumbled through thick woods to find a sudden clearing, a place where you can stay as long as you like.
Crutchfield is thirty-one, and she’s been a front woman for more than half of her life. As a ninth grader, alongside her sister, she sang and played guitar in the Ackleys, a pop-rock band and Birmingham favorite that got booked on the 2006 Warped Tour; after P.S. Eliot, she and Allison also recorded music as Bad Banana. All of these projects were anchored by Crutchfield’s bold sense of melodic color, her offhandedly piercing lyrics, and the prickly restlessness in her delivery. Over the past decade, she has become an informal mentor and “fairy godmother” to other young women in the indie-music scene, urging them to assert and take care of themselves in the midst of the gruelling and often misogynistic worlds of touring and recording. (“Witches,” a track on “Saint Cloud,” name-checks a few of Crutchfield’s fellow-travellers in the project of navigating music-industry vagaries and expectations, including her sister, her friend and collaborator Marlee Grace, and Lindsey Jordan, of Snail Mail.)
While touring in support of her last album, in 2018, Crutchfield decided to get sober. She was in Barcelona, at the music festival Primavera Sound, and though she’s careful to note that it was a high bottom, she still experienced the transition with cinematic intensity. “There were a lot of firsts,” she told me recently, over the phone, from the house in Kansas City that she shares with her boyfriend, the musician Kevin Morby. “I had been avoiding looking at my substance issues in a direct way for a long time.” She spent six months trying to recalibrate—roaming the country, considering a move back to Alabama, wanting to write but finding herself blocked. She settled in Kansas City and pushed herself to render the story she wanted to tell into lyrics. She felt protective of her freshly sober experience, aware of surfacing personal weaknesses. But she was also finding breakthroughs. As she sang along to songs by Fiona Apple and SZA, she realized that she wanted to put her voice front and center, cleanly, for the first time. Her longtime favorite album, Williams’s “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” was speaking to her in a way that felt new.
She began thinking of “Saint Cloud” as an album that would relate a long, elliptical, autobiographical story. Its penultimate track, “Ruby Falls,” tells of a friend who died after overdosing, and its final track, the titular one, calls back to her father’s home town, in Florida, and to lonely rides on the M train in New York City. But the album had to begin in Barcelona, in the frustration and clarity of early sobriety, which she captures on “Oxbow.” “It felt like the beginning of the story,” she said. “Like I was looking at things honestly for the first time.” The chorus of that track is just Crutchfield singing “I want it all,” over and over, as fresh colors break and deepen around her, the chords looping into a state of tenuous reassurance.
Getting ready to tour the album, Crutchfield felt newly proud and deliberate. In a recent interview, she told the musician Jess Williamson that, earlier in her career, she had thought of herself as a songwriter more than a performer—she would “just stumble out on stage and kind of mumble my songs into the microphone and then stumble off and go out with my friends.” Through making “Saint Cloud,” she realized how much self-respect she had been denying herself: she needed to “love myself enough to go out and hone some power for a second and put it out into the world.” At the beginning of March, she gathered her touring band for a long and “magical” weekend of rehearsal in Michigan. A week and a half after that, everything shut down. She has been trying to give herself permission to feel shitty about the situation, she told me—about not getting to bring the story she tells on the album full circle, on tour, not getting to experience it in the presence of other people. “It’s so natural right now for everyone to just immediately put a positive spin on whatever they’re going through. I’ll get half a sentence out and then interrupt myself, saying, ‘It’s O.K.; I’m so blessed.’ ”
But “Saint Cloud” has taken on new resonances in quarantine. Crutchfield’s lyrics, more precise than they’ve ever been, articulate moments of uncertainty and self-recrimination: “We will coalesce our heaven and hell / My eyes roll around like dice on the felt / My mind turns to something useless and trite / My uneasiness, materialized,” she sings, on “Can’t Do Much.” They also crack open a sense of acceptance, of time stretching and perspectives changing and everyday continuity threading things along. On the track “Fire,” she sings:
For me, the album is a potent reminder of the world we will eventually return to—a life of ordinary motion, in which we negotiate each day alongside other people, witness one another’s fluctuations and longings face to face. The unshowy guitar patterns recur and iterate like road signs on a highway; the plucked-out instrumental accents feel like a friend tapping your hand on the steering wheel.
Crutchfield had scheduled weekly digital concerts throughout the month of June, in which she planned to play each of the albums in her catalogue; on June 1st, she announced that she was pushing the shows back a week to “hold space & stand in solidarity with those protesting now during this important moment in the fight against white supremacy & police violence.” A portion of ticket proceeds would be donated to local organizations and chapters of Black Lives Matter. I’ve been dreaming about hearing the album in person—more than any recent album that I’ve heard, “Saint Cloud” evokes a sense of freedom and belonging that has been elusive in this era of constraint and distance. “I know that we’ll tour it,” Crutchfield told me when we spoke. “We just have to live in this weird groundlessness, to accept that there’s no way to know when—to try to be certain that we will get to play these songs, even if it’s two years from now.” In the meantime, quarantine has tested, and possibly changed, her restless nature. That morning, she had woken up early; the rain in the forecast hadn’t materialized; she had made herself a cup of coffee. “It’s been good to see, after moving so much all the time for so long, that I can stay still,” she said. “That I can take joy in simplicity, that I can have these moments. Moments of pure joy.”
