When I pull up to Katie Crutchfield’s stylish Kansas City, Missouri, ranch house around sunset, she has incense burning, an LP of Townes Van Zandt’s 1987 album At My Window spinning on the turntable, and footage of a peaceful waterfront scene streaming on the TV. She’s also ordered a few plates of food from her favorite barbecue spot for us to eat. (She advises me to put some barbecue sauce on the mac and cheese.)
“Are you ok w dogs?” she’d texted me the night before. “I have one and she’s tiny but like, aggressively friendly toward strangers.” The warning had struck me as considerate if a little unnecessary, but as I sit on the living room couch and meet Ernie, I understand that it was warranted. I will spend much of the next two hours with her tiny tongue lapping in my face. Crutchfield is so warm and easygoing that it soon feels like we’re just two old friends catching up over burnt ends and ribs—at least until we start talking about Tigers Blood, her spectacular sixth album as Waxahatchee.
“I think my life gets weirder and less relatable the older that I get,” she says. “So I try to write in a way that’s relatable to anyone with any problem. There’s some universal emotional truth that people can get to the bottom of, even if they don’t understand everything I’m talking about.”
“What about your life seems weird and unrelatable?” I ask. “I have a stranger in my house right now who’s asking me questions,” she says, looking at me as though the answer is obvious. “It’s not something that everybody does.”
As a teenager in Birmingham, Alabama, Crutchfield spent her high school breaks touring the country in a few different groups, including P.S. Eliot, a lo-fi pop-punk band in which she played guitar and sang and her twin sister, Allison, played drums. After three semesters as an English major at U of A, she dropped out to commit herself more thoroughly to life on the road, and soon started Waxahatchee as a solo songwriting project. In 2012 she released American Weekend, a set of pitiless self-examinations set to tape hiss and acoustic guitar. “When I made American Weekend,” she says, “I was fucked up the whole time. I wrote and recorded the whole thing in a week. It was a bender.”
Drinking often comes along with touring, and Crutchfield indulged heartily for years. “We would drive to Columbia, Missouri, play for 30 minutes, get wasted, and that was kind of the whole gig,” she remembers. But as Waxahatchee’s audience grew and the band graduated from cramped DIY spots to cavernous nightclubs, she got uneasy. In 2017, Waxahatchee—which had by then grown from a stripped-down solo endeavor to a roaring rock band—played its first headlining show at San Francisco’s storied Fillmore auditorium. Before she took the stage, Crutchfield remembers, “I had a full-blown panic attack.”
Crutchfield had been dating Kevin Morby, another indie-rock singer-songwriter who’d been on the road since adolescence. In 2018, after an adulthood spent bouncing between home bases all over the country, she moved to Kansas City to live with him. She took a year off touring, got sober, and made what she and many critics agreed was the best album of her life.
Even the quieter songs on Crutchfield’s past records always had a raw, punkish edge. Saint Cloud, released in March 2020, just as COVID restrictions took hold in the United States, sounded more like Tom Petty or Lucinda Williams—two heroes whose work and careers Crutchfield frequently cites as lodestars—than anything punk. It tapped into a strain of American music that now feels timeless, though it’s really been around only since the late 1960s or so: countryish but not exactly country, with writing that deftly intertwines personal idiosyncrasy and universal appeal, splitting the difference between rocking as in rock’n’roll and rocking as in front-porch chairs in late summer.
Crutchfield has never shied away from confronting darker impulses in her work. American Weekend still resonates in part because of its unvarnished frankness about selfishness, nihilism, and willful isolation from loved ones. Saint Cloud didn’t banish these demons, but it did explore a more peaceful coexistence with them. Its melodies and arrangements were supple and spacious, throwing open the windows on the dimly lit rooms of her earlier albums. The songs Crutchfield wrote after her retreat from touring seemed to resonate with listeners thrown into solitary reflection by the pandemic; her conclusion seemed to be that hope was worth fighting for.
Saint Cloud became a sensation, peaking at No. 2 among folk albums, No. 6 among alternative albums, and even breaking into the Billboard 200. Crutchfield estimates that it roughly doubled the size of her audience. Waxahatchee’s new album, Tigers Blood, due out March 22 on Anti- Records, seems poised to push her even higher, toward the kind of success that can be disorienting for a musician who started off touring in a $900 van that was prone to breakdowns.
“I came up playing in people’s basements, you know?” Crutchfield says. “So as the stages get bigger and the audiences get bigger, even if it’s technically the most natural thing for me in the world, because I’ve been doing it for 20 years, [Saint Cloud] was a pretty big leap. And this one will be even bigger. So I’m grateful, I’m excited for the journey, and also I have moments when I’m fully terrified.”
Since getting sober, Crutchfield has made an effort to accept the circumstances of her life for what they are, and to remain engaged with and curious about them, even if they don’t conform to stereotypes about how rock stars are supposed to live. There are a few songs on Tigers Blood about easing into the long middle stretch of a relationship, and one about a day spent sleeping in and taking a road trip to a nearby lake. “If I was trying to give you a quick pitch on this record, you would be like, That sounds fucking boring,” she says. “But I’m on a lifelong mission to be extremely present with the current age I’m at, whatever place in my life I’m at, and just write about those things, even if they might seem a little mundane on the outside.”
This mission also means Crutchfield has had to rethink some of the practicalities of writing, recording, and performing. In P.S. Eliot and the early days of Waxahatchee, she would write songs in frenzied bursts, powered by Adderall, cigarettes, and booze. Now, she says, “I keep banker’s hours.” A melody might come to her while she’s grocery shopping, or messing around on guitar or piano, and she’ll record a quick voice memo on her phone, then come back to it to find the words and song structure at a time she’s set aside for working on music. She has an office at home where she works on honing these ideas, jotting lyric ideas into a notebook and moving them onto a computer screen when she’s reached something like the final version of a line, with a guitar and keyboard both close at hand for testing them out against the music.
Though Crutchfield’s own music didn’t always outwardly reflect the influence, as a kid growing up in Alabama in the ’90s, along with the Beatles and musical theater soundtracks that her mom played around the house, and the riot grrrl and other punk stuff she and Allison dug up on Limewire and Kazaa, she absorbed the likes of Shania Twain and the Chicks, as well as the older country music her dad favored.
When I was driving my rental car away from the airport in Kansas City, I heard a country radio DJ monologuing triumphantly about Beyoncé’s new country-influenced songs: Country fans, she said, this is the year the haters in your life will finally come around. Coincidentally or not, the release of Saint Cloud dovetailed with the beginning of a surge in cultural interest around countryish aesthetics, now seen everywhere from Beyoncé to Oliver Anthony to the rise of the proudly Southern indie rock band Wednesday. I ask Crutchfield if the arc of Kacey Musgraves, whose left-of-center politics and musical decisions have recently taken her to arena stages and Saturday Night Live, could be a blueprint for Waxahatchee’s next phase. She brushes off the idea. “I love Kacey, I love her new single, I’m a big fan,” she says. “I don’t think anyone can do Kacey. It would be a fool’s errand.
“I certainly have noticed that the country aesthetic is thoroughly popping off,” she continues. “I see people from New York move to Nashville and start wearing a cowboy hat, and I’m a little—” She makes a skeptical face. “But I’m also like, whatever. People just gotta go through their phases, I guess.”
Tigers Blood may be aligned with the pop zeitgeist like no Waxahatchee album before it. But the album isn’t hopping on any trends. At first, Crutchfield and her producer, Brad Cook, weren’t sure they wanted to build on the Americana aesthetic of Saint Cloud at all. That album, Crutchfield says, “was such an obvious pivot, sound and vibe-wise, but it felt so right that I was just sort of like, I can’t think about what people are going to think about this. I just have to go down this path. So in a way, it was very free, making that record.
“And then we made it and it came out and the reaction to it was very positive. And I think me and Brad were both like, Fuck, what are we going to do? How are we going to follow that up? We both really felt like this isn’t a fluke, we can do this again, but we had no plan or any idea about how.”
Take “365,” which eventually became a spare acoustic ballad. Early on, Crutchfield thought about giving it to Wynonna Judd; they’d struck up a friendship after Saint Cloud, and released a duet, “Other Side,” in 2022. When Crutchfield, Cook, and a group of session musicians first tried recording “365” during early Tigers Blood sessions at the Sonic Ranch studio in West Texas, Cook recalls a synthesizer being involved, and maybe some electronic drum loops, too. “We were dancing around a pop sound, pop production,” Crutchfield says. “I think when your profile rises, the door to pop, or that sound, opens, and it’s tempting to walk through. That lasted about one day. We gave it a good six hours.”
Crutchfield remembers feeling increasingly alienated from her own work as the arrangement progressed. “I was on my phone,” she says, “completely dissociating. I was like, I really don’t like what we’re doing, but I’m going to let everyone feel out what they’re working on.”
Cook sensed her discomfort and sent the other players home. The two decided to stick to their strengths. “Katie’s easily one of the most brilliant people I know, and also so in tune to what does and does not work for her,” Cook says. “I’ve worked with other artists where you show them what does and does not work for them. But Katie just does not need that.”
“He was very much like, ‘I think we just gotta put cool musicians in the room all together and we’re just gonna play as a band,’” Crutchfield says. “And that’s what we did.” Working any other way, she continues, felt like “trying to go fishing with a tennis racket.”
Crutchfield and Cook did bring in an important new collaborator: MJ Lenderman, a North Carolina native and rising indie rock star for his role as a guitarist in Wednesday and his casually profound solo work. Lenderman plays electric guitar on all of Tigers Blood’s 11 songs and sings harmonies on four. On “Crowbar,” he pulled out a particularly rousing line from Crutchfield’s vocal melody, figured it out on guitar, and turned it into the song’s instrumental hook. “Katie’s an incredible singer so I was both nervous and honored that she would ask me to sing harmonies with her,” he told me via email while on tour with Wednesday in Australia. “For the most part, it felt pretty natural. Some of it was my own intuition and some of it was Katie’s ‘stage mom’ guidance, as she would call it.”
Harmonizing with him on a demo of “Right Back to It,” which became Tigers Blood’s lead single, “was the big pivotal moment for me and Brad,” Crutchfield says. “We were like, ‘OK, let’s anchor everything around this feeling that we’re all having.’”
The finished version of “Right Back to It” feels like a song that will be around a long time, soundtracking first dances at weddings and final drinks at bars where the patrons get a little sentimental with their jukebox money around closing time. It’s an ode to a love that’s both tender and tough, to running wild and then settling back in, to believing that this thing you carry together is powerful enough to get you through the hard times without pretending that the hard times aren’t coming.
At least on the surface, it’s also the most overtly down-home Waxahatchee song to date, with a banjo arpeggiating melancholy chords throughout. But Crutchfield’s writing and phrasing is her own: You never know whether she’s going to cut a line off at the expected point or let it tumble into the next bar; whether you’re going to get a bullseye-precise rhyme or one that just carries a mysterious feeling of assonance, even if the sounds are completely different. There’s nothing showy about this approach; it just sounds like someone is talking to you in song. But getting to a deceptively casual-sounding final phrase can be a painstaking process of fitting lyric to melody. “It’s a style that’s organically developing, and it’s just what’s exciting for me to sing,” Crutchfield says. “A lot of times, writing lyrics is like a math problem, the amount of syllables, exactly what word where.”
Crutchfield had struggled with writer’s block when composing the lyrics to Saint Cloud. Tigers Blood, by comparison, came much more easily. “Saint Cloud was writing from a more troubled place,” she says. “Even though the narrative around that record is that it’s so warm and hopeful, and I do think it is, but maybe some of that was a bit aspirational, because I had struggled so much to get sober. With this record, I feel a lot more at peace in general in my life. I’m really trying to squash the idea that you have to be completely chaotic and tortured to make interesting art, or have something interesting to say.”
On the afternoon of my second day in town, I bring up the Townes Van Zandt album Crutchfield had been playing the night before. Given all the conversation we’d had about sobriety’s positive effects on her life and work, and the influence of country on her recent music—a genre not exactly known for odes to self-care—it had struck me as a complexly meaningful choice of soundtrack. Van Zandt was famously an alcoholic, and his own bad decisions provided him with plenty of songwriting material, whether he was in the mood for celebration or repentance. His best work has a hard-won wisdom, wrested, perhaps, from psychic tormentors in his battles with drinking. One of his most famous songs, the one he claimed was the first he ever wrote, is “Waiting Around to Die,” a narrative about a lifelong drifter and ne’er-do-well who succumbs to codeine addiction.
Van Zandt’s output slowed to a trickle around his mid-thirties, and he died at 53. He was just about Crutchfield’s age when he began his slow retreat. In some ways, it feels like she’s just getting started. “I’m in what feels like a peak moment in my creativity,” she says. “Part of me is settling into that, and part is scared that it’s going to go away.”
Over lunch, I work up the courage to ask: Does any part of her fear that the old myths about tortured artists are true? She brings up the song “Hammer Down” by Jason Molina, a mutual favorite songwriter of hers and Morby’s, who drank himself to death at 40.
“No one writes about death better than Jason Molina,” she says. “The first few times I heard [‘Hammer Down’], I couldn’t get through it without crying. I’m like, this is so self-aware, this is a person who’s so sick, and he knows he is. And it’s so sad that he struggled like that. And I think Townes, it’s similar. Those guys flew so close to the sun. And maybe that’s why they were able to write this stuff that moves people so much. But I thank God every day that I caught myself before I got to that point. Obviously some of that music, it touches me in a way that—no one could have made that without being that close to death.”
One unwelcome marker of Crutchfield’s new success: there have been a couple of conspicuous lingerers around her and Morby’s old house. One asked the neighbors if Crutchfield and Morby live there; another delivered a shockingly personal gift. She mentions one such guy for whom she felt some sympathy: He was clearly going through a rough patch, and may not have fully understood that showing up at somebody’s home like that could carry an implied threat. When he came to a concert, a member of her team politely escorted him out. Looking back, Crutchfield says, part of her wished she had been able to talk to him, to meet him on a human-to-human level and explain why the home visit had been inappropriate. But Morby, she says, was more freaked out by those guys than she was. Her mistrust of fame, it seems, has less to do with other people than the effect it could have on her relationship with herself.
After lunch, we drive around Kansas City in Crutchfield’s newish Jeep Wrangler, listening to a playlist she’d put together to use as house music on the upcoming Tigers Blood Tour. We hear Guided by Voices and Taylor Swift; the song selection seems to encompass the arc of her career, from the sort of artist who bangs out a home-recorded missive to a small cult of devotees during a weeklong bender, to the one who now can expect her new album to find a comfortable place on a few different Billboard charts. Crutchfield added the Swift song after a friend sent it to her and asked if she’d helped to write it, because something about it reminded the friend of Waxahatchee. Crutchfield hadn’t—but it wasn’t a preposterous question, especially given Swift’s recent collaborations with artists like the National and Phoebe Bridgers. I can’t help but ask if she knows whether Swift is aware of her music. The most famous woman in the world had recently been spending some well-publicized time in Kansas City, after all. Crutchfield isn’t sure. But she’s a big fan of Swift’s, she says.
When Waxahatchee hits the road later this year, they’ll be traveling in a tour bus, playing roughly 2,500-capacity theaters. She declined the opportunity to play bigger venues because she didn’t want to skip a step in her growth. She hopes to build a career like Petty or Williams, one that will enable her to continue making records and touring for decades, even if she has to get back in the van for a while. “There were moments earlier in my career where I watched my peers coming up behind me and then blow past me, and sometimes that’s hard,” she says. “Some people really knew how to handle it, and took care of themselves. And then some I saw really struggle. In hindsight, it feels 100 percent like it happened the right way for me.”
After this tour? Who knows. She has loose plans to work on music with Cook at his North Carolina studio in June, but she isn’t especially eager to get started on a new album. Like Fiona Apple, another one of her heroes, she’d like to step outside the release-cycle grind for some time. (Unlike Apple, Crutchfield’s idea of a break is more like five years than 15.) She also tells me that Plains—her duo with singer-songwriter Jess Williamson, which released the well-received album I Walked With You a Ways in 2022—was a one-off and won’t be returning.
The recording project Crutchfield seems most excited about is an idea she’s been batting around with Cook for a while: a collection of songs from Waxahatchee’s earlier days, reworked in arrangements more suited to her current style. For now, her live set list draws exclusively from her more recent music, and she’d like to play a few of the old ones without it seeming like an abrupt shift.
Cook is particularly looking forward to the possibility of digging into “Bathtub,” a ballad from American Weekend whose searing emotional intensity typifies the music Crutchfield made during a more chaotic period in her life. “Katie once said to me, ‘We should all be better than that song,’ in terms of the character and the way the character sees herself,” he says. “But I think that song is so devastating. Every time I hear it it makes me cry.”
If Saint Cloud is a more troubled record than listeners might have discerned, so too, I think, is Tigers Blood. It includes stories of late-night fights with loved ones, friendships frayed beyond repair, and elegies for an idyllic past that may never have existed in the first place. Even the radiant love song at its peak is about coming to terms with exhaustion and despair. These records, in other words, have more in common with Waxahatchee’s early work than their sunlit settings might suggest. It may be true that Crutchfield couldn’t write “Bathtub” today, but she could not have written “Right Back to It” a decade ago. She’s gotten better.
