Katie Crutchfield doesn’t want to deal in absolutes anymore. “I hate to make blanket statements because I’ve already contradicted everything I’ve ever said I’d do creatively,” the singer – who has been performing as Waxahatchee since 2010 – tells NME from a London studio ahead of the release of her new album, ‘Tiger’s Blood’.
Specifically, she’s talking about how she feels tempted to divide her career into two parts, the time before her breakout 2020 album ‘Saint Cloud’ and the years after. Crutchfield’s first record as Waxahatchee, 2012’s ‘American Weekend’, arrived after the breakup of her rock band P.S. Eliot and presented a deeply vulnerable and diaristic form of storytelling set over spare instrumentation and endearingly lo-fi production. The albums that followed (2013’s ‘Cerulean Salt’ and 2017’s ‘Out In The Storm’) beefed up the sonics of Waxahatchee but kept her firmly in the indie-rock lane.
‘Saint Cloud’, which arrived in the infamous month of March 2020, featured not only Crutchfield’s best songwriting yet but also ushered in a new, breezy sound that took her back to the country music of her childhood in Alabama. Sonically, its story of getting sober and slowing down in life also struck an immediate chord in a quarantined world and took Waxahatchee to her biggest audiences yet. “I felt pretty strongly when I was making ‘Saint Cloud’ that this was my best record,” she says.
The album saw Crutchfield work with producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Snail Mail) for the first time, who she now calls “the important collaborator of my life”. She adds: “I never had the type of sounding board that he provides before. Being an artist, there’s an ego that comes with it where you want the final say on everything. There’s elements of that which are healthy, but what I’ve really learned is that I have a certain skill set that I bring to the table, but putting that into place has not always been my strong suit. Brad does all the things that I don’t do in such a smart and tasteful way.
“Brad and I, in our own individual ways, really didn’t want ‘Saint Cloud’ to seem like a fluke to anybody,” Crutchfield reflects on her mindset when work on ‘Tiger’s Blood’ began. “We didn’t want people to think, ‘Oh, they made one good record!’ We both felt a certain amount of responsibility, even to each other, to really bring it for the next one.”
“There’s a weird pressure to reinvent yourself with every record, but I’m just trying to elevate the songs the best I can”
As is often the case when following up a record deemed both by the artist and audience as their best, Crutchfield and Cook’s first instinct was to veer in a completely different direction and considered making a shiny, synth-heavy pop record. “The moment we started, we both had complete breakdowns,” Crutchfield laughs. They were working on ‘Right Back To It’, the track that ended up becoming ‘Tiger’s Blood’’s first single, and were trying to programme beats into it and “basically make it a pop song”.
“I was checked out because I knew I didn’t like it,” she remembers of the day, “and I noticed Brad was telling everyone to go home. We went outside to his backyard, and both just melted down.” She told Cook: “‘I hate this! That sucks! I don’t wanna make a record like that!’ and he agreed. We were in tears, having a big moment.”
The ‘Tiger’s Blood’ that we hear now features none of this crisis of confidence or sonic handbrake turns; it’s a refining and an elevation of Crutchfield’s songwriting in every way. The album doesn’t feel bound to the template set by ‘Saint Cloud’ but doesn’t resort to rash reinvention for reinvention’s sake, either. ‘Evil Spawn’, one of its standout tracks, is the most potent form of Waxahatchee music yet while retaining subtlety and charm. On ‘Bored’, the music returns some way towards her crunchier mid-2010s albums, but there’s a consistently airy and warm quality to its production.
‘Right Back To It’, the album’s first single and best song, also served as the turning point for the record’s creation. The day before Crutchfield and Cook’s tête-à-tête in the garden, they had invited songwriter and Wednesday guitarist MJ Lenderman to the studio to track vocals for the song. Before he hit the booth, Crutchfield talked the enigmatic and fast-rising singer over what she wanted from his backing vocals in the track’s chorus.
A few minutes later, he went in and largely did the complete opposite. “He was super polite and listened to everything I asked him to do, but just went in and did his own thing,” Crutchfield smiles. “It was amazing.” The off-kilter duet that became ‘Right Back To It’ now oozes charm and chemistry as Lenderman’s voice slides down unique tangents away from Crutchfield’s intended melody line.
The pair then knew Lenderman had to stay for the whole album’s recording, with drummer Spencer Tweedy (son and collaborator of Wilco’s Jeff) also brought in. The trio, along with Cook and his brother Phil, then developed their chemistry by playing ‘Tiger’s Blood’ in its entirety at a secret show in Durham, North Carolina, as a full live band before heading down to Texas’ Sonic Ranch Studios, the same place ‘Saint Cloud’ was laid down.
As well as being a sonic refinement and slow expansion of the Waxahatchee sound, ‘Tiger’s Blood’ represents a subtle shift in her lyric writing. For Crutchfield – and listeners – ‘Saint Cloud’ came with a clear narrative of sobriety and reflection, beckoning in a new era of life. While the singer says it’s “a complicated record about a lot of things”, she admits it was “really easy to say [to press] that it’s a record about getting sober”.
She adds: “With ‘Tiger’s Blood’, I was just doing really well. I’m in my mid-thirties and things are just quite peaceful right now. So it was really hard for me when I didn’t have that clean narrative of what to write about.”
“I’m at an age now where my life is less dramatic”
While an album about personal breakthroughs and earth-shifting moments is easier to latch onto, ‘Tiger’s Blood’ excels in sifting through the aftermath of these seismic shifts and examining the things that continue to slowly change even when your life stands somewhat still. On the record, she sings of “the 11th hour of a long friendship,” settling into a long romantic relationship (Crutchfield lives in Kansas City with her partner, songwriter Kevin Morby), familial relationships, culture at large and more.
“I think what I was scared of was it being boring or mundane,” she reflects. “I’m at an age now where my life is less dramatic. When you’re in your twenties, it’s all chaos and melodrama, which is gorgeous fodder for songwriting. Now, it would feel really inauthentic for me to write about that type of thing. That’s just not really what my day-to-day life is like anymore.”
Instead, Crutchfield continues to write about what she knows and what her life looks like at this moment. Though a radical reinvention crossed her mind for a second, ‘Tiger’s Blood’ continues the gorgeous and tasteful evolution of Waxahatchee. It takes her further towards timelessness, a word she thought about a lot while making the new album.
“I’m in this phase where it’s deeply on my mind,” she says of her past and future, name-checking her heroes – Tom Petty, Lucinda Williams – and the admiration she has for the legacies they built over decades. “How is this going to sound in 10 years? How about 20?” she thought to herself when making ‘Tiger’s Blood’. “I wanted to commit to making something that’s going to stay.”
‘Tiger’s Blood’ is released March 22 via ANTI-.