Turn and Turn Again
Waxahatchee’s new record celebrates the artist’s roots—and exemplifies the perpetual cycle of trends in American music.
Review by Joseph Collum
There’s a trend in American popular music every decade or so. Vocals start to slide further down in the mix. Room noise disappears. Strings are added. Drums are synthesized. And all of a sudden, what’s coming out of the speaker could not possibly be replicated by live musicians in a rock club. The human element has been eliminated in favor of highly marketable, mass-produced, and mostly listenable regurgitations. This pattern does not only apply to our music: think fast food, fast fashion, and, of course, Hollywood. But our music is different. Perhaps because it is most authentically our own, traveling across the Atlantic with us from two different continents, our music keeps fighting back against this cyclic whitewashing. Punk rock, outlaw country, hip-hop, grunge: these were reactions to sounds that had become stagnant and inhuman. They did not follow market trends, at least at first. They all followed the same roots movement, tracing what moved them back to its source. Vocals and lyrics rose back to the forefront, room noise was celebrated, and they made sure to take that God-awful reverb off the snare. Rising from this reconstruction came rock stars: the Elvis Presleys of the world. And then Elvis set up shop in Vegas and the cycle started over again.
Waxahatchee, the moniker for singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield, carries this American cycle within her own career. She started out performing in the latter days of the Birmingham punk scene in a band with her sister, but quickly struck out on her own, moving to the East Coast and becoming a fixture of indie rock. Indie rock, itself a reaction to macho misinterpretations of grunge once Cobain was no longer around to steer the ship, has long since stopped being “independent” in any sense of the word. (The National and Bon Iver recently appeared on a Taylor Swift album). Crutchfield added some good albums to the genre from 2012 to 2017, but something was missing, or hidden, amid the drum machines and synth and distortion drones. Crutchfield took the name “Waxahatchee” from the creek that ran through her backyard growing up outside of Birmingham. There was a disconnect between that name and her first recordings. She sounded like someone running from herself, hiding under reverb and distortion, hiding in vague, cool-sounding lyrics, like so many in the indie rock scene.
In 2020, Crutchfield, newly sober, released Saint Cloud, an album of straightforward alt-country, featuring lyrics that simplified everything and found in that simplification the profound realizations that indie rock searched for in obfuscation and irony. “And the lilacs drink the water, and the lilacs die,” she wrote, “And lilacs drink the water, marking the slow, slow passing of time.” She sang these lyrics, so plain-spoken as to strike fear into the listener, over a track of drums, bass, and a clean Telecaster riff. And she sang these lyrics as an Alabaman, her elongated vowels making the listener struggle to determine whether the drinking was happening in the past or present tense. She had matched the name to the music.
The desire for something simpler, more primitive, something familiar to return to, keeps on rising up in our culture even as it continues to come under more and more vehement attack.
After releasing an album of homage to ‘90s country as part of the duo Plains in 2022, Crutchfield is back with Tigers Blood. If anything, Tigers Blood is even more of an American roots record than Saint Cloud. The instrumentation includes, in addition to guitars and drums, banjo, dobro, and harmonica. The album cover is a photograph outside a roadside ice cream shop, with the vibrant reds and greens calling to mind disposable camera photos from the early 2000s. Everything about the album revels in Crutchfield’s rediscovered identity.
Crutchfield’s writing is in full force on this album, writing about the work that goes into adult relationships in visual couplets. “We say the same thing, yet we argue,” she sings on “Ice Cold,” “Rusted out sign, ‘Jesus loves you.’” Often, Crutchfield’s lines come as fragments, with a minimum of ornamentation. It feels like she spent hours over thesauri, looking for just the right word to fill out the sparse lines. “A paradox poetic,” she sings on “Crowbar,” “You get choked up reading the classics. Your pride’ll take a gluttonous bite, a stupid question, I’d rather not ask it.” On the title track she sings “Named after a city you ain’t never seen, spellbinding copperheads banging a tambourine,” but never explains more about the characters of the song than that they won’t cross state lines in their Jeep. She leaves the explanation up to the music and trusts the goodwill of her listener.
This fragmentation could be unsettling in the hands of less-gifted melodists. Logical connections between phrases four lines apart could be completely lost. But Crutchfield makes certain that does not happen. As good as her lyrics are, she shows generational talent in her melody construction. These melodies should not work. She jumps awkward intervals in the space between an article and its antecedent. She holds out the penultimate word in a phrase for a full measure and then doesn’t quite resolve to the root. Yet these melodies, and the counter-melodies of her duettist M.J. Lenderman, keep playing long after the song has come and gone. She seems aware of this superpower. In the lead single “Right Back to It,” she splits up lines, simultaneously awkward and transcendent, “Been yours for so long/ Come right back/ To it/ Let my mind run wild/ Don’t know how I/ Do it/ You just settle in/ like a song/ with no end/ If I can keep up/ We’ll get right back/ To it.” She delivers all of these melodies in her signature warble on the verge of cracking. She sounds like she’s grinning the whole time, amazed at her own magic trick.
Waxahatchee is not on a path to become the savior of American music. Her audience has likely remained mostly the same as she’s forefronted her roots influences and precise writing on the last two albums. She would be playing only slightly smaller clubs if she had kept chasing down the indie rock dream. But her inclination towards music that sounds handmade is indicative of the ebb and flow of American music and American life. The desire for something simpler, more primitive, something familiar to return to, keeps on rising up in our culture even as it continues to come under more and more vehement attack. Crutchfield’s melodies on Tigers Blood provide us with that elusive rootedness. They are paradoxically fresh and ancient in their oddness. Crutchfield has found herself in her return to roots. On Tigers Blood she shares what she has found.
Joseph Collum is a 2022 graduate of Dartmouth College with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Born in Mississippi and raised in Kentucky, he now lives in Philadelphia where he is teaching high school English. He is also working towards his Master’s of Education as a member of the Alliance for Catholic Education at St. Joseph’s University.
