Jesse Riggins
Waxahatchee (Katie Crutchfield) is touring with her fourth album.
It wouldn’t be accurate to say Waxahatchee — the nom de plume of musician Katie Crutchfield — came from nowhere (She’s a native of Birmingham, Alabama, population 1.1 million). But she did seem to appear from nowhere when her 2015 breakthrough Ivy Tripp landed at the top of many critics’ best-of lists for the year.
After a stint in Brooklyn, the 28-year-old songwriter has relocated to Philly, and she’s now on tour with her fourth album, Out in the Storm (her second for indie mainstay Merge Records). Waxahatchee stops at the High Noon Saloon on July 20, along with Cayetana and Snail Mail.
“I’m really excited,” Crutchfield tells Isthmus. “It’s been kind of strange to make a record like this — it’s more personal, I think, than Ivy Tripp was — for a bigger audience. The songs are some of my favorites that I’ve ever made, so I’m pretty much just psyched across the board.”
Written about the dissolution of a recent relationship, Out in the Storm is a perfect cross-section of Crutchfield’s musical output to date. While the raw, emotional honesty is very much Waxahatchee, the instrumentation is starting to get a little louder than the band’s decidedly lo-fi early work (like home-recorded debut American Weekend.) “Silver,” for example, is propelled by a fuzzy jangle that’s more J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr.) than John Darnielle (Mountain Goats).
“I’ve always been into that juxtaposition — of emotionally open or darker and sadder lyrics to more poppy, almost happy, sounding music,” Crutchfield explains.
The closest relative to Out in the Storm is probably the work of P.S. Eliot, the short-lived but much-loved indie punk act Crutchfield formed with her twin sister, Allison (who is also signed to Merge as a solo artist). P.S. Eliot amicably broke up in 2011, but Katie and Allison have never really stopped collaborating; in fact, Allison recently joined the live incarnation of Waxahatchee as a multi-instrumentalist and backup vocalist (as has another former P.S. Eliot member, bassist Katherine Simonetti), and also played on Out in the Storm.
The irony is not lost on Katie, who initially left P.S. Eliot to focus on the decidedly quieter aesthetics of Waxahatchee. “It’s funny, because I’ve had a sort of desire to scale back, and kind of sonically give it more space,” she says. “Then I made this record, and it ended up being the biggest sounding one I’ve ever made. But I think the trajectory has ended up being that each one is a little bit bigger and more powerful sounding than the last.”
Crutchfield’s star is rising just as rapidly as her music. Just five years ago, she was the ex-frontwoman of a band that wasn’t really known outside of its scene. In 2016, she was listed in Forbes’ annual “30 Under 30” list and she was slated to perform on the highly publicized “America IRL” tour, hosted by Lena Dunham’s feminist newsletter LENNY, before it was cancelled due to Dunham’s health issues.
And though the cancellation was a major disappointment for Crutchfield, who’s an ardent feminist, she will likely relish that brief rest. Waxahatchee’s current tour runs through October, taking her all over the U.S. and Europe.
Not too shabby for a punk kid from Alabama.
