Waxahatchee is Exclaim!'s first new cover star of 2024, but you'll have to hit the streets (if you're in Canada) and pick up a free physical edition from a newsstand near you to read our print-exclusive conversation with Katie Crutchfield about Tigers Blood, her astonishing sixth album.
Crutchfield's latest is her first record in the wake of Saint Cloud, the watershed 2020 album that saw the Alabama native rise to a newly rarified plane of artistic clarity and cultural impact. She and producer Brad Cook tapped into an effortless synergy on Saint Cloud by leaning into Crutchfield's southern roots, and Tigers Blood sees the pair — with a little help from Wednesday's MJ Lenderman — dig even deeper into that fertile soil and resurface with a collection of modern country rock standards.
Though Crutchfield herself has described a distinct feeling of before-and-after when it comes to her Saint Cloud breakthrough, the early phase of her career also produced some incredible, time-tested classics. And so, we've compiled a list of our favourite pre-Saint Cloud Waxahatchee songs — the lo-fi acoustic dirges, swirling pop songs and furious rockers that got Crutchfield to where she is today.
Read on for our favourite early Waxahatchee tunes, presented in chronological order, and go grab a copy of Exclaim!'s February/March 2024 edition to read more about Tigers Blood.
"Catfish"
American Weekend (2012)
Way back where it all began, there was "Catfish." The opening track on Katie Crutchfield's first full-length release as Waxahatchee, "Catfish" introduces American Weekend on a peak that it never quite reaches again — restless, devastating and unfairly simple, it remains a high water mark in a career full of them. Every word is a perfect blade, but few cut so deep as "Soaking wet below a static TV set / Conversation flows, counting shooting stars and catfish / But I'll never make a wish." She would grow immensely as a songwriter in the next decade and change, but "Catfish" still feels like the Waxahatchee blueprint.
Kaelen Bell
"Be Good"
American Weekend (2012)
The honeyed melody of "Be Good" is still sweet, even through the grit of the ultra-thin lo-fi production. With lyrics about boredom and shotgunning beer, Crutchfield chronicles an ill-defined relationship full of tenderness and messiness. But amidst the simplicity of both the arrangement and the plainspoken lyrics, her poetic sophistication shines through as she admits, “I'm selfishly dispossessed.”
Alex Hudson
"American Weekend"
American Weekend (2012)
Among the least joyful songs in Crutchfield's catalogue, 2012 title track "American Weekend" conversely mythologizes a college school night on which a now-deceased friend convinced the singer-songwriter to eat three grams of mushrooms, and a very bad time was had. Flexing some of her most mighty songwriting muscles in the chorusless track's third verse, Crutchfield sings of the anxious morning-after clarity, "We are the only ones awake / And you hold me like you do it every day / I chase a graceful way to erase or to run away."
Allie Gregory
"Dixie Cups and Jars"
Cerulean Salt (2013)
Crutchfield's first two records as Waxahatchee were about, among many other things, emptiness. In your bedroom, in your head, in your chest — the songs on American Weekend and Cerulean Salt were charged by the glow of negative space. "Dixie Cups and Jars" is a masterclass in the power of breathing room; drums, guitars and voice that sound like they're floating mid-air, it's music-as-eye-contact, so much said in the silence. That restraint is what gave Crutchfield's earlier records their special force; With words this dense with feeling and brains, who needs noise?
Kaelen Bell
"Hollow Bedroom"
Cerulean Salt (2013)
Slurred vocals, '90s alt-rock riffs and a sharp, single-verse, two-minute-shy runtime lend to the fleeting aura of the bluntly sexy "Hollow Bedroom," the nostalgia-laden opening song of Crutchfield's sophomore return. Unmoored by bedroom-recording fuzz and dripping in confidence, the song introduced a new era for Waxahatchee, one steeped in garage rock bravado, giving new boldness to the already well-trodden intimacy of her lyricism.
Allie Gregory
"Summer of Love"
Ivy Tripp (2015)
A dead simple four-chord acoustic strummer, "Summer of Love" is a raw expression of yearning. Gazing at a photograph from happier times, Crutchfield reflects on “treading water without you.” Her aching repetition of the title lyric drives home her longing for the past — “The summer of love is a photo of us” — with the ambient background hiss and distantly barking dogs driving home the feeling of sitting on the porch on a summer evening.
Alex Hudson
"8 Ball"
Out in the Storm (2017)
Perhaps the sole song on the blustery Out in the Storm that foreshadowed the glorious about-face she'd make on Saint Cloud, "8 Ball" is streaked with dust and deep-orange sun; a compact ruby of a song, it's both a bruising takedown of a shithead ex and a protective fetal curl. But in its smear of drunken embarrassments and cruel slights, there's a glow of potential, a hazy hope on the horizon — Crutchfield loses control, she causes scenes and burns it all down. In the ashes, she traces a map forward.
Kaelen Bell
"Hear You"
Out in the Storm (2017)
In an album of gigantic crescendos, "Hear You" is the biggest of the bunch, its roaring low end blowing wide open during a cathartic chorus. Though lyrically cryptic, it seems to address an unsupportive leech, with Crutchfield standing tall in spite of it all: "I stand up on that stage / You sink your teeth, build your own cage / Wait for the coolest girl / You break her down, make her hear you out."
Alex Hudson
“Silver”
Out in the Storm (2017)
Moving out of her home recording setup and into a studio got Crutchfield's rock 'n' roll juices flowing in a way that had yet to be produced in the three albums prior to Out in the Storm. Among the rockin'-est is "Silver," which finds the musician weathering the storm of her breakup, and bearing the hardening, both as perceived in the "classic story smothered underneath formality" and in the stoniness of the hurt that ultimately makes you stronger.
Allie Gregory
"Chapel of Pines"
Great Thunder (2018)
In revisiting songs from her 2012 band with Swearin' bassist Keith Spencer, 2018 EP Great Thunder found Crutchfield re-recording songs — written around the time of American Weekend — in what would grow to become Saint Cloud's signature sound. On lead track "Chapel of Pines," her newfound vocal twang inflects wistfulness on lyrics that could have been mournful in 2012's costume, but instead feels like discovery, something falling into place after years of searching. Its choral line, "Will you go," bends and curls upon repetition, seemingly stretching back in time itself.
Allie Gregory