Waxahatchee: "I spend so much time thinking about how different I am that I don't ever really think about how I'm the same"

Examining her 30s with the help of a few new pals, WAXAHATCHEE has come roaring back with an assured new album that’s brimming with confidence.

Words: Martyn Young.
Photos: Molly Matalon

If releasing her album in the week the world shutdown in March 2020 wasn’t discombobulating enough, the fact that the record would go on to be her most successful and critically acclaimed was even more mindblowing for Katie Crutchfield. ‘Saint Cloud’ was a landmark release in Waxahatchee’s 15-year recording career. A bittersweet moment for Katie as she had the best work of her life but couldn’t fully enjoy it, while for many, it will go down as THE pandemic album alongside Dua Lipa’s ‘Future Nostalgia’. Fortunately, the world is in a very different place now, and Katie is looking to expand and capitalise on that record’s riches with her follow-up album ‘Tigers Blood’.

“I’m banking on the hope that there’s not another pandemic in the middle of this cycle. Of all the things that could go wrong, I’m hoping that that doesn’t go wrong,” she laughs. ‘Tigers Blood’ is yet another staggering work by one of the premier songwriting voices of modern times, but it’s a record that feels like an evolution of work Katie has been doing for a number of years now. “If I’m zoomed out looking at my whole catalogue, it feels like In 2018 I made this whole EP with Brad Cook called ‘Great Thunder’ and then from there, I made ‘Saint Cloud’, my album with Jess Williamson as Plains and now ‘Tigers Blood’,” she explains. “It feels like before I started working with Brad and after. Contextually, it fits within that family of post-working-with-Brad records so well. It feels like such a natural progression.”

With such a strong creative partnership firmly established, Katie and Brad set about crafting a record in the image of the previous ‘Saint Cloud’, which acted as something of a reset point in the Waxahatchee story. After some deliberation, they established the creative path for the record once again with a strong collaborative principle.