Melody Maker
"Every record, you need the belief that it’s the best thing you’ve done—otherwise, what are you doing?” asks Katie Crutchfield on a recent morning from her home in Kansas. The 30-year-old indie-rock musician has been hunkered down this year, working on the follow up to her acclaimed 2017 LP, Out in the Storm. Ever since she started a solo career, performing under the name Waxahatchee (named after the Waxahatchee Creek in her home state of Alabama), Crutchfield’s crunchy guitar aesthetic had been poignantly lo-fi, up until Storm and last year’s Great Thunder EP.
Now, she’s in the throes ofwriting for her fifth album, aprocess that starts with demoingin ways that have her searchingfor a creative spark, day in andday out. “This is the sweet spot,”she says. “Making the new thingis the best part of whatI do. I’m always chasingthat feeling.”
Crutchfield has been on that journey for nearly half her life. When she was in her teens, living near Birmingham, Ala., she started playing in the male-dominated punk scene along with her sister Allison (who now fronts the band Swearin’). She says her initial love of music came from watching musicals with her mom; as a liveperformer, she’s confident, yetnot afraid to show vulnerabilitywhen the song calls for it.
Her most recent obsession isthe group she toured with earlierthis year, Detroit-four pieceBonny Doon—they served as herbacking band after their openingset. “Playing with new peopleand hearing old songs in a newway guided me to what I wantthe next record to be,” she says.But at a basic level, Crutchfieldis really just concerned with twothings that are the driving forcebehind all of her work.
“Every artist has a very distorted view of what they’re doing,” she says. “For me, it’s not really about the sonic choices, the instrumentation or anything like that. It’s about the melodies and the words. As a writer, you’re constantly trying to hear your own words through new ears. In doing so, it can turn you upside down.”
This article originally appears in the July/August 2019 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.
