Waxahatchee: 2024

It's not an accident that the cover of Waxahatchee's latest album, Tigers Blood, is a remixed version of her 2020 breakthrough Saint Cloud, with the same basic elements — the artist, a rural setting, a pick-up truck — and you can infer that these two works are in some ways related.

Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield told me as much when we spoke over Zoom the day after her sold-out show at the Beacon Theatre. "There are basically two eras of Waxahatchee so far," she said. "Before Brad Cook and after," a reference to the Durham, North Carolina producer at the helm of her last two records.

As a longtime fan of Waxahatchee, I can see the distinction here. Saint Cloud was a milestone, both the end of an era and the start of something new, and a premium piece of artistic identity myth-making that deftly understood the power of place. (At the Beacon Theatre show, the crowd roared at the mention of Waxahatchee Creek during the gorgeous "Ruby Falls.")

Tigers Blood picks up here, albeit in a more relaxed fashion (trading the powder-blue formal wear and red-rose altar of Saint Cloud for a red bikini top, blue jeans, and baseball cap on the cover of Tigers Blood). Crutchfield, who started releasing music with her twin sister Allison at age 18 as the melodic lo-fi punk band P.S. Eliot, has taken more than ten years with Waxahatchee to tell us who she is and where she's coming from.

Now that she's got our attention, there's a couple of stories she'd like to share — and my god, what a storyteller. There are few voices in contemporary pop music that contain such unaffected power and clarity, with digestible (often genius) lyrics always upfront, riding shotgun in the pick-up.

I had the privilege of catching both soundcheck and the show at the Beacon (my first Waxahatchee show) and it was a joy to see Katie in both modes, moving from ripped jeans to gold sequin bell bottoms. Every note (and I mean every note) was hit with pitch-perfect attack, unhurried even when working through the syncopated couplets on "Right Back To It" ("you come to me on a fault line/deep inside a goldmine" is a favorite over here) or transforming a throwaway lyric like "I get bored" into a defiantly casual (generation-defining?) chorus akin to Nirvana's "oh well/whatever/nevermind."

Waxahatchee's band warmed up nicely over the course of the night, bottom-lined by young Spencer Tweedy, who also played drums on the new record. For all the ink that has been spilled about where Waxahatchee sits in the lineage of 20th and 21st century roots music, the live renditions drawn from Tigers Blood reveal pop and rock influences that anyone born in the '80s will gleefully recognize.

The band played through the whole of Tigers Blood, three tracks of which are included in this session. What emerges is a sincere artistic identity that acknowledges its Southern roots but refuses to fetishize them, and an unpretentious millennial songwriter who can appreciate the genius of pop songcraft, so long as you've got the voice, so long as you've found the words.

Katie told me that she has no immediate plans to make another Waxahatchee record and that made sense to me. After two decades of recording and touring nonstop, Waxahatchee is now synonymous with both Katie Crutchfield the songwriter and the brilliant sound of her band, a unified artistic identity chilling at a nice plateau – not an easy feat. So might as well take it easy before getting right back to it, you know?

[Thanks to MSG Entertainment and the Beacon Theatre for providing FUV with the live songs "Right Back to It," "Bored," and "Crimes of the Heart" from Waxahatchee's show on August 28, 2024. Additional mixing by Jim O'Hara for FUV. Interview recorded: 8/29/24; Produced by Meghan Offermatt.]