Almost exactly a year ago, Katie Crutchfield sent a message to her Twitter followers: “wrote a 4 minute long song for the first time in my life.” She was twenty-five years old, and although her tweet could have been mistaken for the triumphant cry of a novice songwriter, Crutchfield was not in any sense a beginner. Since she was fourteen, she has released dozens of albums, singles, cassettes, and digital downloads, working alone or with bandmates, a category that has often included her twin sister, Allison. What began as an extracurricular activity has become a career, as more people have discovered the sneaky power of Crutchfield’s short songs, which aren’t nearly as sketchy as they first seem. A typical composition requires only a couple of minutes, not many more chords, and a fistful of acute lyrics delivered in the first person, present tense. Often, Crutchfield seems to be reliving a decisive moment between indecisive people: I do this, you do that, we do something else. Her voice is achy but unembellished, except for the lungfuls of air that escape along with the words: when you hear her sing, you are also hearing her breathe.
For the past few years, Crutchfield’s main concern has been Waxahatchee, a band that is also, more or less, a solo project: she writes all the songs, makes all the consequential decisions, and manages the fluctuating lineup. The first full-length Waxahatchee album, “American Weekend,” appeared in 2012, the quiet and unnervingly intense product of a weeklong burst of solitary writing and recording. The follow-up, “Cerulean Salt,” came out the next year. In putting the album on its “Best New Music” list, the music Web site Pitchfork called it “blazingly honest,” not because Crutchfield’s songs necessarily reflect her life—how could we know for sure?—but because she sings them as if they did, and because she writes the kind of lyrics that can make listeners feel like eavesdroppers. Crutchfield began to accumulate the trappings of indie celebrity—a Twitter endorsement from Lena Dunham (“@k_crutchfield You make me feel like a natural woman”), an appearance at Coachella—alongside some less expected ones. In an episode from Season 4 of “The Walking Dead,” Beth Greene, a thoughtful teen-ager, sat down at a piano and began singing to herself, murmuring about youthful excess: “We’ll buy beer to shotgun / And we’ll lay in the lawn / And we’ll be good.” One of Crutchfield’s most finely wrought songs had been reborn as a plot point in a television show about zombies.
The new Waxahatchee album, “Ivy Tripp,” marks another step in Crutchfield’s ascendance: it was released by Merge Records, which puts her on the same label—although not in the same league—as Arcade Fire. It opens with “Breathless,” the song that Crutchfield described in that exuberant tweet. (It is not actually her first song longer than four minutes, as one of her fans reminded her in response.) “Breathless” lasts for four minutes and forty-six seconds, anchored by a stately organ line, and enriched by the warm harmony of Crutchfield’s voice, overdubbed:
The steadiness of that voice makes her sound fearless, and underscores a subtly defiant sensibility that separates her from any number of quietly confessional singer-songwriters. Like many of her songs, this one seems to be about an uneasy relationship, but it also hints at a broader, more political form of dissatisfaction.
When Crutchfield talks about other musicians, she can still sound like an eager young fan. She once tweeted, “i am constantly going to bat for fiona apple like she’s my best friend.” Then, less than a minute later: “maybe she IS my best friend.” She has tattoos on her arms inspired by two bands that inspired her, Rilo Kiley and Hop Along. When she was fourteen, Crutchfield sounded older than she was, but the passage of time has made it easier to perceive her youthful spirit. Mish Way, the leader of a barbed indie band called White Lung, wrote that “Cerulean Salt” was “the record my sixteen-year-old self would have aspired to write.” This appeared to be a backhanded compliment, until the next sentence arrived: “It’s the record I would write now if I weren’t so afraid.” Crutchfield’s favorite singers share a willingness to deliver the kind of impassioned, seemingly confessional lyrics that some teen-agers adore and some grownups—unwisely—disdain. Along the way, Crutchfield has become a favorite singer, too, and undoubtedly the object of more than a few imaginary friendships. This year, as she goes on tour to play her new songs, she shouldn’t be surprised if she is approached by shy young fans who proffer arms or legs so that Crutchfield can see her own face looking back, drawn in permanent ink.
Crutchfield grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, which had a do-it-yourself music scene centered on an all-ages performance space called Cave9. She was inspired by the punk ethos of that community, even though the forms it took were sometimes off-putting. In an essay that she later wrote for a fanzine, Crutchfield remembered a scene full of “gym-shorts-wearing, ex-girlfriend-cursing, sexist” bands, and imagined warning her younger self not to trust every guy who claimed to like her music. At fifteen, she was the lead singer of the Ackleys, a proficient and precocious alternative-rock band whose brisk, tuneful songs sometimes seemed to be at war with her knotty lyrics. The Ackleys released an album and an EP, and found a place on the 2006 Warped tour. A short documentary on the band captures her sister Allison, who played keyboards, wistfully voicing a hope common to members of high-school bands: “I see it going forever.” When it didn’t, the Crutchfields formed P.S. Eliot, which was a bit more ramshackle and a lot better, as they discovered all the rock-and-roll commandments—including the imperative to sound “tight”—that they could happily ignore.
P.S. Eliot played its last show in 2011, and with her next project, Waxahatchee, Katie Crutchfield eliminated nearly everything from her music except herself. The first Waxahatchee release was a cassette collaboration with Chris Clavin, a folk-punk firebrand from Indiana. On one side of the cassette, Clavin warbled a militant ode to John Hinckley, Jr., announcing, not necessarily in jest, that “there ain’t nothing wrong with trying to kill the President.” On the other side, Crutchfield sang words so forthright, through a microphone so crude, that she could have been talking on the telephone: “You spell it out, how I mistreated you / And I’m silent—you know I treat myself badly, too.”
In the nineteen-nineties, when singer-songwriters like Robert Pollard, of Guided by Voices, and Liz Phair experimented with homemade recordings, or with songs that ended before the second chorus, they were marking their distance from the musical mainstream. At the time, many indie bands were trying to reckon with the potentially destructive power of the major-label music industry. One way to disengage was to record songs that were accessible, even hummable, without being at all marketable. But time and critical acclaim have combined to create an indie-rock canon—it is no longer a contradiction in terms to talk about classic indie rock. And so gestures that once seemed irreverent can now seem highly reverent: part of what listeners loved about those early Waxahatchee recordings was the way they evoked a certain strain of emotionally direct indie rock, thereby refreshing it.
When P.S. Eliot first started attracting attention, the Crutchfields’ youth seemed less surprising than their geographical location, in a region that has never counted indie rock among its chief exports. The sisters left Alabama in 2011, settling first in Brooklyn—by then well established as the Nashville of indie—and then, the next year, in Philadelphia, because it was cheaper and smaller, with a do-it-yourself scene that resembled a more inclusive version of the one they had left behind in Birmingham. Katie Crutchfield spent much of 2014 living on Long Island, near Ronkonkoma, where most of “Ivy Tripp” was recorded. She is back now in Philadelphia, which has become the musical home that she never really had. Waxahatchee remains essentially a solo project, but it is no longer a solitary one—in Philadelphia, Crutchfield is only the most celebrated member of a cozy musical community, home to a number of startlingly good bands that share her commitment to acute songwriting and unpretentious playing.
Last year, when Waxahatchee came to play a show at the Mercury Lounge, on the Lower East Side, Crutchfield brought along an invigorating Philadelphia pop-punk band called Cayetana, led by the singer and guitarist Augusta Koch, who delivers the lyrics in an addictive yelp. The bands first played together when Crutchfield invited Cayetana to take part in the “Cerulean Salt” record-release concert, and Koch describes her as a kind of mentor. (“To have a female that we really respect that didn’t know us have faith in us was really important,” she once said.) Another Philadelphia band, Radiator Hospital, is led by Crutchfield’s former roommate; both sisters contributed backing vocals to “Torch Song,” an upbeat but bittersweet album that Rolling Stone called “superb.”
Crutchfield’s current roommate is Cleo Tucker, an eighteen-year-old Los Angeles native who plays in a drummerless duo called Girlpool, the most radical band in this cohort. Girlpool’s music can be playful or confrontational, and the lyrics occasionally swing from personal narrative to political protest. (“I don’t really care about the clothes I wear / I don’t really care to brush my hair / I go to work every day / Just to be slut-shamed one day.”) Finally, there is Allison Crutchfield, who has her own band, Swearin’, which is faster and fuzzier than Waxahatchee, and scarcely less appealing—it would be odd to love one without at least liking the other. Katie Crutchfield’s next project is her sister’s solo début, which she has agreed to produce.
Fans who have been following these developments, and who have also noticed the changing emotional temperature of the Waxahatchee albums, might wonder whether the two phenomena are related. Modern listeners have been taught never to conflate a singer with her protagonists, but Crutchfield can make it difficult to obey this injunction. “American Weekend” chronicled addiction and despair, and contained at least one song—“Rose, 1956,” about an ailing and aging loved one who is taking “short and urgent” breaths—so fraught that she had to remove it from her set list. And the words on “Cerulean Salt” suggested a bleak and bleary landscape (one verse mentioned “silver spoons over fire”), transformed by the flickering possibility of love. Crutchfield’s voice can make anything sound sad, but the new album slowly reveals itself to be haunted by an unlikely spectre: contentment. “I know I feel more than you do,” Crutchfield sings, in a tidy song called “La Loose,” which is powered by a rudimentary rhythm from a drum machine. “I selfishly want you here to stick to.” This is Crutchfield’s version of a pop record, though perhaps you would have to know her earlier work to know that. Throughout the album, her voice is the only one you hear, often singing along with herself, as if filling in for her absent twin. But she sounds less lonely than she ever has, no matter how sparse the songs remain. One of the sparsest, “Summer of Love,” was recorded outside, with a single microphone, and it is bookended by an unexpected sound: the barking of a dog, which evidently had the good sense to keep quiet—as most audiences do—while Crutchfield was singing. ♦
