When Katie Crutchfield (who performs under the name Waxahatchee) performs at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival on Friday, fans shouldn’t expect to hear a show that encompasses all six of her studio albums.
Instead, she’s been focusing on her three most recent releases — 2020’s Saint Cloud, last year’s Tigers Blood, and Plains, a 2022 album she made with Jess Williamson.
“I realize it’s a little bit of a risky move,” Crutchfield says in a recent phone interview. “There are definitely gonna be people who have been with me for a long time and want to hear the old stuff.
“But I just feel so excited to play all the newer stuff, and so yeah, that’s basically the whole set,” she said. “So if you are a fan of those last three records you’re gonna probably hear what you wanna hear.”
The focus on the newest music makes sense considering Saint Cloud and Tigers Blood have seen Crutchfield, with the help of producer Brad Cook, reshape her sound, taking it in a more straightforward direction that leans further into her country and folk influences, while retaining some of the rock energy that characterized her earlier work as Waxahatchee, especially on the albums Ivy Tripp (2015) and 2017’s Out in the Storm. (Plains had a similar, if a bit folkier, feel.)
“I’ve always written songs that are very simple … the foundation of my songwriting is country music. It is even like ’90s pop country music,” Crutchfield says. “That’s the first music I connected with and it’s sort of imprinted on my DNA. But those first four albums, I was so concerned with scuffing that up a bit and making it weirder or more sort of in line with indie rock or punk rock, with my tastes at the time, which is great. I’m so glad that that all exists as a snapshot of that moment. I feel like with Saint Cloud, it was a big realignment with my tastes and the actual type of songs that I was writing were aligned maybe for the first time. And I really credit Brad Cook … Brad was very much like, let’s take as much of this away as we can and really try and showcase your voice and the song.”
That shift in style connected, as Saint Cloud — created with Detroit’s Bonny Doon as the backing band — was universally hailed as the best Waxahatchee album to date. Crutchfield saw her audience double in size over the course of that album’s tour cycle.
“It came out right as the lockdown happened,” she says. “I think people were able to kind of take some of my words about my sobriety journey and apply it to what they were experiencing during COVID, and I think that, you know, people were just connecting with it in that way as well.”
Tigers Blood is not built around a central lyrical theme, but it continues down a similar stylistic path. Crutchfield’s rock roots are especially apparent on tunes like “Ice Cold” and “Bold,” which have crisp tempos and bright and catchy guitar work to go with Crutchfield’s melodic vocals, while “Evil Spawn,” and “Crowbar” are more measured in their energy and rootsier in their overall feel. “Burns Out at Midnight,” “Crimes of the Heart,” and “Right Back to It,” meanwhile, take things in an even more easygoing and folky direction, with the first two songs anchored by acoustic guitar while the latter tune incorporates touches of banjo and backing vocals from MJ “Jake” Lenderman.
Crutchfield and Cook initially weren’t sure what shape the follow-up album to Saint Cloud should take. They even toyed with incorporating some synthetic modern pop production — an experiment that was quickly abandoned. But things came together when Crutchfield and Cook brought in singer-songwriter Lenderman to play guitar and sing on “Right Back to It,” and everyone agreed he needed to play guitar in the studio band on the entire album.
“It’s funny, that song, when I wrote it, I couldn’t see it for myself. I don’t know why,” Crutchfield says. “There’s something about that melody that I was like ‘This feels outside of my zone,’ which is funny because I feel like the song on Saint Cloud that felt that way [was] ‘Fire,’ which ended up being the biggest song on that record. And ‘Right Back To It’ is the biggest song on this record. So it’s something I might just track in the future, to go after the melodies that don’t quite feel like something I would normally do.”
It’s not just the music that has aligned in a good way for Crutchfield during the past five-plus years. Before making Saint Cloud, she decided to quit drinking.
“I really feel like everything in my life got better when I quit,” she says. “I’m a lucky person in that I’ve gotten nothing but like good signals from the universe that that’s what was supposed to happen. If I just keep not drinking, good things are coming my way and happiness is coming my way, and … reaching these new creative milestones, that’s coming my way.”
Another turning point was a move from her adopted home of Philadelphia to the Kansas City area to live with fellow musician Kevin Morby in a committed relationship.
“It’s been great,” Crutchfield says. “I think like Kevin, he challenges me in a way that I think is good and I think keeps me on my toes and keeps me present. He’s obviously a brilliant songwriter in his own right, so it’s really nice. I think we keep each other excited to keep working on stuff and yeah, I’m able to really be independent and enjoy my autonomy while still having the full love and support of a partner. It’s been great.”
Waxahatchee performs on Friday, Jan. 24 as part of the Ann Arbor Folk Festival along with Josh Ritter, Jobi Riccio, Adeem the Artist, and Afro Dominicano. The festival continues on Saturday with Toad the Wet Sprocket, Bruce Cockburn, The Milk Carton Kids, Joy Clark, and Willi Carlisle. Hill Auditorium; 825 N. University Ave., Ann Arbor; theark.org/folk-festival. Tickets are $47.50-$70.
