Weathering the Storm: Waxahatchee interviewed

“The more time that passes since I started making music, the more I think I’m kind of a slow burner.”

Given that she’s gearing up to release her fourth record in five years, you could be forgiven for thinking that’s a peculiar opening gambit from Katie Crutchfield. It’s not just that she’s prolific; the defining characteristic of her catalogue to date is her penchant for performing stylistic gymnastics from one album to the next. Her debut proper, American Weekend, was a charming series of lo-fi confessionals. When she followed it up a year later with 2013’s Cerulean Salt, the leap forward was profound – the textures were richer, but the overall feeling was one of claustrophobia, with the atmosphere thick to the point of feeling suffocating.

That was what made Ivy Tripp, Crutchfield’s third full-length, feel like another reinvention entirely. Altogether poppier and breezier, it seemed to bury its anxieties at the idea of aimlessness beneath bouncy melodies and clanging guitars. It might have been Crutchfield’s finest set of songs from a compositional standpoint – the instrumentation was lusher and the ideas more complex – but there was also the sense that it maybe the lacked the sort of emotional heft that she’d so readily made her calling card on her previous two efforts.

Accordingly, her fourth LP reads as her most natural progression yet. It builds on the fizz and crackle of Ivy Tripp, in that it plays like the first out-and-out rock record from Waxahatchee, but it's also scored through with an honesty that was missing from her last album; there’s a delicate balance struck between self-examination and self-care. By her own admission, much of Out in the Storm is about exposing herself to the emotional elements that she’d battened down the hatches against last time out.

“I think, for the most part, my records are kind of cuttingly personal,” she muses over the phone from London. “I mean, they all tend to be very experience-based, but Ivy Tripp came at a weird time in my life. I was depressed, which wasn’t helped by a bad living situation, and I was really having a hard time seeing my life for what it was. I reacted to that by leaning towards making my lyrics abstract and poetic, just to try something different. By the time I came to write Out in the Storm, I’d made a lot of changes to the way I was living, so I wanted to focus on things that had happened to me when I was writing Ivy Tripp, that I hadn’t addressed back then.”

All of which plays into the apparent lifeblood of Waxahatchee; that restlessness that sees Crutchfield changing tack from year to year. “If each album’s going to be a departure, then typically I have a really clear vision for how that’s going to happen,” she explains. “This time around, I wanted to get back into my old headspace, where I was approaching things really personally. I didn’t do that on Ivy Tripp. I was really thinking about that, and less about how the songs were going to turn out sonically. I let the melodies and lyrics come to me naturally, knowing that I’d be able to flesh it out in the studio with my band. I didn’t want to shape anything too much – I wanted to be able to take them to rehearsal and try a tonne of different things with them.”

In a lot of ways, then, the way in which Crutchfield confronts the difficuties that she’d shied away from on her last record is actually the manifestation of looking at herself psychologically, by prioritising her own happiness and peace of mind. She’s talked about how she didn’t truly recognise what made her unhappy until she viewed those things through the prism of what it was that brought her contentment. That dichotomy hangs heavy over Out in the Storm, as does the spectre of her former partner – musically and romantically. “The whole album is really about one relationship; the evolution of it, the end of it, and the sort of drag afterwards," she says. "That was heavily on my mind, but ultimately, it’s something that I’ve written about before.”

One of the album’s standouts, Silver, sums up those themes, and lends the record its title – 'I went out in the storm and I’m never returning' – as she faces up to her own failings whilst still coming over as steely in her defiance. “It’s about examining how you got into a certain situation, and not really blaming yourself, but just kind of walking through the steps that you took on the way there. I definitely know it’s important not to overthink things too much, because you’ll drive yourself crazy, but I knew that this was bound to be a very introspective album by nature. I was really trying to capture a moment.”

Before heading into the studio to cut tracks for the record in her adopted hometown of Philadelphia, Crutchfield worked out the arrangements with her band, which currently comprises Katherine Simonetti playing bass and Ashley Arnwine behind the drum kit. “I’d been obsessing over every detail,” she recalls, “and I was just telling the guys, 'don’t worry about it sounding good together – we’re not rehearsing to go on tour. We’re rehearsing to go into the studio, so just concentrate on your own individual parts.'”

Veteran producer John Agnello, though, had other ideas. He pushed Crutchfield to cut the record live, something that she hadn’t initially felt ready for. “It turned out we were way more prepared than he’s used to,” she laughs, which is quite the compliment given some of the names Agnello’s worked with over the years – Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and The Hold Steady amongst them. The wider line-up in the studio, meanwhile, was rounded out by Crutchfield’s sister Allison on keys and Katie Harkin, of Sky Larkin and Sleater-Kinney, on guitar.

“The funny thing was that, on the one hand, nobody knows me better musically than Allison; just her presence there put me at ease. If there’s a take I’m not sure about, I only need to look at her to know if it’s the right one or not. She took time out of making her own album (January’s Tourist in This Town), so she really went above and beyond to help me out.

“Bringing Katie in was kind of the opposite of that; we’ve been friends for a while, and obviously she’s a national treasure in Britain, but I was rolling the dice a little bit because we’d never played music together. Silver was actually the first song we did, and she just ripped into one of those riffs on it, and I knew I’d made the right call. I’d gone in knowing that I wanted somebody to play lead guitar, because I wanted it to be a rock record with solos, and she just came in and nailed it. Any time I had an idea for a part, she could turn it into something awesome.”

Since wrapping the album back in January, Crutchfield has found herself in the eye of an altogether different storm; back in April, she announced that she’d be taking part in a tour put together by Girls creator Lena Dunham and the show’s producer, Jenni Konner, in support of their feminist newsletter, Lenny. The idea was to combine music, discussion and performance art, with a bill including the likes of writer Jenny Zhang and poet Rachel McKibbens; the dates have since been nixed due to Dunham’s ongoing health issues.

At the time, though, Crutchfield’s association with the ever-divisive Dunham was enough to encourage a vitriolic backlash on social media, with myriad commenters on both Twitter and Facebook suggesting that it was a grave enough offence to justify a boycott of Waxahatchee's music. “The dust seems to have settled a little bit on that now, which is good,” she reflects. “It was a lot to handle; I’m not used to strangers being that mad at me, so it was a little scary. I knew all along we were going to do it to raise money for local abuse organisations, and that it would be a big platform lifting up all these brilliant voices. I knew there were cons, but the pros always outweighed them. It was an opportunity to do some good, and bring these women to audiences in towns that wouldn’t normally have those resources.”

Even with the Lenny run on indefinite hold, Crutchfield will still tour exhaustively in support of Out in the Storm, just as she did behind Ivy Tripp and Cerulean Salt. Her rate of output seems all the more impressive when you consider that she doesn’t write on the road, waiting instead until she’s wrapped live commitments before moving onto a new batch of songs. 

“People seem to think I’m really prolific, which is crazy! I feel like some of my closest peers are always working, whereas I can go two months without writing anything. That’s healthy, I guess, because I struggle to focus on the next thing when I’m still in the mindset of playing whatever the last album was every night. My perspective’s probably a bit warped, because I always feel like I could be doing more, but it looks like nobody else sees it that way – which is great!”