‘I’m pretty boring and sort of straight-laced’ – how sobriety improved a musician’s work

Something settles over you when you listen to Waxahatchee. It’s always been there, carried on the wind in Katie Crutchfield’s voice since her debut, American Weekend, in 2012. But where there were once knots and static and tension braided through the revelatory moments, there’s more recently been calm, an exhale, a loosening of anything that has a tendency to tighten or constrict.

It’s a feeling that’s reflected in her daily routine and demeanour. When we speak over Zoom, she’s back home in Kansas City after a week of “bouncing around” from Los Angeles to Kansas, and then on to Washington. She doesn’t usually do press this late (it’s 8pm), she says, but has made an exception. She’s also made soup “which I was really proud of”. “Even if I’m just home for three or four days, I really try and get in my home routine.”

The boundaries that Crutchfield has put up to protect her peace have meant she says “no” to more things, but it’s hardly limited her reach; she’s playing to bigger crowds than ever before, on tours that take in more of the world. She’ll return to Australia in December for the first time since 2018.

“I feel like people don’t talk about trying to prioritise being happy … It’s all about ambition and reaching the next milestone,” says Katie Crutchfield, now 35.Credit: Redferns

Being stretched thin to the point of snapping, then recovering from the emotional ricochet that follows, is a sentiment that pervades her work. Given her schedule recently – touring in support of Tigers Blood – how does she find the same peace and patience that her music offers listeners?

“It’s definitely a practice and it’s something I’m really disciplined about,” she says. “[I’m] trying to preserve whatever I can of my creative spirit all the time. I am off social media and I try and keep my life really small and really quiet, even when shit’s crazy and everything’s kind of happening at full blast.

“I mean, I’m sober and I’m not doing drugs or staying out late or anything like that. I’m pretty boring and sort of straight-laced, so I’m getting lots of sleep. I’m staying hydrated. I’m working out. I’m eating really well. I’m doing all those things. It’s routine. With more and more experience and more and more time, when I can keep myself at a certain baseline, the whole thing just works. I can keep my head above water and stay feeling good.”

Feeling good, finding steady ground, tending to the relationships you treasure – they’re the streams that flow through Crutchfield’s songwriting these days. She’s remarked, in past interviews, that the themes of her recent records “[sound] f---ing boring” when you attempt to describe them. But there’s nothing mundane about the stamp they leave or what making them has required of her.

Hearing Crutchfield describe her writing process now, at age 35, compared with when she was in her 20s, is akin to watching someone stare at their reflection after a decade of wearing a mask. After a career spent forging an identity as an artist, a writer and a performer, her work explores what it means to know yourself simply as a person.

‘Earlier in my career there was a lot of second-guessing or fear ... I learnt I was just trying too hard.’

Katie Crutchfield, musician

It all began on the country-inflected album Saint Cloud, released at the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. Crutchfield grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, but moved to the US East Coast as a teenager, chasing a music career and a new identity. All that tension and difficulty came with it. But a return to the South – both literally and sonically – brought her songwriting a new dimension that’s been as vast as the landscapes around her. After years of finding the agonising truth and setting it to impressive arrangements, on Saint Cloud Crutchfield was content to fling the windows open and let light in.

“Obviously, I grew up with country music,” Crutchfield says,“but then as a teenager, I got into punk rock and indie rock, and they were all my influences for so long.” It wasn’t until she went on tour with indie folk songwriter Kevin Morby that he held a mirror up to a part of herself she’d either denied or didn’t yet know was there. “It was just me and an acoustic guitar with my songs, very stripped down, on this tour. And he pulled me aside and was like, ‘Dude … I feel like when I watch you, I’m watching a classic country singer’.”

She and Morby were not yet dating, but have now been together for seven years. “I had never been put in a context or seen that way, or no one had ever said that to me.”

At the time, Crutchfield was freshly falling in love with the music of Lucinda Williams, so she was more than primed to venture down her own gravel roads for the first time. Over pedal steels and strummed guitars and banjos, Crutchfield sang of coming to terms with herself and all her dependencies – she was newly sober from alcohol while making Saint Cloud and reckoning with that, as well as her emotional attachments – while building a world that listeners wanted to crawl into.

During a time when we were forced to be inside, it became an alternative universe, like those websites that sprang up during the pandemic that collated images of the views from other people’s windows all over the world. From where Crutchfield sat, we saw a version of Americana rendered in watercolours, creek beds, lilacs that sit in a glass of water atop a piano and bring light to our days while waiting to die.

When the world opened back up, Crutchfield found bigger stages and audiences were waiting for her. The indie songwriter who’d come up playing tiny clubs and DIY spaces was a bona fide star. And on her next record, Tigers Blood, released earlier this year, she kept the windows drawn, dug deeper and got to know herself even better. In May, while touring the record, she performed at the famed Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Lucinda Williams and Wynonna Judd, another inspiration turned collaborator and friend, made guest appearances.

More than anything, making Saint Cloud, Crutchfield says, taught her to trust herself. “Earlier in my career, there was a lot of second-guessing or fear. I’ve always written these really straightforward melodies, and I think I was insecure about that before. I really wanted to find ways to make it weird. I learnt, with Saint Cloud, I was just trying too hard.

“I always use food metaphors and Brad [Cook, producer of Saint Cloud and Tigers Blood] and I talk in food metaphors a lot – and I learnt if [I have] a perfect tomato, if I just slice it with a little salt and pepper [and] olive oil on a piece of bread … You don’t need more than that sometimes. And so that was a big lesson for me: don’t try to dress it up so much, just let it be what it is. And we really carried that into Tigers Blood.”

Crutchfield comes across as a realist. Her position in the industry and present relationship with herself have been hard-earned and have given her a handy perspective on what’s worth chasing and what you can let pass on the current.

“In a high-performance job – or any job – but really in entertainment or music or whatever … I just feel like people don’t talk about trying to prioritise being happy people. It’s just all about ambition and reaching the next milestone. And I think that’s something I noticed watching other people around me achieve certain levels of success. I’m just like: ‘Those people seem miserable. What the hell? They have everything they ever wanted and they’re miserable’.”

She learnt early on the power that comes with having healthy relationships; achieving “a good, fulfilling, rich domestic life”; and looking after herself. “Especially in this record cycle, I’ve been really trying to do that. I didn’t let myself get sucked into the things about this life that can make you feel bad, and I’ve sought out ways to feel good.”

Now at the peak of her career so far – one that’s lasted four years and shows no sign of slowing – has the quest to feel good meant she’s had to make sacrifices?

“Oh yeah, that’s a big part of it. I feel so blessed that this is happening to me at the time. My career has been at this beautiful pace – this totally humane pace – and with every new door that opens, I am completely ready for it. And that doesn’t happen all the time; it’s kind of feast or famine a lot of the time. I feel like having done this for so long, and seeing the highs and lows, I’ve really put myself in a good position to handle whatever gets thrown at me.”

Crutchfield sings on Crowbar:“Maybe it’s easier to be afraid, drenched in tragedy, man-made.”

She’s in the hard part now, but it turns out that’s not so scary after all.

Waxahatchee will perform at Perth’s Astor Theatre on November 29; Brisbane’s the Tivoli on December 1; the Sydney Opera House on December 2; Melbourne’s Corner Hotel on December 4 and the Forum on December 5; and at Hobart’s Odeon Theatre on December 8.

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