THREE DAYS INTO THE FIRST SESSION FOR THE SIXTH WAXAHATCHEE ALBUM, IN Durham, North Carolina, the producer Brad Cook sent the band home early.
It was a muggy afternoon in late July 2022, the heat and humidity of the Piedmont region closing in like a sauna. Katie Crutchfield had just finished an early-summer tour opening for Sheryl Crow and Jason Isbell, on which she had locked into a fluent songwriting rhythm. After her early set, she would retire to her bus with a keyboard, guitar, and laptop, turning bits of melody she’d stowed for years into full songs. By tour’s end, she had four new tunes.
“I didn’t see Jason or Sheryl much, because I was tucked away,” says Crutchfield. “I got good at finding ways to have privacy.” The singer is curled on the couch of the Kansas City home she owns with her longtime boyfriend, the singer-songwriter Kevin Morby. Their puppy, Ernestine, lazes by her waist.
“But I ran into Jason one day, and he’s like, ‘Ya got any new songs?’” she remembers. “I said, Man, I’ve got a hot hand. I’m in it. It’s the best feeling, like you’re high on it.”
For two days in Cook’s backyard studio, Puff City, that momentum continued. Joined by a small crew that included songwriter and Wednesday multi-instrumentalist M. J. Lenderman, Crutchfield and Cook translated rough drafts into full-band numbers with uncanny ease. Lenderman’s aching harmonies on the complicated love song Right Back To It made them all tear up. After Lenderman left to open for the Drive-By Truckers, though, the crew slammed into a brick wall of a tune called 365. Crutchfield first began the frank examination of addiction while writing for country star and childhood hero Wynonna Judd; sitting at her piano in Kansas City, she quickly realised she wanted the song for herself.
Waxing lyrical: “I’ve been saying it since I was 15 – all I want to do is write songs,” says Katie Crutchfield, AKA Waxahatchee, Kansas City, 2023.
Molly Matalon