Waxahatchee’s ‘Tigers Blood’ Is the Sound of a Master Storyteller on a Hot Streak

Rob Sheffield
·4 min read
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Credit: Molly Matalon*
Credit: Molly Matalon*

“Drank someone else’s juice and left only the rind,” Katie Crutchfield boasts on her excellent new Waxahatchee album, Tigers Blood. She’s got a right to sound cocky. The long-time indie-rock underdog hero won herself a lot of new fans with Saint Cloud, her 2020 breakthrough hit, going for a laid-back style of heartland rock & roll twang. But Tigers Blood is even more rugged and confident, a master storyteller fully aware she’s on a hot streak. She sings about adult romance, struggling for sobriety, the day-to-day work of holding it together—in the poetic voice of a Lucinda Williams who came of age playing DIY punk-house basement shows.

To many fans, Crutchfield is a fresh new voice, yet she’s already lived out so many amazing stories. She grew up a teenage emo prodigy in Alabama, joining with her twin sister Allison to form cult bands like P.S. Eliot and Bad Banana. She found her voice with Waxahatchee, in the brooding guitar poetry of her 2013 gem Cerulean Salt. As far as most devotees were concerned, Out in the Storm sounded like her career-capper, an indie answer to Tapestry, one of the decade’s most brilliant rock singer-songwriter statements. Yet she was just getting ready to aim higher.

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Saint Cloud was a huge departure musically, with country-flavored Americana in the mode of Tom Petty, Wilco, or late R.E.M., with the spooked balladry of Emmylou Harris or Townes Van Zandt. But the album made her infinitely more famous and popular, without shedding any of her old fans. She’s been on a roll since then, teaming up with Jess Williamson for the one-off duo Plains, with their 2022 sleeper I Walked With You a Ways. Tigers Blood goes even further into her country roots. (“I grew up on country,” she told Rolling Stone in 2018. “That’s my parents’ music—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, George Jones.”)

Crutchfield rejoins producer Brad Cook, cutting these songs with a tight-knit band of collaborators like Phil Cook on keyboards and Spencer Tweedy on drums. (Yes relation, Sherlock.) But she finds a perfect guitar foil in MJ Lenderman, the North Carolina axeman best known for playing in Wednesday, as well as his own as barn-shaking gems like Boat Songs. (“You Are Every Girl To Me” is a modern standard.) His wild guitar and back-up vocals add the right touch of electric mayhem, while the band adds flourishes of banjo and pedal steel.

“Right Back To It” is her knockout rocker here, as she and Lenderman harmonize like a ragged-ass Gram and Emmylou. It’s a fractured love story about thinking yourself into corners, then having to think yourself out of them. “I get ahead of myself/Refusing anyone’s help,” she admits, letting her mind run wild worrying over old flames or jealous flashes or non-existent problems. But the couple’s salvation is in remembering to listen to the rhythm of each others’ hearts. “You just settle in like a love song,” she sings. “If I can keep up/We’ll get right back to it.”

The most haunting moment is “365,” a stark acoustic ballad of a codependent confronting the addict she carries on her shoulders. The narrator wonders if she’s trapped, confessing, “When you fail, I fail/When you fly, I fly/And it’s a long way to come back down.” (She originally considered handing this tune to the country legend Wynonna Judd, who became a friend after Saint Cloud—the two dropped a duet in 2022, “Other Side.”) “365” is the quietest song here—but the most frightening.

“Bored” has an easygoing bar-band jangle, like .38 Special taking a pass at Springsteen’s “Streets of Fire.” She sings about emotions on the verge of collapse: “My spine’s a rotted two-by-four/Barely hanging on/My benevolence hits the floor.” Tigers Blood is an album that makes you marvel at how much Katie Crutchfield has accomplished, over all the miles she’s traveled so far. But it’s also an album that makes you excited for wherever she goes from here.

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