#39: Waxahatchee and Happiness

5 December 2022

The night I sent my last newsletter, I went with my husband to go see Plains, which is a fairly new band, composed of Jess Williamson and Katie Crutchfield, more commonly known for her solo project, Waxahatchee. Plains was phenomenal--their album is an explicitly more country direction for both these artists, and the show featured covers of "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys," and of course, "Goodbye Earl." I spent from ages 11 to 18 in Texas, and country music feels nostalgic in the kinds of ways that like, finding your old homecoming pictures with a mum the size of your body your then-boyfriend got you feels nostalgic. It's not always music for your life, but you can recognize it as a music of a life you've had. However, the hit of the show was when Katie (because, really, it was more or less only Katie) sang Hurricane.

As soon as she took the mic, walked into center stage, it was like she was the only possible person in the room, like this was the only thing she could be doing, the only possible words she might be singing. When she sang I know you'll love me anyways, it felt obvious and true because how couldn't you love her?

Jason has been going to see Waxahatchee live pretty much since he arrived in New York as a freshly-22-year-old. He tells a story about one day finding himself in the audience right between Katie and her twin sister Allison after they had opened a show he went to go watch. He talks about her early performances as someone who was figuring out how to perform--hiding behind a guitar, blending into a backing band. When you listen to her early records, her voice isn't exactly small, but there's a sort of whispered, intimate quality to it. Her first album, American Weekend, was recorded in her childhood bedroom in Georgia, and you can almost hear her hushing herself out of consideration for the other people in the house. They're beautiful albums, but they're also the work of someone who is very much in her early-20s. The lyrics abound with heartbreaks and shitty boyfriends and giving in to your worst impulses. Let me be very very clear: I love these albums so much.

A nice thing about finding artists that are a little bit your age or older is that their life phases roughly map onto your own—the music they make speaks to you where you are, their back catalog reminds you of who you were right when they came out. I also discovered Waxahatchee's music when I was 22, right after I had met Jason, in 2015, and it's felt like her albums have tracked in accordance with my life.

I didn't have dancing at my 6-guest, apartment-living-room wedding or like, a wedding song per se, but I do think of Waxahatchee's 2020 album Saint Cloud as our wedding album. It's a complicated album to have bear that title--in interviews, Crutchfield has talked about how it's an album she wrote after getting sober, after having one of those personal moments of looking at yourself square in the eye and deciding you want to be better, but it’s also an album that was written as she was settling into a relationship with her partner, Kevin Morby, settling into creating a home and a place to be a person with roots. In an incredible track-by-track interview about the album she did for Pitchfork, she keeps coming back to this idea of, after a life on tour, slowing herself down, taking stock, figuring out who she was.

There isn't a lot of art about happiness--it's the end point of a lot of art, sure: the white wedding, the finished quest, the breach healed, peace achieved--but happiness in and of itself has a smaller canon than its counterparts. To it, though, I'd add Saint Cloud. It mainly comes down to this:

In case you have never seen this meme, it's original is this cartoon:

I think the genius of Waxahatchee, and of Saint Cloud in particular, is realizing that it's not in either the mortifying ordeal of being known or even in the rewards of love, but rather, in chasing the ball. Saint Cloud is an album of joy, but it's also full of struggle and solidarity. The struggle of sobriety, of friendship, of recognizing that you are the person you are, and that person can be better, but there’s no running away from these basic facts, there's just living in it. The solidarity of finding the person you can make art with ("The Eye,") of lifelong friends with you in the fight ("Witches"), of having your own back ("Fire"). The album is one of a person who is maybe in the middle of becoming comfortable with herself, who is figuring out how to take up space, to want things. Who has figured out that to be loved, you have to be perceived, and that being known in that way doesn’t have to be a mortifying ordeal, because you could already choose to know, and see, and try to love yourself in your entirety.

I have two examples for this evolution, to chart the changes I see in Saint Cloud across the arc of Crutchfield's career. The first is the opening tracks to both Saint Cloud and her 2015 album, Ivy Tripp. To map this onto my relationship, Ivy Tripp came out a few months before Jason and I met, approximately a month after I had a complicated but absolutely necessary breakup of my own. Here is the last verse of “Breathless,” that first track of Ivy Tripp:

You take what you want
You call me back
I'm not trying to be yours
You indulge me
I indulge you
But I'm not trying to have it all

In these lyrics, you get a relationship that is complicated and messy and in which no one is meeting anyone’s needs, but also it’s fine, because it doesn’t matter that much, we’re not here for that, we are here to pretend that we are too cool to want any more than that, too cool to want to give any more than that. In contrast, here’s the final lines of “Oxbow,” the first song on her most recent album:

If I go along with it, am I lying to you?
Watching from a distance
Whispering close about anything else
But it's not that far

I want it all

And that, I think, is the difference those five years wrought. It’s unclear whether she’s talking to herself in this song, or a partner, or just you, her audience, but going along with it, playing it cool, is now not a survival strategy but a lie. And of course, this final, triumphant line, a reversal to her promises in “Breathless.” The song closes with her repeating the refrain, each addition taking up more and more space, getting louder, pushing her voice to it’s raw-skinned edge. In her live performances, she eschews playing it with a guitar and just stands there, arms open, rooted and living and absolutely electric, asking for everything and knowing it is within herself to get it.

That gets me to my second example, which is the way that she takes up space on a stage, the way she performs now. There's a very early Tiny Desk Concert which is just Katie and her guitar and her songs about being heartbroken and she maybe does not look up once. To be clear: I think the tiny desk is probably a particularly terrifying concert to perform: you're surrounded by NPR employees and cameras, and there are all these faces right there, and she's doing this particular set completely solo, with no one else to look at or keep her on track. Even so, you get the sense that, had she been given an option to perhaps be a disembodied voice, she would probably have taken it.

To contrast this with her performances today Waxahatchee was the first concert I went to after the worst part of the lockdown. Jason and I drove to Madison, Wisconsin, and stayed in a motel, and the show was so, so perfect and good. Seeing her live felt like someone stretching her legs, like someone running back into a life that had been waiting all along.

Haley was at my house this morning, on her way to somewhere else. We were talking about the usual things, the trials both big and small, our plots and plans and somewhere in the middle of it she said, "life is serious," by which she meant, I think, that time is passing, that the stakes and results and responsibilities of each year are real, that the relationships we build now matter, that, in the words of Annie Dillard, "how you spend your days is how you spend your life" and that what we are doing now counts in a way that feels a little hard to to believe when you're younger.

It feels like the phase of my life that Waxahatchee has met me in is this realization that life is serious, and that your own happiness is something worth taking seriously. I leave you the was she did, on that night in Madison, that first perfect night out, with a Dolly Parton cover. Click through to watch.