When Saint Cloud landed in late March 2020, just as the world was sliding into lockdown, it felt less like an album release and more like a dispatch from the future. Here was Katie Crutchfield, the Alabama-born singer-songwriter behind Waxahatchee, standing on the other side of her own personal storm, sending out songs about resilience and clarity at the exact moment when her audience needed them most. If the pandemic made time feel slippery and disjointed, Saint Cloud was a reminder that survival was not only possible but could sound luminous.
“I’m in a war with myself; it’s got nothing to do with you.”
Crutchfield’s work has always carried the ghostly presence of her twin sister, Allison — an unspoken harmony line baked into her worldview. Like Kim Deal of The Breeders, another indie-rock twin, Katie seems to create with an awareness of that duality. The Deal sisters brought a scrappy, lopsided joy to alternative rock; Katie channels a similar energy into Waxahatchee, filtering it through her own plainspoken Southern lyricism. You hear it immediately on “Lilacs,” a song that plays like a one-woman dialogue, equal parts pep talk and confession, its repeated mantra of self-renewal echoing as if another voice were egging her on from the wings.
To get here, Crutchfield had to start in basements. As teenagers, she and Allison played in The Ackleys and later in PS Eliot — Birmingham DIY punk bands where volume and velocity mattered more than precision. That spirit still hums beneath Saint Cloud. On the surface, this is her first Americana record: clean guitars, gentle pedal steel, folk-country cadences.
But emotionally, the urgency of punk remains intact. The driving rhythm of “War” could almost pass for an old PS Eliot chorus slowed down and burnished, carrying the same bite but dressed now in earth tones instead of neon. Like fellow Alabamians Drive-By Truckers, who emerged from the punk underground only to circle back to Southern storytelling traditions, Katie shows that you can trade distortion for twang without giving up the fire.
Place has always been more than a backdrop in Waxahatchee songs; it’s embedded in Katie’s vocal DNA. On Saint Cloud, you can hear Alabama in the stretched vowels, the way syllables linger like summer air that refuses to move, shades of her sister-in-lyrical-specificity Courtney Barnett as she unspools her asthmatic afternoon of adventure on “Avant Gardner.” For Saint Cloud, “Arkadelphia” is the purest example: a slow-rolling ballad where highways and recovery intertwine, her delivery as humid and unhurried as a Southern dusk. These are not generic Americana ballads — they are Southern songs, rooted in precise geography. Rivers, fields, highways: her voice carries their weight, grounding the record in a South that’s lived-in, not mythologized.
The core of Saint Cloud is Crutchfield’s sobriety. Rather than hammering the point, she threads it through recurring images of water. Rivers and seas serve as metaphors for both danger and cleansing, a way to talk about transformation without sanctimony. Joni Mitchell, her great idol, used water in Blue as a metaphor for emotional turbulence, her soprano dancing like sunlight on the surface. Katie’s water is steadier, more resolute: in “Fire,” she sings of crossing a great river with a calm conviction, her mezzo-soprano stronger and more resonant than on any Waxahatchee record prior to this one. Sobriety didn’t just unblock her vision; it amplified her voice.
The album artwork underscores that sense of renewal. The cover shows Crutchfield perched on the back of a pale-yellow Ford pickup, draped in a powder-blue dress, surrounded by a bed of red flowers. The setting is rural but not romanticized: an open field, a tree leaning in the background, daylight already fading. The image captures the album’s balance between toughness and vulnerability, rustic grit and dreamy transcendence. She looks both grounded and elevated, as if fully aware of her roots yet reaching toward something greater.
Saint Cloud is a record that rewards the right setting. It’s best absorbed in the late afternoon, when the light is turning golden and the air feels thick with the possibility of change. Play it with the windows down on a slow drive along Georgia backroads as you head out for a weekend at the lake or the mountains. It’s music for transitional hours, for moments when you’re suspended between what you were and what you might become as the promise of a weekend respite awaits. The songs carry a firmness that makes them companions in solitude but also cohorts in clarity — the kind of record you reach for when you want to feel tethered, awake, and just a little more hopeful than you were an hour before.
With Saint Cloud, Waxahatchee didn’t just make a great record; she carved out a space in the lineage of personal redemption albums — records like Blue, Exile in Guyville, or Southeastern that document transformation with honesty and grace. It’s her clearest, most confident statement, the sound of a songwriter no longer searching for her voice but inhabiting it fully. And that’s the real miracle of Saint Cloud: it’s an album about one woman’s struggle that feels like it belongs to everyone who hears it.
Megan’s favorite song on this album is “Lilacs”. While listening to this track, I can daydream my way back to a ’90s/2000s childhood where this song would have had a place in this world, even then. It’s the kind of track that plays during the montage of a chick flick’s main character finding her groove again — and that’s exactly what Crutchfield is doing.
She sings on about her observation of lilacs, which, if you’re a person born without a green thumb, you know are some of the brattiest plants to take care of. They drink, they die and time passes on — a metaphor for her own self-care, detrimental as it may have been before, and finding out how to make the lilac survive and thrive instead.
Wendell’s favorite song on the album varies by the day. On this day, he’s going with “Arkadelphia.” It’s the moment where the personal and the geographic blur completely, underlining that for Waxahatchee, the South isn’t just a setting — it’s the very instrument she plays. Still basking in warm memories of the recent Neil show in Charlotte, he’s easy prey for the lyric “We’ll weigh what’s good and get real old, keep driving straight searching for a heart of gold.”
Waxahatchee is available on Bandcamp, all streaming platforms, and most places where records are sold. She has appeared on NPR’s Tiny Desk twice — first solo in 2013, when her voice still carried the ragged edges of her punk beginnings, and again in late 2024 with a full band, promoting the Grammy-nominated Tigers Blood (definitely check that one out too!) The contrast between those two performances is striking – the kind of progression you can only hear (and in this case, see) when an artist grows up in public.
You are likely to find her songs played on SiriusXM stations SiriusXMU and Alt Nation. Wendell caught Waxahatchee live on her epic spring 2025 tour with Wilco, and you are fortunate if you did the same. The closest to Atlanta that she will perform over the balance of this year is at Jason Isbell’s Shoals Fest in Florence, Ala., in October, on an insane bill including Jackson Browne, Isbell, MJ Lenderman, who guested heavily on Tigers Blood, Patterson Hood, among others.
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