As she releases her superb fifth album, Alabama musician Katie Crutchfield shows us around her native Birmingham, and explains how sobriety opened up her songwriting
Katie Crutchfield pulls up in her dad’s rugged Jeep outside my hotel in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. She grins when I voice my surprise at her ride. “I should have told you it was a ragtop with crazy tyres,” she says. It’s early March, and we head to a nearby coffee shop then she steers us into the city. As soon as I take out a notebook, the bumpy ride upends my pen. “Sorry,” she says. “I love driving it so much, but it’s a little wild.”
With a licence plate repping the college football powerhouse Alabama Crimson Tide, the vehicle blends into Crutchfield’s home town. Her relationship to the place is more complex. One of the US’s sharpest and most acclaimed songwriters, she’s about to give me a tour of Birmingham as she viewed it as a teenager: through the lens of the underground punk scene. Now 31, Crutchfield about to release Saint Cloud, her fifth album as Waxahatchee, which finds her reexamining her southern roots with increased self-awareness. It’s one of the year’s most bewitching albums, the bristly indie rock for which she’s best known enhanced by country and folk, and the clarifying effect of new sobriety. “If you’re getting sober, you’re facing all of this stuff that has been shoved deep down and covered in booze for years,” she says. “And I’m like, oh my god, my brain is a scary place right now.”
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