Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood has been a critics’ favorite of 2024 with the album topping most mid-year Best Of lists. Katie Crutchfield’s raw and piercing songwriting has connected with fans globally with shows selling out around North America and across the UK and Europe. On the album Crutchfield emerges as a powerhouse – an ethnologist of the self – forever dedicated to revisiting her wins and losses.
Today, she returns with the video for ‘Tigers Blood’, which gives a gorgeous fly-on-the-wall look at the making of the album at Sonic Ranch in Texas with producer Brad Cook. The video, which opens with a voice memo from Crutchfield, has the same perfect blend of nostalgia and timelessness as Tigers Blood, and captures a special moment in time when this masterful album was being recorded.
Waxahatchee has been nominated for Song Of The Year at the Americana Music Association’s Honors & Awards for ‘Right Back To It,’ the song she recently performed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert featuring album collaborator MJ Lenderman. The awards are announced in Nashville on September 18th. Tigers Blood also debuted at #1 and had a multi-week run topping the JBE Non-Comm Radio Chart and a nine-week streak at #1 on the Americana Albums Radio Chart.
ACCLAIM FOR TIGERS BLOOD
“Katie Crutchfield’s voice is the centerpiece of her music as Waxahatchee. It’s shaky in a way that feels resilient…She’s finding herself on Tigers Blood. You can hear the confidence shining through.” – NPR
“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.” – Rolling Stone
“A fiery and biting country-rock foot-stomper that allows Crutchfield to channel some serious had-it-up-to-here attitude.” – New York Times
“Carrying forth the Southern sound of Saint Cloud, Katie Crutchfield does it again. Her dazzling, piercing songwriting is perfectly in tune with the band behind her.” – Pitchfork, Best New Music
“Katie Crutchfield’s band follows its acclaimed 2020 album with a record of vivid, poetic songwriting and rootsy musical color…all a fan of her previous album could hope for, extending her hot streak as a songwriter while adding a few twists.” – Wall Street Journal
“Waxahatchee, known for her gut-wrenching alt-country, demonstrates mastery of her craft on her sixth studio album, “Tigers Blood.”… it’s a rootsy love letter to her chosen genres, to finding contentment and an artistic evolution.” – Associated Press
“It feels like Crutchfield is making the music that she was always meant to make… These songs seem like they have always been around, filled with details that will leave your head spinning and your heart wrenching.” – Stereogum
“Some of the best alt-country of the decade” – Paste Magazine
“Crutchfield is a singular talent and voice, and her new album, Tiger’s Blood, solidifies that status.” – GQ
“The arc of Waxahatchee’s output has bended toward craft and steadiness, a sign that she is a music lifer who intends to go the distance artistically, professionally, and in every other sense” – UPROXX
“Tigers Blood is a brilliant portrait of the nuances that shade our lives.” – Holler
“Crutchfield has her feet firmly planted in this sonic universe, and she doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Collaborating once again with producer Brad Cook, Crutchfield has found her sweet spot — a cozy place to land that suits the songs she’s been writing lately.” – No Depression
“Crutchfield’s voice — with its rich country vibrato, its confiding just-us-talking hiccup and twitch, its bursts of punk rock agitation — is in full bloom here, as sure and vibrant as she’s ever sounded.” – Aquarium Drunkard
Saint Cloud was a breakthrough album for Waxahatchee, and despite being released in the height of the pandemic it entered #1 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Chart & Top 10 on the Emerging Artist chart. It was a welcome musical escape for many and cemented her status as an important voice in the indie-Americana scene. Now with Tigers Blood we see Crutchfield dig even deeper, the result is a complex and beautiful album that is sure to find a special place in people’s hearts once again.
‘Right Back to It‘ is Tigers Blood’s lead single. A nod to country duets like Gram and Emmylou, winding over a steadfast banjo from Phil Cook. Together, Crutchfield and Lenderman harmonize on the chorus: “I’ve been yours for so long/We come right back to it/I let my mind run wild/Don’t know why I do it/But you just settle in/Like a song with no end.”
The song ‘Bored’ opens with blase drum beats from Spencer Tweedy that crash under Crutchfield as she throws her voice high: “I can get along/ My spine’s a rotted two by four/Barely hanging on/My benevolence just hits the floor.” Lenderman’s scuzzy riffs and Nick Bockrath’s climbing pedal steel add power to the album’s most ‘Southern Rock’ a la Drive-By Truckers moment.
‘365’ is a story of recognition told from a hard-won place of self-acceptance/forgiveness. Crutchfield initially started writing it for Wynonna Judd, with whom she has written and performed in the past, until the lyrics started hitting closer and closer to home. The writer Annie Ernaux says, “writing is to fight forgetting.” Like Lucinda Williams, Crutchfield’s lyrics are memoir. Throughout Tigers Blood Crutchfield is addressing a “you,” but the ‘you’ in ‘365’ evokes raw closeness, vulnerability. “Ya ain’t had much luck but grace is/In the eye of the beholder/And I had my own ideas but/I carried you on my shoulders, anyways.”
Tigers Blood is Crutchfield at her most confident and resilient. Staring straight at the truth, forgiving but not forgetting, not batting an eye.
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