WHAT’S IN A NAME –
MARCH 20, 2024 – On her sixth album ‘Tigers Blood’, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield is distancing herself from her demons and embracing home. Katie Crutchfield is back, the Alabama-born artist was trying to be a little kinder to herself. Having made the leap into sobriety in 2018. Taking a stroll along London’s Brick Lane for today’s conversation, Katie is in high spirits, gleefully petting as many dogs as possible, ecstatic at the fact that a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel looks “just like mine!”. Any jet lag from a quick trip to Europe seems to have evaporated. There’s good reason to be cheerful too, as ‘Tigers Blood’ is an album that surges forward with a stormy assuredness, unwavering and teeming with realisations.
‘Saint Cloud’ was produced alongside Brad Cook, who Katie describes as her “great collaborator in life”, and the pair intended to replicate the same processes for ‘Tigers Blood’. This time around, however, the relationship delivered vastly different results, thanks in part to the introduction of MJ Lenderman: the Americana-infused songwriter known both for his solo work and as part of indie-rock group Wednesday. “I saw him at SXSW before his album ‘Boat Songs’ came out and it blew my mind,” she remembers. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe this music exists’. It’s this intersection of so many different things I like in one.”
