MUSIC MATTERS –
Jan. 12, 2023 – Katie Crutchfield, 35, credits the shift to maturity, sobriety and success – although, she makes clear, they are all linked … Katie is referring to the boundaries she’s developed over the last three years – insulating herself not only against drugs and alcohol, but also the distractions and drains on her energy as an artist and a human being. Tigers Blood is more outward-looking than its predecessor, without an overarching narrative. Saint Cloud had “such a neat little bow on it: ‘This is an album about someone getting sober,’” Crutchfield says, ironically. That’s a simplification, she adds – but the narrative was certainly picked up and cemented by the press.
As she often felt moved to clarify in interviews, Crutchfield’s issues with alcohol and drugs were “never anything crazy”; nevertheless, sobriety was a new and rich terrain to mine for songs. Often, on Saint Cloud, Crutchfield is in conversation with herself, processing her history of codependency and addiction and – as on the transcendent Fire – coaxing herself towards feeling self-compassion.
As a songwriter, Crutchfield has always been drawn to the interior, sometimes even creating “two Katies in conflict with each other”. Now five years sober, she has a different relationship to herself and her work. “That was something that was really on my mind: it’s not the shiny, new glow-up sobriety that everybody thinks about – now I’m in it,” she says.
When she quit drinking and moved to Kansas City to be with Morby – having spent her life touring and bouncing between her home town Birmingham, Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Long Island – a friend warned her that she wouldn’t recognise herself for a while. “That was really true,” says Crutchfield. “Now it’s like: ‘OK, I fully know myself sober.’”
