Happy 10th Anniversary to Waxahatchee’s debut album American Weekend, originally released January 12, 2012.
There are three kinds of songs that I gravitate to in winter. First, there are the cozy songs—the ones that make you want to pass the quiet, snowy hours from inside your home with a blanket and some hot chocolate. The second set of songs simply feel cold, and whether they’re explicitly about winter or not, they tap into the season’s inherent despair. The third group helps me feel like that despair is something that I can overcome, and it’s the rarest group by far.
Usually, I find it in punk—I want a song that conjures up images of crowded venues full of people singing along. This makes me feel like the cold and scary feelings of winter aren’t mine to forge alone. But these moments, when I’m listening at home, lean on the grandiosity of punk instrumentation—lots of fuzzy guitars and crashing cymbals. It’s much harder to instill this feeling in me with just a voice and an instrument.
Enter American Weekend (2012), the first record from Waxahatchee. It’s a bare, lo-fi thing that I still feel affection for even in the darkest months. Of course, there are many bare, lo-fi things out there, and many are well-suited to the second category of winter music. This is one of the rare ones that fit the third category, because it is the only one driven by Katie Crutchfield’s singing.
Her voice on this record is so expressive that her character renders completely through the songs. Even when she drops to a whisper, like on the disillusioned “Magic City Wholesale,” the full emotional and musical embrace of the song helps steel you against those dark January days and see what might lay beyond them.
This feels true even though the version of Katie Crutchfield at the center of American Weekend is anything but sure-footed. “Bathtub” is the clearest rendering of the contradictions inside of Crutchfield in one song, as she cannot place exactly how she feels about the song’s love (dis)interest, or even where she places her malice (in one lyric, it “desists,” and in the next, she corrects herself and it “woefully recurs”). It turns out that this record is the beginning of this sense of de-centeredness, something that would define Waxahatchee through four brilliant albums, until the great searching of her work would come to a resting place on 2020’s Saint Cloud.
Crutchfield creates a sense of home amid all of this uncertainty with her now-signature simplicity. She sings plainspoken lyrics over unfussy chord changes and guitar playing. This is perhaps best on display on “Michel,” in which she chooses to leave behind the cynicism instilled in her by a toxic relationship. The track strikes the difficult balance of telling the story in the barest language possible while still leaving the central points obvious. The straightforward approach creates the feeling that American Weekend is real, almost a physical place, not something that was created but rather something that exists naturally.
But, even though the record feels like a natural occurrence, the emotional tenor of Crutchfield’s voice re-locates the whole thing inside of her sense of self. Her roar on “Grass Stain” is clearly vindictive, while the whisper of “I Think I Love You” is full of regret.
But “Rose, 1956,” might be the most interesting of all, a song that takes place on Christmas Eve. It has a rumbling guitar part that feels like it’s powered by a furnace and a vocal part that, perplexingly, hangs back. This is the song that I can most clearly hear that imaginary crowd singing along to, packed into a basement against the harshness of winter. Crutchfield could easily take the song higher to match the locomotion of the guitar, but she chooses not to. The result is the song burns longer, not extinguishing itself through catharsis but instead warming you from the inside. She goes on a walk with someone who can’t keep up from lung disease, and whose marriage flamed out long ago. “Rose, 1956” is trying to do the opposite and walk with you for much longer, throughout the entirety of American Weekend, and help you make it through the winter.
BUY American Weekend via Waxahatchee’s Official Store
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