Happy 5th Anniversary to Waxahatchee’s fifth studio album Saint Cloud, originally released May 27, 2020.
In the heat of Summer 2020, that perplexing and terrifying confluence of pandemic anxieties and racial injustice, Phoebe Bridgers released Punisher. Its final song, “I Know The End,” concludes with a terrified scream that sounds like Bridgers running away from the impending apocalypse that she had been painting for the last five minutes. The first time I heard it—on my car stereo in a Trader Joe’s parking lot as I prepared to stand six feet apart from everyone else waiting to be allowed into the limited-capacity store—I cried. I felt as scared as she sounded. The world was unraveling. It continues to do so. That scream is the sound of that summer, but also every summer since.
If “I Know The End” put a sound to my feelings, another song put a sound to a feeling I didn’t know I needed to have. I spent that summer obsessively listening to “Saint Cloud,” the final and titular track of Waxahatchee’s fifth album. This album closer is pastoral, shimmering, sparse. Katie Crutchfield’s voice is rock-solid, yet warm, basking in the light of the summer, and her invocation is simple: “I guess the dead just go on living / at the darkest edge of space… and if the dead just go on living / then there’s nothing left to fear.” That, somehow, all of this would go on—that even if the virus came for me, or for people who I loved, we would all live on in the rippling manifestations of ourselves that live in each other.
Even though I was unable to spend time with friends and family that summer, or go to any of the community spaces that mattered to me, I still had my guitar. I played “St. Cloud” every day, sometimes quietly, contemplatively, on my front porch, as the old man across the way nodded serenely from his deck chair. And sometimes I played it louder than it appears on the record, on the days when I was really scared, to convince myself that Crutchfield was right. Because she was. I felt like a human manifestation of Bridgers’ scream, and every time I felt like it was all over, Saint Cloud was there.
Katie Crutchfield didn’t write Saint Cloud to make anyone feel better about the pandemic. Released March 27, 2020, it was written, recorded, and pressed long before we understood the gravity of the situation. Instead, it is a celebration and investigation of her sobriety, a rejection of codependency, a chronicle of falling in love with singer-songwriter Kevin Morby, and an ode to a hopeful future. It finds hope in the darkest moments, and its power comes from how seriously, richly, and unironically it embraces that pursuit.
Listen to the Album:
It is harder to write about hope than it is about despair; there are legions of masterpieces about heartbreak but far fewer tunes of equal quality that are about love. Saint Cloud’s ability to capture that hope so fully at the exact historical moment that it was most needed makes it a singular record in music history.
Many of the tunes are light and clean, a direct contradiction to Out In The Storm (2017), the fuzzy, druggy predecessor to Saint Cloud. Crutchfield’s voice is clear, nearly bell-like, on “Fire” (likely her strongest career vocal), but conversational on “Lilacs.” These two singles represent the central dichotomy of the record: realism and romanticism. The desire to love the mundane, to find it something that’s worth reveling in. Whether it’s sobriety (“Oxbow”) or just growing up (“Fire,” “The Eye”), Crutchfield isn’t fighting anymore. She’s accepting. This message, combined with the light instrumentation, creates a believable feeling of stability, wholeness. The kind of thing that’s easy to say but very, very hard to do.
One of the hazards of this approach is falling into a Hallmark card cliché, which Crutchfield deftly avoids through acknowledgement of how hard this clarity can be to achieve. “Hell,” for example, chronicles the early days of sobriety and the mind-addling challenges of coming to terms with yourself. Meanwhile, “War,” with its quietly thundering drum part, finds Crutchfield manically bouncing between her falsetto, her chest voice, and a near scream as her band follows her. None of this intensity undoes the album’s central sense of stability and forward progress—it just shows that it’s hard-won.
The closing suite of “Arkadelphia,” “Ruby Falls,” and “St. Cloud” is a hazy dream. The recordings are sparse in their instrumentation, plain in their language (except the two uses of “iconoclastic”). They are simultaneously the simplest tracks on the record and the boldest; each features bucolic imagery and lyrics but has a dark, frightening middle: “Arkadelphia” narrates a friend’s near-overdose. “Ruby Falls” recalls heartbreak. “St. Cloud” meditates on death. But each song rescues itself, with Crutchfield offering a bittersweet route forward.
Nothing is ever perfect, but the fundamental balances of the record—love and loss, life and death, trying and failing—are rendered as part of the natural order of things, rather than a series of wins and losses that can be chalked up to our personal victories and failures. Quite a thing to hear as the sun streams into your apartment at the beginning of the end of the world.
Listen: