Song Exploder - Waxahatchee - Fire

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

Katie Crutchfield is a singer and songwriter from Birmingham, Alabama. She’s been making music under the name Waxahatchee since 2010. Her fifth album, Saint Cloud, came out this past March. Pitchfork named it Best New Music, and The Guardian called it the best album of the year so far. In this episode, Katie breaks down how she made the song “Fire."This episode was originally published July 29, 2020.For more, visit songexploder.net/waxahatchee.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. The Grammy nominations came out a couple weeks ago, and I was really happy to see that Waxahatchie's album, Tiger's Blood, which I've listened to a bunch this year, was nominated for Best Americana album. It's her first Grammy nomination, and the news made me want to go back and listen to the episode that I recorded with her back in the summer of 2020. That was about the song, Fire, from her previous album. So here it is, and I'll be back with a new episode next week. Writers Block is something I experience with every record in one way, shape, or form. I have the feeling of the universe allotted a certain number of songs, and I hit my quota.

And now I'm never going to write another good song again. But usually the darkest moments of Riders Block, right? When it really gets hard and you're really kind of borderline panicking over it, that's usually when you push through in my experience. It's like I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, kept doing the next thing, and before I knew it, I wrote fire, and it really felt like, okay, I got this. It's going to be okay. I'm Katie Crutchfield from Waxahatchie.

Katie Crutchfield is a singer and songwriter from Birmingham, Alabama. She's been making music under the name Waxahatchie since 2010. Her fifth album, St. Cloud, came out this past March. Pitchfork named it Best New Music, and The Guardian called it the Best Best Best Act. album of the year so far. In this episode, Katie breaks down how she made the song fire. For some of us, it ain't enough. It ain't a know. I was preparing to write the song. I was traveling. I had been spending a lot of time here in Kansas, which is where I live. It was winter, and I was sort of hammering away at writing the record. And then I went on a trip with my

partner, Kevin to Birmingham, Alabama, which is where I'm from. We were visiting my family, and as we were leaving, I got this melody in my head. And it was just sort of the most awkward timing, because it was as I was saying goodbye to my family, as I was about to get into a car for a very long journey with Kevin, and I just kind of couldn't find an easy way to hold onto it. Like, usually I would just record that in my phone and then forget about it until I had some time to actually sit with it. But I was too distracted with what was happening right in front of me. So I started the drive and I just repeated the melody just sort of over and over. And I kind of would lose it for a second and then it would come back. And by the time we got to Memphis, that's when I started to really

put lyrics to it. And then the moment that I got home, I recorded the very first demo of the whole song. I gravitated toward electric piano. With every Every album, I usually have an instrument of choice that sort of is the thing that's inspiring me. And guitar, I'm hyper aware of the chord progressions that I, like, tend to go to. And with piano, I just know so little. Like, it takes me a minute to even figure out, is this a C chord? You know, it's like, my knowledge of it is, like, pretty limited. So I can, like, let go of some of the hangups that I have just because I don't really know what I'm doing.

So I can kind of just stick to what sounds exciting melodically to me rather than get in my head about chord progressions and things like that. The first line that came to me was, that's what I wanted. I wrote that as we were driving over the Mississippi River, over a bridge from Tennessee to Arkansas to West Memphis, and the sun was kind of going down and the light was reflecting. It was so bright. I was just trying to find a way to like poetically talk about that,

and also talk about what I wanted in that larger moment. You know, I'd been going through a lot of dark stuff. I had just gotten sober, and I had chosen to take a lot of time off from music. And I think I was having a little bit of an identity crisis. And then having these big panicky writers block feelings. So I wanted to find a way to poetically say, I can love myself through this darkness that's happening. I take it for granted

if I can love some of us. I was thinking a lot at the time about unconditional love and really kind of thinking of that as like the ultimate position to take the softness around loving anybody unconditionally, loving yourself unconditionally. I was thinking a lot about that as like something that I wanted to be able to achieve

in like all my relationships. to just not let it have terms to just accept people and accept myself. So I had like a loose idea, but I knew I needed help. I knew I needed like other people to come in and help me figure out what the next phase of the song was going to be. I sent this song to Brad, Brad Cook, who is the producer of the record, who is really like my main collaborator on the whole thing. When you're in a project where you're, you know, it's really just like a solo project, it's so important to have a sounding board, to have a collaborator, a person who you can bounce ideas off of or talk to about your songs. You know, from the beginning, Brad really shared my excitement about the song and then I pretty quickly sent it to the guys who I knew were going to be the band on the record.

Nick Kinsey, who's a great drummer, and Bobby Columbo and Bill Lennox, who were both in the band. band Bonnie Dune, an amazing band in their own right. There was one time where the band was in Durham and everybody was together and we were all demoing and most of the songs I'd written for the record were really straightforward and it really felt like, okay, we're all just going to set up in a room as a band and knock all these songs out. But, you know, anytime we got to fire, we'd all just kind of look at each other and be like, let's just skip this one, we'll come back to it. And then we just ended up doing that until it was time to go into the studio. I think we were all scared to overthink it,

and we were scared to, like, make it go through a million processes. We all kind of knew, like, this one is going to be different. It was like there was this unspoken agreement between all of us that, let's tuck this one away, and then when we get in the studio, we'll just see if some kind of magic happens. We made the record at Sonic Ranch in West Texas. It is an amazing studio that is a 4,000-acre pecan ranch, and there's like a compound of recording studios on the property.

And I went back and re-recorded my electric piano. And then we started with the beat. So I had just anticipated, like, this is going to be a drum machine song, and the rest of the record is going to have analog drums. So I don't know how it happened, but Brad was like, let's get Nick in there and let's work on the drum sound to make it sound a little bit more like a dryer kind of manufactured beat. We just recorded like a really basic sort of track just doing four on the floor,

and then the snare. Then he added the tombs. The beat sort of grows and evolves. And we were just all so excited about the drum sound. We're like, this is actually so much better than a drum machine because it really does feel like a performance, like there's a warmth to it. I believe what came next were the guitars. And that was what was the most surprising about the song.

I didn't really even think about guitars on the song. I kind of didn't really see it. And then Bobby just kind of pulled out this part. He started doing that along with Nick and I was like, oh, my goodness. And then Bill wrote this beautiful sort of complimentary lick on the song right after Bobby. That's just totally pulled out of thin air and was not at all part of the plan. And yet now I'm obsessed with it. More with Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee after this.

I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of friends. writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast like Iron and Wine,

Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrobe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, Rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash

Live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. I was feeling kind of sick going into Sonic Ranch. I came to record straight from Barcelona and I had this fear of like, I'm going to get on that long flight and I'm just going to get sick right as I'm going into the studio to make my record. And of course I did. So I was feeling really nervous about the vocals. I kind of warned everyone, which is just like a fatal flaw. I was like, guys, I'm going to take this slow. Okay. I'm going to do like, one line at a time, then we're going to need to stop, and I'm going to, like, take a sip of my tea, and we're going to, like, have a breath, and then I'm going to do the next line. And everybody was like, yeah, whatever you need. It's all good. Like, you don't have to stress. And then I did that,

and it sounded so wrong and so forced and too performative. And I was really frustrated. And then Brad was like, just go in there and, like, lay down one more scratch vocal, like, just do the whole thing from top to bottom. And then we'll just move on and we'll come back to vocals. Don't worry about it. And I was like, okay, so I went in the booth and then I did that and I walked out and everyone was like, that's it. That's the vocal take because it just had like an ease to it. I take it for granted. If I could audition it could iron out the edges of the darkest sky for some of us. It ain't enough. It ain't enough. I really feel like this part of the song is really for me. I was like, I want to write a love song that's sort of about this turbulent

relationship, but I want the relationship to be sort of between me at my best versus me at my worst instead of those two voices negotiating with each other and trying to come together as like one. And when I turn back around, will you drain me back out? Will you let me believe that I Broke like a hundred years later, I'm wiser and slow and a tune. As sort of foky as it had become with the analog instruments, we still wanted it to feel poppy and synthy, so we sort of put some layers. Different synth than organ sounds to sort of blend.

Just like extra atmosphere to build the vibe of the song. The whole song at the end, when I finished recording it, I realized pretty quickly that it did kind of do everything I had set out for it to do. I don't know, stepping into that power of like, I'm going to write this song that's going to be about this kind of tormented relationship that I have with myself and actively kind of piecing that together. Honestly, I feel like this idea of unconditional love as something that I could have and hold for myself, at least that being a goal, is kind of a new thing for me. me. Yeah, I'm sure that

in hindsight, when I look back on things in my life, I will certainly see that as a, just a step in the right direction, I guess. Even just with the sounds, even when you take the lyrics out of it, just the mood of the song is that like warm, loving, uplifting

energy. Like it's supposed to make people feel good and happy and excited. And I felt like this is yeah, weirdly exactly what it was supposed to be. Well, here's Fire by Wax. Waxahatchee in its entirety. Visit songexplor.net to learn more about Waxahatchi.

You'll also find links to buy or stream the song, and you can watch the music video there. Song Exploder is made by me, Rishi Kesh Hirwe, with producer Christian Coons, production assistant Olivia Wood, and illustrator Carlos Lerma. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of independent creative podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can get a SongExploder t-shirt at SongExploder.net slash shirt. You can also follow the show on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at SongExploder. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.