Perhaps it’s the lack of an audience or maybe it’s Johnny Eastlund’s languid direction and the unnaturally dead space but Crutchfield as a performer still feels slightly unnerved without a guitar to lead her into the heart of a song, and she’s reluctant to stare into the eye of the camera. Waxahatchee are on surer ground with “Lilacs” where the band really swings for the first time. As Crutchfield sings “I run it like the crop of kismet, I run it like a dilettante/I run it like I’m happy, baby, like I got everything I want”, a smile even threatens to dawn slowly across her pale face. Much of Saint Cloud was written in – and about – a newly resolved sobriety and an apparent domestic bliss, and Crutchfield is using these foundations to stake out a position
as a classic heartland American singer-songwriter. “The Eye” makes good on this claim. Lines such as “You watch me like I’m a jetstream/ A scientific cryptogram lit up behind the sunbeam” seem obviously in love with Joni Mitchell. But it wouldn’t be out of place on any of those canonical early-’70s singersongwriter albums. It might well be that Crutchfield takes things a step too far with her encore, a cover of Dolly Parton’s mighty “Light Of A Clear Blue Morning”. The band certainly don’t disgrace themselves and, as Crutchfield wearily drawls the opening lines – “It’s been a long dark night/I’ve been waiting for the morning…” – with all the ennui of a long lockdown, it’s clearly a song that has found its moment in time.
She cruises into the turn of each verse with a swagger that’s Dylanesque But when it comes to the chorus, she doesn’t seem to believe in the reality of the light of morning; there’s some rueful, hangdog tenor in her voice that hints that, like many promised easings over the past 12 months, this may be another false dawn.
As the song fades and Crutchfield and her band take their shy bows, you can’t help but look up Dolly’s early performance of the song on German TV show Der Musikladen in 1977 – there’s a small audience but the set-up is not so dissimilar to Waxahatchee’s in 2021. What’s immediately obvious, though, is that Parton’s band are electrifying in a way the cover doesn’t begin to approach – vibing off each other, challenging themselves, coaxing each other to ever greater heights. Dolly leads them with such blazing ebullience that you never question the possibility of her new day. It’s a reminder that for all the manifold achievements of Saint Cloud, Waxahatchee have a way to go to ascend to the real peaks of American song. STEPHENTROUSSÉ JUNE 2021 • UNCUT • 103
JOHNNY EASTLUND
L IVE
