In 2011, shortly before she adopted the name Waxahatchee, singer Katie Crutchfield wrote a piece for a feminist fanzine celebrating those moments when, as a young woman, you see a female performer on stage who makes everything seem possible. With a candidness now characteristic of her acute, diary-entry songs, she hoped she might go on to inspire “even a tiny percentage of this dizzying empowerment” in somebody else.
On the face of it, there’s nothing life-changing about the short-and-sweet set she plays on this whistle-stop visit to London. It’s just her and her guitar, scattering shards of adolescent memory and raking the ashes of past relationships. Some songs barely use three chords; others pass like a fleeting thought. Mid-set, she switches to keyboard, picking out notes with emphatic care and apologising that she’s even worse on piano than she is on guitar. Although simple, her melodies like to kink and trip, and her voice occasionally struggles to reach an intended note. When her sister, Allison, joins her to duet on a few songs, their voices rustle pleasingly together like layers of tissue paper.
This all makes Crutchfield sound tentative and fragile. In fact, she’s compellingly robust on stage – and that, combined with her disarming frankness, makes her exactly the kind of performer who might encourage other young women to follow in her footsteps. It helps that the setting for tonight’s gig is so makeshift, with bedside lamps lighting the stage, a keyboard propped up on the amp case and Crutchfield herself balancing on two wobbling cushions. She makes playing music seem, not easy exactly, but a natural human endeavour, like capturing your life in photographs. Only she does it with gimlet economy and scant self-indulgence.
