Waxahatchee is in “The Square”
Waxahatchee is at Pioneer Courthouse Square this weekend.
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Katie Crutchfield, who performs as Waxahatchee and who’s playing Pioneer Courthouse Square Saturday (August 9; $50+), has been hailed as “a new giant of American songwriting,” a (punk) Joni, and a (millennial) Emmylou. Her hero is Lucinda Williams, every piece of writing about Crutchfield wants you to know. The name Waxahatchee is borrowed from a creek near her childhood home in Birmingham, Alabama.
You could call the music alt-country, or slap an Americana label on it; she and her band recently toured with Wilco, and Andy Shauf’s band Foxwarren is opening Saturday. But since the 2020 breakout album Saint Cloud, the band’s twang has, remarkably, inched closer to something like pop music while also embracing its coarse, punk roots. Everyone seems to find something in the songs. Perhaps because Crutchfield manages to blend so many influences while remaining entirely her own. Perhaps because she can make an earworm of the syncopated melody in “Right Back to It,” a slow song led by a pinging banjo riff that Crutchfield sings with MJ Lenderman. Lenderman also sings backup and plays guitar on the latest Waxahatchee album, Tigers Blood, which was nominated for a Grammy last year.
But the fan club stretches further. Waxahatchee also has a song with Aminé, and Crutchfield recently covered the Fray’s 2009 bop “You Found Me” (“Lost and insecure / You found me, you found me”) with her longtime romantic partner, Kevin Morby, for the new Lena Dunham Netflix show Too Much. Accounts of going on tour with the band—writers sleeping on the bus like some gonzo journalism of yore—recently ran in both Oxford American and GQ. Waxahatchee Creek is looking like an ocean these days.
More Things to Do This Week
FILM OPB Presents: An Arts & Culture Showcase
7PM THU, AUG 7 | TOMORROW THEATER, FREE WITH RSVP
“Federal funding for public media has been eliminated,” reads a banner atop OPB’s website. Aside from its vital Fourth Estate duties, public media has a vital duty to show you cool stuff. At this First Thursday event at the Portland Art Museum’s movie theater, reporters and producers from the local NPR affiliate’s visual arts, music, food teams, and more will show clips of their reporting and dish behind-the-scenes takes.
VISUAL ART Lucinda Parker
RECEPTION 5–7PM THU, AUG 7; THRU AUG 30 | RUSSO LEE GALLERY, FREE
Parker’s large-scale paintings bend Oregon landscapes with a cubist slant. “Cubism loaded with emotion,” she clarifies in the statement for her latest show, Good Grief (Redux). The casual title is meant literally: After losing her husband of 53 years, Parker started adding figures to her landscapes, and formed this suite of paintings as an elegy. They blend cubist perspective and folk art silhouetting into an unmistakably joyous tribute. Framed by a backdrop of various Mount Hood locales, the couple’s private memories become mythic. Parker will give an artist talk Saturday, August 16, at 11am.
MUSIC Lucy Dacus
FRI, AUG 8 | EDGEFIELD, $66+
Dacus is one third of Boygenius, the supergroup with three Grammys to its name that also includes Phoebe Bridgers and Dacus’s romantic partner, Julien Baker. Boygenius is odd in that, depending on the weather, any of its three members could be called “the famous one.” Regardless, it might be Dacus at the moment. Forever Is a Feeling, her fourth solo album, came out this spring—“a gorgeous and tender album about falling in love,” says The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich.
Elsewhere…
- Portland photographer Will Matsuda’s unique tribute to those killed in the bombing of Hiroshima. (National Geographic)
- Lindsay Costello on Blouse singer Charlie Hilton’s latest: “a concise 28 minutes that feels like Sauvie Island at golden hour.” (Portland Mercury)
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