Saturday was a big night for Texas at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl. While the Astros were clinching the 2022 World Series in Houston, two prominent artists from the indie/alternative frontier played a vibrant and joyful set of country music bathed in Lone Star light. They covered Willie Nelson, Terry Allen and The Chicks, and there were even Don’t Mess With Texas t-shirts on sale at the merch table.
But the real story is the songs that native Texan Jess Williamson and Alabama-born Katie Crutchfield, who performs under the aka Waxahatchee, wrote themselves and sang together. Fans of each other’s music, they’ve formed the new and perhaps one-time-only duo called Plains. Their album I Walked With You A Ways rocketed to the top of the Americana chart after it was released in mid October. Reviews are effusive. Jason Isbell tweeted his endorsement. Their ongoing tour is offering fans this common vision where it sounds most moving, the live stage.
After walking on to the strains of Loretta Lynn, Crutchfield and Williamson led their four-piece band into the opening sequence of songs from the album. “Summer Sun” is a bright and floating letter of regret and separation sung in close harmony, with lyrics by Williamson. While it didn’t have a banjo part as the recorded version does, the performance set a country tone rooted in the heart-forward and populist vibes of the Judds and the golden vistas of The Flatlanders.
Up next, “Problem With It” is one of the catchiest and subtlest songs released in 2022, an Americana radio hit and a candidate for Song of the Year. These are Crutchfield’s lyrics, which are as striking as the southern poetry of her Waxahatchee projects, if a bit more down to earth. In another song about ditching a relationship with defiance and dignity intact, she sings: “I drive fast on high alert/Pass the Jet-Pep and the Baptist church/On the county line, I'll be a songbird softly heard”. That’s an Alabama gas station, I concede, but the line puts me immediately in mind of James McMurtry’s Texan eye for local detail: “This place you say you're looking for/It's a good ways off the track/It'd take a quarter tank of Fire Chief/Just getting there and back.”
“Line Of Sight” followed, still adhering to the album’s track order, with its cozy stride and soaring sing-along chorus. Crutchfield directly addresses God in this one, looking for existential reassurance and possibly recovery from the strictures of a religious upbringing (“I don’t want to give an eye for an eye,” she sings). By this point, the album - and the show – have set a high bar and a clear point of view. This music references the commercial country music the artists grew up on while not mimicking it. It’s tuneful and personal, clear and persuasive. It’s one of the year’s deepest “event” records, a collaboration we’ll be glad about and want more of.
Crutchfield is a searching, emotionally wide-open singer-songwriter who launched herself as Waxahatchee (named for a creek where she grew up) after time with the pop/punk band P.S. Eliot. Her lo-fi debut won national praise in 2012, and she’s been a notable force in left-of-center indie folk/rock ever since. Nothing hit the mark so hard however as 2020’s Saint Cloud, a beautifully written collection that found Waxahatchee leaning more toward folk and country than anything she’d made so far. While still somewhat mannered in her distinctive vocal attack, the record plays and reads in some ways like Blonde On Blonde, with a loose and elemental band supporting imagistic lyrics. “I release a ramble of a sigh/You illuminate me as I galvanize/A flowery demise,” she sings in “Hell” for example. It made a lot of year-end Americana lists. Pitchfork gave it a rare 8.7 score and put it on par with Lucinda Williams’s landmark Car Wheels On A Gravel Road in the Southern gothic school.
For her part, Jess Williamson told a writer in 2016 that she’d made her second album with Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell as “guardian angels on my shoulders,” and that’s a good rough idea of her thoughtful alt-folk output. She also talks about bridling against her conservative suburban Dallas context and building the confidence to take her stories to the stage. She did so during and after college in Austin and then moved to Los Angeles in time to release her third album Cosmic Wink in 2018. The one that brought her together with Crutchfield though was album #4, 2020’s Sorceress. It’s a beautiful and varied listen, with some synth sounds that evoke the 90s and plenty of acoustic guitar and melodious vocals as well. In a New York Times feature about Plains, she said it “was the most I’d ever leaned into country sounds, and I felt like I had unfinished business.”
Williamson and Crutchfield met in 2017 and had grown close, particularly as the pandemic scotched the tours supporting their respective 2020 career-best releases, albums they mutually loved. They had ambition but not quite the kind of energy it takes to return to the studio alone for another turn. So they cooked up Plains as a special project that would let them freely explore their love of country music. They’ve noted the legendary Trio album as a touchstone, not that Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt needed to get back to their roots, but that sound, with high flying harmony and simpler song structures, lights up the Plains album from its first measures. The artists have slipped easily and naturally into a space with less artifice and more blues, less angst and more open road.
Williamson contributed “Abilene,” a lilting country waltz suspended between a disappointing past and a windshield-forward future. Its line “Texas in my rearview/Plains in my heart” loans the duo project its name while evoking soft, flat landscapes as a metaphor for the place on which a self must be built. That’s followed, at the heart of the album, with Crutchfield’s “Hurricane,” in which her voice recasts its idiosyncrasies from the cool remove of indie rock to a warbling poignancy in the country context. The lyrics about a woman’s complexities make for a dreamy, thought-provoking chorus. Throughout, the union of these voices is more rapturous and book-matched than one might guess from their individual bodies of work. The story of mutual musical discovery, friendship and collaboration recalls the Highwomen and the 2021 duo of Jade Jackson and Aubrie Sellers, but while that connection pointed them toward full-tilt rock and roll, Plains feels like a big, relaxed exhale, a soft place to land.
The album doesn’t lag in the second half either. They pull in one cover, a stripped bare cowboy waltz by Texas artist Hoyt Van Tanner. “Last 2 On Earth” features a rolling piano and Crutchfield lyrics that find the singer in a happier relationship, possibly because here there’s a co-writer, her partner Kevin Morby. “Easy” might be the prettiest song in the collection. Then Jess Williamson’s lead vocal gently ushers us out with her album title track “I Walked With You A Ways.” It’s about the impermanence of many of our relationships and the importance of fully appreciating them in any event. That’s good advice for considering this magical collaboration. Jess and Katie may or may not record or tour again, so this keepsake of 2022 and the remaining shows on the calendar are all to be savored all the more.
