Many years ago when my kids were young, my elder son came up to me one day looking perplexed. “So,” he said, “Joy Division and New Order are basically the same band?”
This was a mind-blowing discovery. These were two of his favourite bands. In his mind they came from different eras. They operated in different genres. One played doom-laden guitars. The other’s biggest hit was an electronic dance anthem.
And yet, for the most part, they were the same people. I could see my son mentally recalibrating everything he thought he knew about music.
Ah, the innocence of youth. Except in the past year I have done exactly the same thing, twice.
For a while now one of my favourite bands has been Waxahatchee, a musical project which takes its name from a creek in Birmingham, Alabama, near the birthplace of singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield.
I guess you would call her music Americana, and it is certainly marinaded in the country and soul of the Deep South. There are echoes, too, of the American folk revival of the 50s and 60s. But Crutchfield has an indie sensibility that comes from her time as frontwoman of a punky outfit from the Noughties called PS Eliot.
The combination is beguiling. Here’s one of my favourite Waxahatchee songs:
Another of my favourite bands in recent years is Bonny Doon, from Detroit, who have come to personify a genre sometimes dismissively called “slacker rock”. They have a laid-back surfy vibe and one particular track, Long Wave, is a huge favourite among young people like my two sons, who are both surfers.
I would go so far as to say Long Wave is the defining song of their particular tribe of young men and women in their late 20s and early 30s, encapsulating their outlook on life.
“You are who you’re supposed to be.” Isn’t that a great line? In a complex and confusing world, with so many pressures and expectations, it is so simple, so forgiving, so affirming.
So imagine my shock on reading an American music magazine and discovering that Bonny Doon was Waxahatchee’s backing band for a while, recording the 2020 album St Cloud with her and touring the world.
My two favourite bands were actually the same band. Kaboom. Mind blown.
The evidence was there all along. The interlacing guitars of frontmen Bill Lennox and Bobby Colombo, the comfortably dug-in drums of Jake Kmiecik. How did I not notice? Maybe I was too busy enjoying the music to mind about the detail.
Here’s video of them playing live together:
This year I have had the pleasure of watching both acts live, albeit separately, in Glasgow. First up was Waxahatchee at QMU, and some guy in the balcony filmed the first song.
What I love about this video (see below) is that it is timeless: this could have been filmed in any of the past five decades. The clothes. The music. And yet to me it seems entirely of this moment.
I love the restraint of this opening song’s arrangement. You are kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting. And when the drums finally kick in and Katie throws her baseball cap into the crowd the sense of release is amazing.
If you can hear a guy whoop at that point, that was I, that was me, that was the author of this Substack. (A wee Kurt Vonnegut reference there, for the aficionados.)
By the way, the drummer in this band is Spencer Tweedy, son of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy. Spencer has his own Substack, as for that matter does Crutchfield, and both publications are full of insights into their respective musical worlds.
I saw Bonny Doon a few weeks later, this time at the Hug & Pint in Glasgow’s West End. The guys were standing outside on Great Western Road having a beer when we arrived and so we were able to chat briefly to them. Being totally starstruck, I babbled about the weather. They were unnecessarily kind.
I can find no video from the gig so here is another recent live performance, clearly chaneling The Band, which is fine by me.
Both Lennox and Colombo are fine songwriters, unashamed to be sincere and open-hearted. They can also be funny. Take this verse from the song Fine Afternoon:
California’s nice, but it's true that it kills.
If the earthquakes don’t get you, the landlords will.
They gave amnesty for hippies long ago,
But is there mercy here still?
Watchful readers will have noticed that earlier I said I had a Joy Division/New Order moment twice.
So what was the other time?
It came while reading a review of Waxahatchee’s tremendous new album Tiger Blood, released earlier this year. It raved about the guitar licks contributed to the album by a young, up-and-coming musician called MJ Lenderman.
Wait. What? MJ Lenderman? The same MJ Lenderman who recorded the album Boat Songs in 2022, an album that has been buzzing around my head ever since? An album that contains an audacious reworking of Nina Simone’s Do What You Gotta Do, to make it a song about TV cage fighters?
The very same. And it’s true, Lenderman’s guitar on Tiger Blood is superb. On one of the breakout hits from the album, Right Back To It, he also does backing vocals, although what compositional technique he is using is anybody’s guess, but it sure ain’t descant.
Crutchfield, who is ten years older than Lenderman, wrote about these harmonies in her Substack. Btw, MJ’s friends call him Jake.
I very presumptuously and probably with a decent amount of stage mom energy attempted to coach Jake through the harmony as I heard it. He very politely took that information in, went into the booth and sang something completely different but so much better. When he sang the line “You just settle in…” Brad and I darted our eyes to each other. That was really the moment the whole thing came into focus for us.
Here’s the song. Warning: in this video Lenderman has a really stupid haircut.
The song is one of many Crutchfield has written about her relationship with her partner, the cult indie musician Kevin Morby.
Crutchfield calls their relationship “a codependency”, and writes about it movingly on her Substack:
Codependency is a vast meadow full of stones I’ve been turning over, unearthing little broken pieces of sadness and wisdom and awareness for many years. It’s a consistent source of inspiration, a deep well in which the water tastes a little different every time I return to it, another year older, smarter and less insecure.
I find that beautiful. The wisdom gained from a troubled relationship - not least when she knows she is the source of much of the trouble - is one of the joys of her songwriting.
But what news of Jake?
MJ Lenderman’s new album Manning Fireworks was released last month and it is a pure joy from beginning to end: raw in places, composed in others, occasionally interrupted by a snarling guitar break, and with lyrics that are mordant and dogeared.
How about this verse from the song Joker Lips:
Coward cutting Joker lips into a rubber mask.
Please don't ask how I'm doing.
Draining cum from hotel showers,
Hoping for the hours to pass a little faster.
Or this from Rip Torn:
You need to drink some water.
It'll kill the need to puke.
You need to learn
How to behave in groups.You said: "There's men and then there's movies.
Then there's men and Men in Black."
You said: "There's milkshakes and there's smoothies."
You always lose me when you talk like that
All of a sudden Lenderman is everywhere. The New Yorker raved about his “laxness”, which the writer explained as “a lighthearted kind of recklessness”.
Here’s Wristwatch live on the Jimmy Fallon show. Am I alone in hearing the influence of Lanarkshire’s own Teenage Fanclub here?
I hope you’ve enjoyed this wander through my current musical obsessions. Expect to see some of these bands mentioned again next month when I do my annual round-up of my favourite albums of the year.
Until then, here’s Waxahatchee once more, and another song about Crutchfield’s relationship with Morby. One of my favourite music videos of the year:
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