Waxahatchee explores and embraces human connection on “Right Back to It”
January 01, 2025
In early 2024, Katie Crutchfield released “Right Back to It,” the lead single from her eagerly awaited sixth album as Waxahatchee. It struck the airwaves directly and hasn’t left listeners’ ears since. The album, Tigers Blood, built upon the momentum of Waxahatchee’s 2020 album Saint Cloud. It sticks with a Southern, modern alt-country embrace and roots-rock tempos to create a collection of tasteful poetry. The tenderness and honesty of the single is one of the many reasons why “Right Back to It” was voted as the No. 1 song on The Current’s Top 89 of 2024 countdown.
Joining Crutchfield on the song is Mark Jacob Lenderman, AKA MJ Lenderman, a guitarist in the band Wednesday with a quickly ascending folk-rock solo career of his own. Over simple guitar chords and steady percussion, his voice rests calmly next to Crutchfield’s, adding texture and weight to the chorus. The synergy between his tenor and the songwriter’s crystal-clear vocals make the chorus a potent place to return to within the song. Despite Crutchfield’s verses detailing uncertainty in a relationship, the duo’s collaboration emphasizes the song’s main message: Don’t underestimate the power of reconciliation.
“I’m really interested in writing love songs that are gritty and unromantic. I wanted to make a song about the ebb and flow of a longtime love story,” Crutchfield said in a press release. “I thought it might feel untraditional but a little more in alignment with my experience to write about feeling insecure or foiled in some way internally, but always finding your way back to a newness or an intimacy with the same person.”
The song’s thesis reflects the idea that people’s overall happiness returns to baseline despite experiencing major positive and negative life events — also known as the “hedonic treadmill” in psychological theory. “Right Back to It” maintains a serene sonic structure, sounding like a float down the river in the warm summer breeze, with a music video that hammers home the point. Crutchfield’s verses remove the veil of fantasy that she has often draped over love songs in the past. “I get ahead of myself / Bracing for a bombshell,” she ruminates on the refrain, as a casually strummed acoustic guitar accentuates the ache. She takes responsibility for insecurity and flightiness and points out her own flawed reasoning with humility. “I lose a bit of myself / Laying out eggshells,” Crutchfield admits.
But when she and Lenderman return to the chorus, an earnest melody seals contentment in the first lines: “I've been yours for so long / We come right back to it.” The common chord progressions and Americana ease, reminiscent of folk rock singer Lucinda Williams, center a vision of clarity. With Lenderman’s voice working as a comfort blanket filled with affirmation for Crutchfield, the singers conclude the chorus by extending peace with, “But you just settle in / Like a song with no end / If I can keep up / We'll get right back to it,” in affectionate voices.
Waxahatchee released Saint Cloud in March of 2020, a few weeks after the U.S. established the COVID-19 lockdown. Almost exactly four years later, Tigers Blood reached listeners at a place closer to normalcy — at least regarding the public health crisis. But collective anxiety remains as many of us scroll through continually changing algorithms that deliver just what we want to see, and everything we don’t. (The U.S. may not have TikTok next month?) Crutchfield sings about fighting her own baseless worries, but her words about searching for inner peace can be applied to justifiable societal concerns as well.
In the context of a particular romantic relationship of her own, Waxahatchee’s song offers listeners a hopeful ethos to lean on during times of uncertainty: the will to self-soothe and ground oneself while on the low end of the hedonic treadmill. For a song Crutchfield calls “gritty,” her lyrics about how even the most secure relationship can leave you anticipating collapse amid stillness wash over like a gentle wave of recovery.
With the hits of immediate dopamine in our digital, and for some, “chronically online” lives, it can seem pretty unexciting to sit quietly with the acceptance of mutual love. After all, Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year is “brain rot” — “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” But Crutchfield reminds us that pure, in-real-life human connection is so integral to our well-being. “Right Back to It” sounds like a song that has always existed, just like how our baseline of happiness always exists amidst the ups and downs with others, with the world around us, and within ourselves.