Through My Sister's Eyes: Allison And Katie Crutchfield On Each Other's Music
Katie and Allison Crutchfield are perhaps the hardest-working twins in indie rock today. Born in Birmingham, Ala., Allison and Katie started playing music together in their early teens. Since then, they've been in myriad bands, both with each other and apart. The sisters started The Ackleys when they were 15, then shifted their focus to the pop-punk band P.S. Eliot. After that group disbanded in 2011, the two women split musically. Katie began making music as Waxahatchee; her sound has evolved from DIY raggedness to impressive full-band force while always preserving her knack for bitingly direct, emotional lyrics. Meanwhile, Allison started the fuzz-pop band Swearin', which broke up in 2015; she now releases songs under her own name that set folk-inspired lyrical specificity against dark, dreamy synths.
As identical twins and creative collaborators, the Crutchfields' lives have always been intertwined. But with new albums out from both sisters, this year seems more about parallel motion. In January, Allison released her debut solo album, Tourist In This Town, while Katie's fourth album as Waxahatchee, Out In The Storm, came out Friday. The records are, as Allison puts it, "dueling breakup albums," both written about the emotionally turbulent separations that the sisters happened to go through at the same time in their lives.
To mark this serendipitous moment in the Crutchfields' careers, NPR did something that Allison and Katie say no one's ever tried before: We interviewed each sister, separately, about the other's music. Though the two women weren't in the studio together, their memories and observations interacted as if in conversation with one another: coinciding, diverging, realigning, echoing. Maybe it's no accident that their work — together and separately — seems to do the same.
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