I bought tickets to see Waxahatche perform in support of their most recent album, 2020’s Saint Cloud, nearly two years before I actually got to go to the show. They were scheduled to play Washington, DC’s 9:30 Club on April 23rd, 2020 and, well, needless to say, that didn’t happen. I bought a lot of tickets for shows that would end up getting canceled in 2020, but this show in particular haunted me throughout the pandemic, not only because I loved Saint Cloud, an album who’s songs of rebirth and renewal were the perfect guide throughout those troubled months, but also because I kept getting emails about it, first when it was delayed until October and relocated to the Lincoln Theater, and then about once a month after that as Washington’s COVID-19 regulations kept changing. I had already moved out of DC by then and more or less made peace with the things I missed throughout 2020, but those emails kept piling up.

Well, I finally got the chance to see Katie Crutchfield and company in February of 2022 at Brooklyn Steel, and the show was certainly worth the wait. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic or melodramatic, Waxahatchee seems to have entered their final form. I can’t read Crutchfield’s mind, but one gets the sense that this current iteration of Waxahatchee, which eschews the 90s nostalgia of the project’s prior two albums for a warm, rich, country-fried sound, feels like the natural apex of a project that began with the lo-fi indie folk debut American Weekend. In a scene defined by lyrical misery and the ever lingering specter of electronic instrumentation, this iteration of Waxahatchee feels fiercely organic, classicist, and optimistic, a welcome ray of sunshine in what’s been a harsh, bitter February.

Written after coming to grips with her alcohol addiction and the resultant burnout from her Out in the Storm tour, Saint Cloud has always been framed as something of a “coming home” record for Crutchfield, a return to her Alabama roots after dabbling in crunchy indie rock. Indeed, the stage at Brooklyn Steel felt sufficiently countrified, with every mic stand wrapped with flowers, and a screen featuring a blue, nearly-cloudless sky as the backdrop. It’s a fairly foolproof aesthetic – a few years a ago (right before I was originally supposed to see Waxahatchee, in fact), I wrote about how Motown and soul music have a nearly 100% approval rating that transcends age and political affiliation, and judging by the dives in my Brooklyn neighborhood that look like the country/western bar from The Blues Brothers, I’d wager that this hippie/honky-tonk crossover has similarly wide appeal. Crutchfield has even reshaped her own style for something a little more pastoral – gone are the trendy cut jeans and loose T-shirts of her Out in the Storm Days, in was a red velvet dress with long black boots, her once shoulder length hair at least a quarter of the way down her back. Crutchfield used to look like all of the other girls in any given venue she played – now she looks like a forgotten act from The Last Waltz.

My first taste of the Saint Cloud tracks being played live was this performance of “Lilacs” on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Crutchfield is pitchy throughout, and seems unsure of what to do with herself without a guitar in her hands. But the band has clearly worked out the kinks – Waxahatchee played every track from Saint Cloud Thursday night, and nearly every performance was pristine. Most critics describe bands who play cleanly and in-sync as “tight,” but that adjective is much too harsh and intense for Waxahatchee – instead, their performance flowed like a stream, the sweet guitars like the water running over the polished stones of the rhythm section. Even for the songs that demanded a little more punch, there was nothing overpowering or imposing about the music – Waxahatchee opened up its arms wide to the crowd and welcomed them into their world, allowing them to become part of the “chain, chain, chain” Crutchfield sings about in “Witches.”

Most impressive, though, was how deftly Crutchfield and her bandmates adapted Waxahatchee’s back catalog for this new setup. I feel the need to reiterate that Out of the Storm, from which the group played three songs, was produced by John Angello, best known for his works with distortion-happy bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth, and that it sounded like it, too. And yet, three songs from this album were seamlessly blended into Thursday night’s set thanks to some truly stunning rearrangements that brought out the earthy, twangy core of these songs that sound so much fuzzier on record (“Silver,” already the best track from Out of the Storm, was taken into the stratosphere by a truly great country rock solo added to the outro). The band worked similar magic on selections from 2015’s Ivy Tripp (“The Dirt” is a more natural fit for this version of the group, but the synth-y “La Loose” was transformed into brilliant showcase for Crutchfield’s backing vocalists) and the otherwise turgid Great Thunder EP, and even made room for “Tomorrow,” the lead single from Crutchfield’s soundtrack to the Apple TV+ children’s show El Deafo.

Crutchfield isn’t a belter, but her voice is impossibly sweet. The slight grit she applies in some of her choruses makes it clear that she’s seen things and lived through them, but eventually she comes back to the light touch, the vocal equivalent of the “honey on a spoon” she compares herself to in “Can’t Do Much”. Crutchfield was able to show off her voice to the fullest extent in two of the covers the band performed, the first being Lucinda Williams’ “Fruits of My Labor.” A song about taking the time to finally appreciate your success; one gets the sense that every time Crutchfield sings this song, it’s to remind her of what she’s accomplished since she put out that first home recorded album back in 2012. Every tricky high note is an opportunity for her to both flex and stretch, a chance to both hammer home her talents and luxuriate in them. The band closed Dolly Parton’s “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” another ballad that allowed Crutchfield to take a stab at some long and high notes. What makes it the perfect closer is fairly self-evident – full of reassurance that everything’s “gonna be alright, gonna be ok,” it promises that even after the curtain falls, there’s no room for despair. In their recorded cover, Waxahatchee keep a slow, steady pace, but live, they kick into the quick, gospel-tempoed coda of Parton’s original. Between masks, vaccinations, social distancing, and watching with bated breath as American democracy has hung in the balance, so much of the past two years have been focused on avoiding bad things. What Waxahatchee seem to promise is, once the bad goes away, there might be room for some good things to look forward to, as well.