Waxahatchee works even when a romantic relationship didn’t

Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield is a bit of an anomaly in the popular singer-songwriter landscape. Her latest record, Ivy Tripp (released in April on Merge Records), finds the Alabama-born artist — and former frontwoman of P.S. Eliot, the pop-punk band she formed with her twin sister, Allison — spreading out her most honest self-assessments in songs that have a Lilith Fair-era nakedness to them.

Ahead of Waxahatchee’s show at the Jackpot Music Hall Sunday, October 18, I chatted with Crutchfield from her New York home about the path to Ivy Tripp.

The Pitch: Ivy Tripp is your third album. How do you feel you’ve grown?

Crutchfield: When I made [my first album] American Weekend [in 2012], it was just like a fluke thing. I made a solo record in a week because I had a really prolific week. Everything since then has been a little more deliberate. With Ivy Tripp, I really went wild. I wanted to take all the time in the world to try everything and use different instruments on every song and build these big, weird songs. That was a really fun and new experience for me, and it was a really different approach than what I had done on my previous albums or even in my previous bands.

So I feel like maybe I’m a little bit more open to experimentation now. You grow the more you play music and the more that you write.

Your twin sister, Allison, played with you in your previous bands — the Ackleys and P.S. Eliot — before starting her own band, Swearin’. How have you adjusted to the separate creative projects on which you’ve each embarked?

It’s funny — she’s in the next room. We live together. We learned to play music together. I liked to play guitar and write songs, and she played drums — and now she plays everything. But basically, the songwriting process with me is no different than when we were 14 and sitting in our parents’ garage making music. A lot of the creative process now isn’t that different than it was because the songwriting process has always been mine — that’s a private thing that I do by myself.

When we moved to New York, she wanted to do a band that was separate from me. That made sense because we’re twins, and that’s something that twins struggle with anyway, having their own thing and identity and separating themselves from each other.

Your ex-boyfriend, Keith Spencer, is one of your primary collaborators and the drummer for Waxahatchee. Tell me about the dynamic of being in a creative partnership with someone you used to be romantically involved with.

It’s funny because no one ever asks me about that, and I feel like maybe it’s a bold thing to ask, but I have no problem talking about it. I appreciate you asking because my relationship with Keith was — and is — really important to me. For both of us, what we really ended up getting out of that relationship is the creative connection. I’ve never been very good at collaborating with people because songwriting is such a personal thing that I do alone. It’s hard for me to sit down and do that with another person. I kind of clam up or I’m in my own head. And Keith just tried to get me out of my comfort zone with that, and together we’ve come up with some of the greatest music I’ve ever been a part of. I feel like he is super-talented and just instrumental in Ivy Tripp.

Basically, we had a moment in our relationship where we both realized that the romantic aspects weren’t working, and the creative aspects were too valuable to us to let the whole thing fall apart. We broke up and then went on tour together for a whole year. It wasn’t an easy thing to go through, but we worked through it, and we’re still really close. I’m happy that the worst of it is over.