Around the time Katie Crutchfield was writing the Waxahatchee albums Cerulean Salt and Ivy Tripp, she was also working on songs for Great Thunder, the side project she shared with Keith Spencer of Swearin’. The duo put out the Groovy Kinda Love LP in 2013, but then put the duo on pause with several unreleased songs in the vault. Rather than let her songs fade into obscurity, Crutchfield decided to refurbish them, working with producer Brad Cook to give them a second life with Waxahatchee. The first song to be released from the forthcoming Great Thunder EP, “Chapel of Pines,” strips back Waxahatchee’s sound to the basics. Compared to the chunky indie rock of 2017’s Out in the Storm, it’s a sparse, eerie number that gives Crutchfield’s voice plenty of room to trace a broad emotional arc.
Crutchfield begins “Chapel of Pines” on a high note, lending the song a striking sense of intimacy. Against a simple chord progression scraped out on an acoustic guitar, she sings from a place of heightened uncertainty. “Will you go?” Crutchfield asks in the chorus, letting her guitar fall to silence as her voice hangs in the air. It’s as if she’s asking a question she already knows the answer to, and mourning the loss of a loved one before they’ve even departed. While it’s closer in tone to Waxahatchee’s Cerulean Salt than Crutchfield’s more recent work, “Chapel of Pines” shows how she’s grown into a songwriter who dares to do more with a whole lot less.
