#365songs (188 / 365)

Cerulean Salt was my first Waxahatchee album and I've been a fan ever since, all the way up to the quite different-sounding Tigers Blood. Back on her second album Katie Crutchfield was still very much in indie-rock mode, and following a trajectory I was familiar with from the Mountain Goats and Iron and Wine: a determinedly lo-fi acoustic-guitar first era (just one album in Waxahatchee and Iron and Wine's case) followed by very tentative exploration of other instrumentation in a studio, sooner or later going full-band and pretty much staying that way.

Cerulean Salt is from that tentative middle era of Waxahatchee and the clean-but-sparse sound leaves the emphasis on Crutchfield's lyrics, where it should be in a song like "Swan Dive," my favorite off Cerulean Salt. It's not a happy song but in some of its predictions of the future there's a bit of hopefulness to it that, insofar as it's autobiographical, was sort of borne out later ("I will grow out of all the empty bottles in my closet" prefiguring Crutchfield publicly getting sober in the Saint Cloud era). Mostly it's sad though, and simple as hell (four chords, three verses, wordless "oo-oo-oo" chorus) but extremely affecting. Live performances tend to slow it down and omit the constant tom roll but my favorite version is the studio one. Beautiful song, kind of a bummer. Kind of Phoebe Bridgers-esque, but 10 years before Phoebe Bridgers.