Turns out, I’ve got a personal theme song for 2024. I didn’t start the year thinking I needed a theme song. Never had one before. Didn’t go out searching for one. It just foisted itself on me, like some over-eager, poorly trained puppy that jumped into my arms, nibbled my ears, and licked my face until I was forced to acknowledge its adorableness.
Starting in January, I found myself listening to Waxahatchee’s cover of Dolly Parton’s “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” nearly every day, usually early in the morning as I made my way home from the gym. I’ve tapered off some since January, scaling back my listening sessions to maybe once a week, supplementing on an as-needed basis, but I don’t think that makes it any less of a theme song.
You see, I was in a dark place at the beginning of the year. At the risk of understatement, looking out at the political horizon left me anxious. And then our beloved too-young dog, the canine love of our lives, was diagnosed with an incurable, extremely rare dread disease that over the course of several weeks left him physically unrecognizable to us, resulting, as it always ultimately does, in just ending it.
Enter “Light of a Clear Blue Morning.” The lyrics—lamenting the night, anticipating the morning, dreaming of the sunshine—hit me deep in the gut. But what I clung to in those early morning listening sessions, and still do, is the song’s assurance that “everything's gonna be all right,”
'Cause I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of a brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
And everything's gonna be all right
It's gonna be okay
Man, I needed to believe that. Those lyrics, coupled with Waxahatchee’s slow burning, almost plodding, arrangement that morphed Dolly’s church revival-like song into something off an early Neil Yong album, sealed the song’s fate as my theme song. During one of my countless trips to the out-of-town specialty veterinarian, and upon being told our guy would be tied up undergoing tests for a couple of hours, I lit out for a nearby regional park, put on my headphones, climbed to the top of a small, deserted hill with 360 degree views of San Francisco Bay, and cued up “Light of a Clear Blue Morning.” I then involuntarily started to dance, flailing my arms around like a twirler at a Grateful Dead show, singing along—no, shouting along—occasionally opening my eyes and gazing up at a perfectly clear blue sky. For those fleeting moments, stolen right out from under an all-encompassing sadness, I was downright giddy. Only a theme song can do that!
But what’s really interesting to me about my theme song is how my understanding of it has changed over the intervening months. At the very end of the song, in the final rendition of the chorus, the line “everything’s gonna be all right” is repeated three times—everywhere else it is sung just a single time. Earlier this year, I interpreted the repetition as an effort to persuade, to convince, as if it needed to be repeated in order to be believed, like an article of faith. But recently I’ve come to hear it more as an exclamation point, a joyous, if defiant, statement of the real. My theme song has done some good work!
But enough gabbing—here’s the song.
There’s so much more to Waxahatchee than that inspiring Dolly Parton cover. I’ve been wanting to write about Waxahatchee, the musical vehicle of Kansas City's (by way of Alabama) Katie Crutchfield, long before January. But life kept getting in the way. Lucky for you, the day has finally come!
Any introduction to Waxahatchee has to start with 2020’s Saint Cloud. It’s an exquisite record, start to finish, so much so that it’s hard to pick just a single track to highlight. But that’s why I get paid the big Fine Tuning bucks!
Check out “Can’t Do Much,” a song that, at least musically, puts me in mind of an inner tube float trip down a wooded Alabama creek on a
sultry summer day. The meandering bounce of it makes me want to reach for the beer cooler, all the while cognizant of the murkiness that lies below, an undertow of resigned fate, as Crutchfield, seemingly tongue-tied, finally succeeds in declaring that “I’ll love you till the day I die,” a statement made with a shrug of the shoulders—“I guess it don’t matter why.”
Now let’s jump forward in time to Waxahatchee’s record from earlier this year, Tigers Blood, and the first single, “Right Back To It.” The song finds a sweet spot somewhere between my rock ‘n roll soul and my country-adjacent achy-breaky heart. Love the banjo, the pedal steel, the electric guitar, and the lyric about a former and soon-to-be-again partner, “You just settle in/like a song with no end.” Can’t quite tell if that’s meant to be a good thing. I guess it depends what song it is. If it’s “Right Back To It,” I think they have a shot.
Finally, check out “Problem With It,” from Crutchfield’s 2022 side project, Plains, with Jess Williamson. It’s a toe-tapper for sure, with some folk, country, and rock elements seamlessly interwoven.
I could go on, but as Bob Dylan says, “The hour’s getting late.”
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