Musicians Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee, and Kevin Morby have spent more than a decade sojourning through a real and mythical geography in their songs and on endless tours. Now in a new season of life and a new home, each with a recent milestone album and undoubtedly more ahead, the couple has found that, away from the noisy East and West Coast scenes, they hear their true selves best in the quiet spot they’ve plotted in the middle of the map.
Story by Hannah Hayes | Photos by Brinson + Banks
October 11, 2022
As Katie Crutchfield eases her Jeep inside the garage, there’s a nostalgic tone to the overhead door opener as the grinding chain strains to hoist the folding panels — a suburban equivalent to car wheels on a gravel road. Through the windshield, a shelf lined with old paint cans appears; Crutchfield’s longtime boyfriend, Kevin Morby, hops out the passenger-side door next to a small mountain of cardboard boxes bound for a recycling trip someday. The open garage frames indie rock’s reigning power couple in a much different scene (albeit a delightfully boring one) compared with those their fans know: Crutchfield looking skyward like a periwinkle birthday candle atop a cupcake-colored pickup truck on her “Saint Cloud” album cover, or Morby in a 24-karat fringed jacket on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”. But here on this quiet, tidy street in Overland Park outside Kansas City, Kansas, they’re just Katie and Kev, plus their massive potted bird of paradise named Bertha and some carpenter ants (“We’re going to figure that out,” says Crutchfield, apologizing for the tiny piles of sawdust).
Bertha lives in the kitchen next to a wall of windows where sunlight shines kelly green through her tremendous veined leaves, contrasting against an adjacent framed print of a Nehi orange soda bottle sitting on a jet black car hood by Memphis photographer William Eggleston. Crutchfield and Morby moved into this slant-roofed, atomic ranch-style house in Morby’s hometown earlier this year. It’s a quick drive from their previous home, where they invited thousands into their living room and backyard shed via Instagram Live for “weekly rodeos” in 2020 when neither could tour. In these intimate, egalitarian sessions, they mixed original songs with covers from heroes like Bob Dylan and Tom Petty (“You don’t know how it feels to be me … in quarantine,” joked Morby) and beamed-in other musician pals. The rodeos became cathartic fireside chats for loyal followers, but the screen time also introduced them to a new, truly captive, audience. “The amount of people who've written us or come up to us in public to say how helpful those were to them, it’s kind of astounding,” Morby says.
But before the rodeos, for more than a decade, he and Crutchfield had respectively risen from their scene-kid origins and grueling tertiary market touring to attain unlikely careers as genre-panoramic artists in a music industry still keen to pigeonhole, especially performers from the South. Under the name Waxahatchee, Birmingham-born Crutchfield grew a cult following with her crystalline coyote-whoop of a voice and post-rock-imbued, incisive songs written in the darker valleys of love. Her acclaimed 2020-released record, the luminous “Saint Cloud,” steered into a different sound and light, influenced by the classic country and singer-songwriters she grew up hearing (e.g., the holy trinity of Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt), a shift to sobriety and the reliable relationship she’s established with Morby today. In a brighter, less cluttered space, Crutchfield revealed the knock-you-over force of her lyrics, leading critics to compare her to giants like Lucinda Williams, even Bruce Springsteen. Morby’s latest, “This Is a Photograph,” sits seventh in his notably prolific catalog. Written mostly in Memphis, it doubles as a sonic family album, his parents and sister appearing as characters throughout. While his father was recovering from a scary collapse at the dinner table in January of 2020, Morby flipped through old snapshots and found a picture of his dad at the same age he is now, 34, which inspired the title track. The album has met similarly glowing praise and media attention, including a sprawling feature for The New York Times where Morby stands in Raphaelite rhapsody outside a Memphis AutoZone in one of the photos.
But when the work for each of those records, just-completed and in-progress, hung precarious in the pandemic, the rodeo house served as a refuge for them as much as the viewers. After much of the time they’ve been together spent apart on the road or performing logistical gymnastics to see each other, the couple nestled into the stillness. “We did a lot of projects in the pandemic. It was really fun,” Crutchfield says. “I painted the cabinets. We had the garden. We bought some furniture. Before, it felt like that house was just a landing pad and such a mess. We really made it nice.”
On one of their neighborhood walks, an activity they’ve kept up with when they’re both home from touring or recording, the couple formed a joint fascination with a nearby midcentury modern house that looked like a mini-biodome. Morby noticed a sign in the yard saying, “Follow us on Instagram, the Campbell Dome House,” and soon enough the owners invited them over. One of them happened to be the daughter of the home’s builder, Bob Campbell, and she told them about the other midcentury modern homes that dot Kansas City. Crutchfield, with wide, geeking-out eyes, explains how they learned about Don Drummond, a pioneering builder in the late ’40s to mid-’60s. “He built all these houses in Kansas City that were Palm Springs- or Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired.” She and Morby had tossed around the notion of moving to Memphis or Austin after two years cooped up. “Just letting the universe guide us,” Morby says of their house hunting process. But within three months of the dome meeting, the cosmos revealed their very own Drummond just a few miles away.
Some familiar background pieces from the rodeos sit or hang in new places here. The banana-yellow Dusen Dusen throw pillow sits on a turquoise sectional in the den lit by egress windows dressed with a pothos vine. Their collection of art reshuffled throughout the rooms, like the framed illustration of Townes Van Zandt facing diagonal from a Dyson cordless vacuum propped in the corner of Crutchfield’s office. “This is my little zone,” she says. “One guitar and one piano and I have everything I need.” The hall between the office and guest bedroom displays their “wall of dead rockers,” original artworks by revered musicians’ musicians Daniel Johnston, Blaze Foley, and David Berman.
Back in the kitchen, where a sleek steel vent hood hangs over six gas burners, Crutchfield recalls a recent meal where they made simple, satiating steaks on the stove top. With her hand resting on the onyx countertops, she cranes back, long raven tendrils falling backwards, and throws her voice back toward the den.
“Gosh, Kev, what have we made lately?”
“Elote!” he hollers.
“Yes, he’s made elote like four times this week. We can’t get enough,” she confirms.
A millennial-Jetsonian moment indicative of the life they’ve made by design.
Consider the geography, real and imagined, covered across their catalogs and the places they’ve been, apart and together, and a Yoknapatawpha County-esque map unfolds. The headwaters of their careers beginning on rivers, Morby on the Harlem River, a waterway that runs between Manhattan and the Bronx and namesake of his first album; Crutchfield on the Waxahatchee, a tributary that runs by her family’s cabin in the bucolic hills south of Birmingham, more precisely Chilton County, famous for its peaches. In between the oceans crossed, venue stops, and countless roads traced, they mark a litany of landmarks: Ruby Falls; Paris; Baltimore; St. Cloud, Florida; Castle Rock, Kansas; Savannah, Georgia; Alabama’s Coosa River; Barcelona. Then there’s Bittersweet, Tennessee; Chapel of Pines; the Little Los Angeles; and Piss River fitting beside, under, and above an anthropomorphized topography of mountain peaks, city streets, velvet highways, apartment buildings, valleys, and hedonistic sugar beaches.
“I just can't not mention places,” says Morby. “They're in the work because I feel moved to put them there. Destinations have always been so a part of my work, and I just get so inspired by them.”
“I think it's intentional and it isn't at the same time,” Crutchfield says of the places noted in her songs. “I think about my favorite songwriters, someone like Lucinda Williams. I feel like she’s really good at evoking emotions by really putting you in her head space. Finding ways to describe that place, and name that place, carries out the intention of the whole song.”
In an introduction to a conversation between her and Williams for Interview magazine in April 2020, Crutchfield wrote: “As a fellow musician, a woman from Alabama, a lover of poetry and literature, a believer in the dark, effervescent magic of the deep South, Lucinda Williams’ songs mean everything to me.” Her influence rings clear on Crutchfield’s song “Arkadelphia,” reminiscent of Williams’ “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” an understated masterpiece in Southern scene setting. Crutchfield paints a rural road in the opening lines:
I lose my grip, I drive out far
Past fireworks at the old trailer park
And folding chairs, American flags
Selling tomatoes at five bucks a bag
Coincidentally, before Interstate 22 finally hooked into Birmingham’s downtown in 2016, Arkadelphia Road served the ambling stretch of Highway 78 that led to Memphis, the city that sparked both “Saint Cloud” and “This Is a Photograph.” Crutchfield conjured the melody for her lead single from the album “Fire” as she and Morby barreled across West Memphis back toward Kansas City — the first time she had pulled a song’s pieces from the sky without the aid of a guitar or piano. The words she wrote down became a love letter to her newly sober self. “If I could love you unconditionally, I could iron out the edges of the darkest sky.”
Morby fell in love with Memphis during these visits with Crutchfield, who had a more familiar kinship with the city from occasional weekend trips with her family when they would stay at The Peabody, one of the South’s famous historic hotels, known for its daily march of mallard ducks from the elevator to the lobby’s travertine, flower-festooned fountain. She took him there for the first time impromptu during the holidays in 2018 as a midway pit stop between her parents’ house in Birmingham and his in Overland Park. Both relished the ambiance, old-school fancy with a bit of kitsch and a 30-foot-tall Christmas tree towering over the mezzanine. They made many returns to Memphis, one for Crutchfield’s birthday, another to see a Grizzlies NBA game. Crutchfield’s sister and her then-fiance Mike Krol had planned to wed in Los Angeles, where they live, but a pandemic-driven shift of plans had Morby officiating their much smaller ceremony at Sun Studio at the “altar of rock ’n’ roll.” With the world seeming unsteady but a little less bleak in October 2020, Morby went back to The Peabody, his window to the past, and set up shop in Room 409 to finish “This Is a Photograph.”
“For me it was a little like Kevin McCallister lost in New York at the Plaza Hotel, but this weird Southern version of the Plaza,” says Morby. “Because it was so low vacancy during the pandemic, and I was staying there for like a couple of weeks, they upgraded me to this huge suite. It was kind of hilarious.”
On the grand but desolate downstairs level, Morby befriended a few bartenders but kept his distance for fear of catching or spreading the virus. “I always think about how there's that player piano and it felt like this ghost piano playing to a lobby of no one,” he recalls. Upstairs, in his unexpectedly Eloise-ian accommodations, Morby spread out his gear and confronted his own ruminations about aging and death by communing with more Memphis ghosts: Big Star’s Chris Bell, who died in a car accident at the age of 27 and never saw his band’s massive impact; the legendary soul singer Otis Redding, whose own death at 26 in a plane crash heralded the demise of hit machine Stax Records; the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his incorruptible room in the Lorraine Motel, where he was assassinated on its balcony just shy of his 40th birthday; James Lee Lindsey Jr., aka Jay Reatard, who buoyed the city’s punk scene by way of homegrown label Goner Records before he died at 29; and singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, the angelic voice behind the better known version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” who was swept into the Mississippi River’s mighty current at 30. Morby recorded the lapping of water against the banks where Buckley swam out near Beale Street for the song “A Coat of Butterflies” — the texture of the river in high relief against the swell of a harp. While critics have called the song the tired descriptor “lush,” it seems more accurate to call it (and the album) fully saturated, like those iconic dye-transfer images by color photography pioneer Eggleston.
“[Eggleston is] one of those people that once I discovered him I was like, ‘Oh, this is that guy,’” says Morby, who became so enthralled with his work that two posters of his photographs hang in their living room. “He took this album cover and this album cover. He wrote the rule book to capturing a certain feeling in that part of the South. It's like every feeling I had being there, he took a photo for that feeling.”
While walking around Memphis, Morby carried his Pentax PC35AF camera with him, snapping his own still lifes of the city, which later became an exhibition staged at the Ace Hotel in Brooklyn — “This Is a Photograph of Memphis.”
Crutchfield and Morby credit having the time, resources, even just the mental clarity to have these experiences in Memphis all back to their decision to set down roots in Kansas City. It was a move precipitated by a piece of wisdom handed down through a grapevine of musicians that, years ago, hit Morby while sitting in the living room of Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox’s in Atlanta. Looking around at his roommate-less house, Morby's head started to spin.
“I lived in the two most expensive cities in America at the brokest time in my life,” says Morby. “Very quickly I was like, ‘How did you buy this house?’ Brad said, ‘I'll tell you the same thing Kim Deal [of Pixies and The Breeders] told me: The moment you get any money from music, buy a house wherever you can buy a house.’ So I literally took that advice. Years later, when we're on tour in Australia, I saw Kim and told her that I bought a house in Kansas City. She was like, ‘D.J. Brakebone from X told me to do that because he couldn't buy a house in LA.’ He had told her, ‘You live in Dayton, just buy a house in Dayton.’”
“Buy a house in Dayton,” Crutchfield repeats like a mantra.
“I’ve told this story too many fucking times,” admits Morby. “But it’s a crucial one.”
Somehow in 2022, with the average rent in New York City climbing northwards of $5,000 a month, the idea that an artist of his or Crutchfield’s notoriety could thrive outside it or Los Angeles — let alone in a modest midsize city in the middle of the country — remains baffling for many in their industry orbit and the writers who cover them. (Both admit mild exhaustion with explaining how they do to those who still can’t fathom it.) But after the living room talk, Morby thought more about musicians he admired: Will Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy) in Louisville, David Berman in Nashville, Justin Vernon in Eau Claire, Angel Olsen in Asheville, Conor Oberst in Omaha, John Darnielle in Durham. He realized buying a house in Overland Park, the suburb where he grew up on the Kansas side of Kansas City seemingly straight out of a ’90s family sitcom, might not be that novel an idea after all. It might just be the secret sauce.
“I think a lot of people wouldn't quite understand the desire to want to move back to a place like Kansas City, or be open to it,” says Morby. “But our love of middle America and the South is a huge part of it and understanding those places. I mean, there are the Lou Reeds or Patti Smiths that are so synonymous with a place like New York.”
Crutchfield picks up his line of thought: “But, at our core, at our essence, that's not who we are. We are people from small cities in the middle of the country. As soon as we started to tap into that, I feel like it paid off creatively.”
“The complexity and the beauty of these places, I think a lot of people who haven't lived in them or spent time in them, are naive to that, which feels frustrating,” says Morby. “Some people weirdly fear the middle of the country, especially post-Trump, or have the wrong idea of it.”
“It’s more inspiring to be in places that are less tapped into,” says Crutchfield.
“Rather than the bright lights of New York or the way the ocean looks in southern California, there is something in the middle of the country where you lean into the silence and lean into the whisper of it; it's a big payoff,” he says.
“Yeah, we're searching for treasure out here,” she says.
“Like a thrift store,” Morby adds.
At first, Morby didn’t even live in the house he bought in 2015, instead renting it out to a friend while touring the country. But the next year, he, like so many other Americans, started to reassess his values after the presidential election.
“Trump was coming into power and I felt some sense of responsibility to return to the middle of the country,” he says, a sentiment Crutchfield echoes.
“I felt a responsibility to take myself out of a liberal bubble that I was existing in socially, and come back to a place where my vote would matter more,” Morby explains. “To be on the ground politically.”
“When Kevin was moving back to KC, when we first got together, and I was thinking about moving back to Birmingham, that was even a weird parallel,” says Crutchfield. “We both had this strong desire to have a landing pad that felt calmer and more comfortable and less charged. I felt like I was getting to a point in my career where I did not need to be in the mix or participating super-heavily in a scene. I actually felt like that was starting to hold me back and distracting from making records I wanted to make. I needed a clean slate.”
Less than a year later, Crutchfield woke up one morning in Barcelona after playing the Primavera Sound festival and made another monumental life decision: She was done drinking, for good. Unlike some of her artistic contemporaries, there were no close calls or interventions, no incident to hang a press release on. Perhaps just emblematic of her generation, Crutchfield had seriously reevaluated the role alcohol played in her life and concluded it was drowning out her inner voice, one that spoke clearly to her about who she wanted to be as a person and artist. Back home, she leaned into the quiet of Kansas, turning the crash pad into a sanctuary on the plains where she wrote what would become “Saint Cloud” while keeping what she calls “banker’s hours.”
“It was like a working theory in my head,” says Crutchfield. “If we can work on stuff in Kansas City and make the sacrifice of being away from bigger cities and our friends there, I do think it'll pay off. Then I put out ‘Saint Cloud,’ which is very much written in the midst of living here. And then when he put out ‘This Is a Photograph,’ we both had the same experience of, ‘Oh, I think this is working.’ I think this is the right place for us to turn off all the outside noise and really focus on being in the thick of our work.”
“I could have never made this record in Los Angeles,” says Morby.
When asked to tell the story of how they met, Crutchfield and Morby volley the start like a tennis ball.
“There’s a little bit of debate,” she says.
“There’s one of two places. Oh wait, three,” he says.
“We think we've at least narrowed it down that it was in the year 2012, right?”
“We should just Google this.”
Although the location remains uncertain, the circumstances of their first encounter was a merchandise sale gone bad at a show where Crutchfield and her twin sister, Allison, playing with their band Swearin,’ had opened for The Babies, the group Morby fronted with Cassie Ramone (later of Vivian Girls).
“We had a contentious interaction,” says Crutchfield, explaining with a mischievous grin that she stole a sale from Morby when she told a fan Swearin’ T-shirts were only $10 instead of the $15 The Babies were charging.
“It was a real, real sham,” says Morby with feigned indignation.
But later, when talking about their families and the oddly similar paths of their lives before they started a romantic relationship, Morby tenderly recollects that it was indeed a photograph that introduced him to Crutchfield’s existence.
“You know what's funny, one of the first times I ever heard of Waxahatchee, I saw a photo,” he says. “This is when I would've been living in New York, and I feel like at that time it was so cool to be in New York. That was the popular music hub and everyone's press photo would be a similar thing of standing on a rooftop with the city behind you or down on the streets — the concrete of New York. Then I saw this photo of you with your dog in a field. And I remember thinking, ‘I feel like I would get along with this person. I really relate to that photo. Wherever this person is from feels like where I'm from.’”
The photo was a promotional shot for Crutchfield’s 2013 album “Cerulean Salt” taken in Birmingham’s Brother Bryan Park, named after James Alexander Bryan, a progressive, Princeton-educated pastor who moved to the city in 1888 and often came home without his coat after giving it to someone in need. (The French hermit St. Cloud did something similar, albeit around 540 AD, by surrendering his royal robes for coarse garments.) Crutchfield used the park’s name in her song “Brother Bryan” detailing the suspended animation she and her sister felt after their friend Tripp’s death from an overdose, and how the park is where she thinks of him most. His mother had found a piece of writing after he passed away that expressed how he wanted the Crutchfield sisters to dress up like bluebirds and sing Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” at his funeral. They obliged the latter part of the request, and Crutchfield soon after added the ballad to her lineup on a subsequent tour, one which happened to be with Morby.
“When we really first talked and connected was at a venue called the EKKO in Utrecht, Netherlands, where Waxahatchee opened for The Babies. She covered ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ and we talked afterwards,” Morby remembers. “One of my best friends had also passed away from an overdose. I'm also a huge Bob Dylan fan.”
“There’s a weird parallel there,” says Crutchfield.
“My life and Katie’s are just so parallel in so many different, bizarre ways,” Morby echoes.
While many musicians from the South or middle America have movie-rights-worthy backstories as the children of itinerant preachers or, conversely, the children of show business parents, Morby and Crutchfield are each the product of much more widely relatable circumstances: two middle-class nuclear families who didn’t outlaw secular music or discourage their progeny from playing it, but also never saw the present day coming.
“Probably what my parents expected was for me to go to University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, be in a sorority, and meet my soulmate who was in a fraternity,” says Crutchfield. “And then get married and start having babies and maybe not even work. It's kind of what they assumed, not even that's what they wanted. I bet that was a really interesting experience for my parents to be like, ‘How did this happen?’”
“I've had the exact same trajectory because I played sports as a kid, and I grew up in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. I think my parents were like, ‘Oh, Kevin will play baseball in college and he'll meet his soulmate there. And she'll probably be a cheerleader,’” says Morby. “And then the same thing. How the hell did this happen?”
“Neither of us had siblings that played music. Our parents don't play music,” says Crutchfield. “That was another thing we related over. We didn’t really have examples around.”
What their parents did provide was the foundation for a dogged work ethic. A middle school Crutchfield picked up a guitar and taught herself how to play (“YouTube didn’t exist yet. I didn’t know how to tune it or change strings. It was just so much slower.”). After dropping out of high school and earning his G.E.D., 18-year-old Morby rode a train to New York City. He may have landed in the right place at the right time as a scene coalesced around the late aughts in New York City, specifically Brooklyn, but he made the most of it playing with Woods in addition to The Babies. His first solo album, “Harlem River,” came out the same year he moved camp to Los Angeles in 2013, and he’s released an album nearly every year since, a pace simultaneously envied and dreaded by other musicians. As Morby moved east to west, Crutchfield flew from the South up north. First, she mined for songs and a following with her sister as P.S. Eliot in Birmingham’s long-closed Cave 9, right off Brother Bryan Park. It was the kind of DIY venue that if mentioned in the right city bar still inspires the unfurling of shirt sleeves and pulling of pant hems to reveal commemorative tattoos; but on the other side of the coin, it was a challenging, if not downright hostile, environment for young women sharing their art. She homed in on her own sound as Waxahatchee while stationed in Philadelphia, albeit constantly on tour, at one point with one of the city’s favorite sons, Kurt Vile.
“Honestly, I think a huge part of why we relate to each other is because we grew up in places that had touring bands and cool cultural things coming through, but it still seemed very far away. It seemed a little unattainable,” says Morby. “So we both were led to these DIY scenes and came up in these punk scenes. But we also loved Saddle Creek Records and The Strokes. All these bands that seemed bigger than God. We were like, maybe we could do our own little version of that.”
“There was access to some culture where we grew up, but I think the lack of total access was almost a little bit of a point of pride,” says Crutchfield. “We had to really work for cool stuff. When we were both living in these big hubs, Kevin and I both connected over ‘Yeah, it took a lot for us to get here.’”
“I heard this interview one time with the actor Jeff Daniels, who lives near Ann Arbor. And he was like, 'I have a Midwesterner's work ethic,'" says Morby. “I really think that's a thing. I have watched my parents, from the moment I was born to this day, even past retirement for them, still hold down jobs. I just feel like I constantly have to be working. Touring is where I think that Jeff Daniels work ethic kicks in. For me, this is the equivalent of watching my dad and mom going to a 9-to-5 every day."
“I just love making music so much,” says Crutchfield. “I know a lot of people have a tortured relationship with it, and I’ve certainly been there … but nothing makes us happier than working on music. Just pure love of the game.”
“It’s like breathing,” says Morby.
While the two would sporadically see each other backstage at festivals and shows from time to time after 2012, it was the 2017 tour where they set off on the road as solidified solo artists when more of those connections crystallized. Even the covers of the albums they were promoting on that cycle mirrored each other, both referencing the esoteric portrait photographer Francesca Woodman, known for her haunting, kinetic images in black and white.
“It's all really beautiful to look back at, because I didn't identify myself as a country singer at all then. I was just singing my songs how I always sang them, but stripped down,” says Crutchfield. “Kevin saw this thing way before it even happened. That led me to explore other sounds and make a record that was a reflection of that. With Kevin's music, how he saw me is exactly how I saw him, but reverse. Kevin's this indie folk guy, [not just punk]. It’s not my scene at all, but when he made ‘Singing Saw,’ that's what made me want to do the tour, like, ‘Oh, that guy Kevin Morby, who I've kind of known forever. He's doing really cool stuff right now.’”
Crutchfield confesses the last thing she thought would happen at the end of that tour would be her dating Morby, but they both had turn signals on toward the exit ramp of their respective relationships and found themselves talking often as the show dates ticked by. At the end of the tour, each newly single, they began to see each other in a new light, too. Without the ideal conditions to start dating, they set up an experiment in Austin where Crutchfield was ending a tour and each had an escape hatch to pull if necessary. They went swimming in Barton Springs, ate barbecue in Lockhart, and met each other’s pals — packing in cute, crushy activities while time was on their side. They even visited the grave of Townes Van Zandt, one of Crutchfield’s biggest influences, together.
“We weirdly gave it all these tests,” says Morby. “It was a very rock ’n’ roll romance started on the road.”
It would be annoying if Crutchfield and Morby played self-deprecating or dismissive of their union having its very own fan base, but both acknowledge that its “sweet” listeners are invested in that part of their storyline, albeit a smidge unnerving. Deadpan, they theorize what would happen if they broke up with the weathered practicality of two people who know the spotlight’s fickle swivel.
“When we've gone through rough patches where I'm like, ‘What if we broke up? All the fans!’ But people's attention spans are like this,” Morby says, snapping his fingers. “It's basically that Courtney Barnett song, ‘Nobody Really Cares if You Don’t Go to the Party.’”
“They might be sad for a week, and then they’d get over it,” says Crutchfield.
“‘Damn … anyway,’ as they're scrolling on their phone.”
Still, since the first streamable melding of their voices on “Farewell Transmission,” a cover of a Jason Molina track from his Songs: Ohia project, they’ve been placed in the wouldn’t-it-be-dreamy category of creative couples a la a Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach live-love-work situation. Type either of their names into Google and “Are Katie Crutchfield and Kevin Morby still together?” appears along with adjacently aimed questions. So do pictures of them lounging in bed together in the rumples of a peach and powder blue striped comforter (yes, it’s Dusen Dusen, too) or standing in their garden during lockdown — Morby in a hooded white terry bathrobe, Crutchfield in an oversize denim shirt over a striped crop top and green shorts, and a charcoal grill in the background. More deeply relatable scenes, yet effortlessly cool enough to inspire long-term relationship fantasies. So does their domestic bliss juxtaposed with their cadre of famous friends and fans from Tim Heidecker to Bowen Yang to the HAIM sisters.
“I feel really fortunate that Kevin and I have such an easy, healthy relationship. I think if we didn't, having our relationship seen [in an idealized way] would be hard,” says Crutchfield. “My favorite is when we're out and we've gotten into some little scuff and someone recognizes us. I’m like, ‘That’s so funny. Kevin and I were pissed at each other and of course someone comes up.’”
“People constantly ask us if we'll do a record together,” says Morby. “We like to keep it super low pressure. We only collaborate if it feels natural. Maybe we will make a record someday. But why throw that pressure into a relationship?”
“It's fun though because it feels like our fans are always really excited if the other shows up and it's kind of this question mark, ‘Is the other one going to come?’” says Crutchfield.
Their joint live appearances might be unpredictable, but each of them has written the other more permanently into their songs on the albums they’ve made since becoming a couple whether it’s a melody the other helped improve or a direct address. Morby’s first song about Crutchfield, “Congratulations” on 2019’s “Oh My God,” uses “baby” as a stand-in for her name, but there’s no confusion as to who he’s singing about on “This Is a Photograph’s” “Stop Before I Cry.” In that song, Morby sings, “I know I’m not perfect, just like I know you are wild,” maybe an idiomatic response to Crutchfield’s line “When you’re missing me, oh, what do you see? Something wild that you think you’ll never be?” on “Saint Cloud’s” “Can’t Do Much,” which Crutchfield wrote about Morby about six months into dating. He starts off the story of how he found out the song was about him while Crutchfield’s eyes dart toward the ceiling as she plants the bouquet of wildflowers tattooed on her forearm between her knees, clasping her hands awaiting a remaining twinge of embarrassment.
“Katie had these lyrics that were lying on the ground,” he says. “I picked them up and started to read them out loud, there was that line, ‘Love you till the day I die.’ I was like, ‘Love you till the day I die?’ Then Katie snatched them away from me and you were like, ‘Don't read my lyrics!’ And I was like, ‘Wow, you're going to love me until you die?’ And you were like, ‘This isn't about you!’ And I was like, ‘Well, who is it about?’”
“Yes, it’s about him,” says Crutchfield with a grin. “It was just a little too ripe for him to read.”
“I think [being in each other’s songs] is amazing,” says Morby. “It’s like a statue. The love is in there forever.”
“I do think that there are little Easter eggs that are completely unplanned and unintentional that show up in our songs because we're making stuff so physically close to each other,” says Crutchfield. “It's sort of impossible for it to not feel like there's this Venn diagram.”
But before anyone thinks that life as a musical couple is all writing love songs longhand, leaning in close over a shared microphone, or driving vintage pickup trucks through the other’s music video (OK, one more mushy moment: “I feel like there’s shared inflections on both of our parts,” says Morby. “Sometimes even on stage, I'm like, ‘Oh, I'm dancing like Katie,’ or, ‘I'm making singing faces like Katie,’”) there’s the far less sexy side, too. Managers, labels, numbers all come home, too.
“We talk about [business] constantly,” says Morby.
“All day, every day,” says Crutchfield.
“I've dated people who aren't in the music industry, and it's 80% frustrating and 20% nice knowing ‘They don't have any idea what any of this means,’” says Morby. “But with Katie, it's 80/20 the other way. I'm so glad this person gets it. I don't have to break down to them what a publicist does.”
“We don’t have to pause to explain all the ins and outs,” says Crutchfield.
“At the end of the day, what we’re doing is such a funny, unique thing,” he says. “So to be understood is really nice.”
“I feel like I really depend on Kevin's opinion on a lot of things,” she says. “It's a part of my greater compass as far as driving my own career goes.”
During the pandemic, the term “turbo romance” entered the upside-down lexicon of 2020, used to describe couples who had started dating either soon before or at the start of lockdown. Forcing the bulb of a long-term prospect and testing it in the terrarium of isolation, some unions took root, others withered. For Crutchfield and Morby, they were already used to the concept of concentrating months of typical first dates into a few days or a week of round-the-clock time spent together on the road. But quarantine felt almost like starting over for them.
“I feel like most people are land animals and know how to figure things out on land,” says Morby. “It’s like Katie and I are sea creatures of something on tour. That’s home for us. Being here at this home took more getting used to.”
“Yeah, like, how do I just exist around this person? Not in motion,” says Crutchfield. “I almost think as a touring musician, you're scared of being home a lot of the time. You crave it so much when you're exhausted on the road, but it's such a big transition. It’s really nice to look at it now and say, ‘Wow, we actually did that really well.’”
With a microphone garlanded in red roses and a candy store of flouncy frocks like Loretta Lynn at the Instagram Ole Opry (DÔEN and Selkie in frequent rotation), Crutchfield finally set off on the “St. Cloud” tour just a little over a year after releasing the album — swaying in a blue dress, turning the crowd into a big mess as Morby sings in another line from “Stop Before I Cry.”
“Those first shows we played, that was pure magic,” she says.
Playing catch-up from the year she lost, the tour hasn’t ever really ended, a run that led her to open for her hero, Williams, this past August. “Perhaps the best night of my life,” she captioned a photo of the two backstage. But the highs of getting back to business have also been met with separation anxiety and chronic low-grade chaos.
“Leaving was never that hard before, but when you were leaving me [for that tour], there was some relief of, ‘We just spent two years in a house together, this is probably good.’ And, at the same time, I was like, ‘Oh, there goes my limb, my right arm.’”
“I do remember you visiting me once in the middle of that tour, and getting back together was so desperate,” says Crutchfield. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, I have to see you’ in a way that we usually aren't.”
“Right now, we're just on psycho runs where our schedules aren't lining up,” says Morby.
“We didn’t stagger things this year very well at all, and that has led us to realize that we need to,” says Crutchfield.
Despite the weariness in their voices, those homegrown work ethics have them announcing a new project or press item or show seemingly every week. There’s Plains, the band Crutchfield formed with singer-songwriter Jess Williams, which dropped a high desert dream video shot in Marfa, Texas, for their first single and a list of tour dates hot on its heels. Together they released two covers (Guided by Voices and Broadcast) on Bandcamp to support abortion rights in Kansas after the fall of Roe v. Wade. A nail-biter for most, Crutchfield felt the air of possibility in her adopted state, heralding the overwhelming vote in favor of choice. “Kansas is kind of magical that way,” she said. And of course there was the Kansas City Royals game in July where Morby threw out the first pitch after fans lobbied for him on Twitter. His headshot glowed underneath the golden crowned megatron while he threw out an impressive lob (he did play pitcher on his high school baseball team) to the lion-costumed mascot, Sluggerrr.
But when their paths cross back at home, Crutchfield and Morby have a rhythm to return to — one they intentionally keep the beat with now. They’ve held on to the rodeo house, now Morby’s studio where he clocks in nearly every day, while Crutchfield goes to work around the corner from their bedroom.
“Going to the other house for me is a big thing,” says Morby. “I'm a huge proponent of, ‘See you in the morning, and I'll see you later on. I got to miss you a little bit.’ I also love going to this other place that feels like, ‘OK, I'm here alone, and I can sing a silly lyric off the top of my head.’”
“I can confirm that, if I may, Kevin's the type of artist that needs to have a lot of chaotic mess around,” says Crutchfield. “He needs to be a tornado in the house, in order to be his truest artist self. I need to do every single chore on the list. That’s what my craziness looks like.”
“Those are healthy distractions,” Morby says.
“Yeah, I feel like before we were here, my idea of my own creative process was a little more tortured,” she says. “A little ‘Oh, it's all a distraction, and it's all keeping me from doing the thing,’ Now I'm way more zoomed out. It all matters. I need to do all of that stuff. It's all brewing while I'm doing it. All of those little isms support the bigger picture.”
“Having security from this house kind of gave me keys to the world,” says Morby, who, like Crutchfield, is content to have these domestic distractions instead of the big city’s endless options every night. “I'm on the research floor and I can really live inside the work.”
“I used to need so much space from the world, so much privacy to do it,” she says. “As we've been together longer and as I've grown to trust Kevin and respect him as an artist, I'm able to write with him on the periphery, in a way where we get involved in each other's writing in the midst of it now more than I would've ever thought.”
In between strums during the last song on “This Is a Photograph,” Morby sings, “When I was a little boy, I wanted to live and breathe inside a song.” In this snapshot of their lives, with the paint cans, the massive houseplant, the little piles of sawdust left behind by busy carpenter ants, he and Crutchfield seem to be doing just that.
Hannah Hayes was a lead editor at Wildsam Field Guides, where she produced 10 books about American cities, regions, and road trips and, prior to that, was Travel + Culture Editor at Southern Living. She lives in New Orleans.
David Walter Banks and Kendrick Brinson met and fell in love with photography and storytelling at the same time and place in photojournalism class in college, eventually falling in love with each other two years later. They began their professional careers as community photojournalists in the South, then expanding to national magazines, and eventually joining forces to create moment- and color-driven work as a team for some of the world's leading advertising agencies and editorial publications. Their bylines can often be seen under their documentary and portraiture images in The New York Times and National Geographic. Together, their clients range from Fortune Magazine to Apple and Red Bull. They recently relocated from Los Angeles — where they still have a crew and return to work often — back to their roots in the South, where they live in Atlanta in a 1916 bungalow with their pack of animals, Tux, Tia, and Rex, and a big vegetable garden.
