Waxahatchee balances simplicity and intricacy on ‘365’
Breakups seem to be in the air again. Strange how they seem to come around in waves like that, where suddenly all your friends are going through it all at once as if some cosmic epidemic has raged through your town. If you’re currently trying not to text someone or licking your wounds from them not texting you, Waxahatchee has a new song for you.
On ‘365’, she lends her comforting southern drawl to the topic of co-dependency. Or perhaps more specifically, the painful experience of trying to break the ties of co-dependency but ending up back there anyway. “I stop picking up all your phone calls / Take a shot at decency,” she sings, casually delivering a devastating blow to everyone currently talking to their ex. But as the song develops, it’s more intricate than a typical heartbreak or healing track.
‘365’ is a messy number sung so neatly. Waxahatchee’s sweet vocals beautifully contrast the emotional carnage in her lyricism with stripped-back instrumentation to let the story keep the spotlight and make space for its complexity.
It’s a winding tale told so straight. She perfectly manages to nail the tension, upset, and love in an ongoing back-and-forth. The line, “I catch your poison arrow / I catch your same disease,” hits like a tonne of bricks as it snapshots the sharpness of shared pain so effortlessly. As the voice in the track tries to pull themselves out of codependency, her merge of tender, loving imagery with darker elements nails the feeling of mixing a relationship with a reliance.
For Waxahatchee, that feeling comes to life in a very real way. Of the song, she wrote, “‘365’ is a song about codependency as it pertains to addiction and relationships with addicts. It’s something I’ve dealt with a lot in my life, and I really wanted to distil the nerves and emotions down to their purest form in this song.” If that was her mission, she’d more than succeeded on this fraught emotional cut.
The track is the third and final teaser from her upcoming album, Tigers Blood, which arrives later this month. Along with ‘Bored’ and the sweet country duet ‘Right Back To It’, the singer seems to be leaning further into her Alamaba roots on this record. Merging indie with a distinctly southern spirit, Waxahatchee’s unique vocals could sing a shopping list, and she’d have the world hooked.
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