Waxahatchee is back out on the road supporting her excellent 2020 album Saint Cloud, on a run of North American dates with Madi Diaz, who released the great History of a Feeling last year. They stopped in NYC on Thursday night (2/10) for a show at Brooklyn Steel. Madi opened the night with a set that, except for the first song, pulled entirely from her new album. Accompanied by a drummer (other than a few songs she performed solo), her voice was in gorgeous, heart-rending form as she played the confessional tracks that make up History, but she added some levity with her between-song banter, too.
Waxahatchee and her band took the stage next. They have the ease of a road-seasoned group (although drummer Eric Slick joined the crew more recently) and sounded fantastic bringing her songs to life, particularly the Saint Cloud material, which is among her strongest yet. They also played a couple of Great Thunder songs ("Chapel of Pines" and "Singer's No Star"), one of Waxahatchee's new songs for the El Deafo soundtrack ("Tomorrow") and a cover of Katie Crutchfield's all-time favorite songwriter Lucinda Williams' ("Fruits of My Labor.") For the encore, they invited Madi back out to do their gorgeous, harmony-laden new reimagining of "Resentment."