Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman have released a cover of Lucinda Williams‘ ‘Abandoned’ – listen to it below.
The singer-songwriters teamed up to perform the song by the country veteran, who will co-headline a show with Waxahatchee – real name Katie Crutchfield – in March 2025.
Crutchfield recorded the song as part of ‘Apple Music Nashville Sessions’, a three-track EP issued exclusively on Apple Music on Wednesday (December 4).
The EP also features a rendition of ‘Right Back To It’, her Lenderman collaboration featured on this year’s ‘Tigers Blood’, which also saw the ‘Manning Fireworks’ musician play in her backing band through its twelve tracks. Listen to the ‘Apple Music Nashville Sessions’ EP on the streaming platform here.
Crutchfield has also announced a one-day concert at Willie Nelson’s Luck Ranch on March 14, 2025 – it will see a personally-curated line-up of acts that include co-headliner Williams, Futurebirds, Bill Callahan, Kam Franklin, and Brennan Wedl, with more acts to be announced down the line. Tickets are available here.
In NME‘s five-star review of ‘Tigers Blood’, Mia Hughes praised Crutchfield’s decision to recuit Lenderman as “a stroke of brilliance”, writing: “On ‘Evil Spawn’, he joins the chorus to intensify its triumphant us-against-the-world sneer, while his most memorable contribution is on the album’s standout, ‘Right Back to It’ — his plaintive harmonies make the song ache with romantic surrender.”
‘Tigers Blood’ sees Crutchfield presenting songs about a life in her mid-thirties lived after achieving sobriety, which was expanded in detail in her standout 2020 album ‘Saint Cloud’.
She told NME: “I think what I was scared of was it being boring or mundane. I’m at an age now where my life is less dramatic. When you’re in your twenties, it’s all chaos and melodrama, which is gorgeous fodder for songwriting.”
“Now, it would feel really inauthentic for me to write about that type of thing. That’s just not really what my day-to-day life is like anymore.”
In June 2025, Crutchfield will embark on a UK tour, including her biggest ever headline date in the country at London’s Hammersmith Apollo.
Both Crutchfield and Lenderman secured spots on NME‘s 50 best albums of 2024. On Lenderman’s ‘Manning Fireworks’, Karen Gwee wrote: ““Kahlua shooter, DUI scooter,” MJ Lenderman drawls on ‘Joker Lips’. Economy is the Wednesday guitarist’s watchword on solo album ‘Manning Fireworks’.”
“That devastating precision gives his portraits of sad-sacks, losers and egotists either a withering edge or empathetic nuance – sometimes both in the same song. An understated triumph.”
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