It can be tough to be the “you” in a song. The best a “you” can hope for is to become an urban legend a la Carly Simon’s unnamed target. The worst is something like Waxahatchee’s finger-pointing diatribe “Never Been Wrong” where Katie Crutchfield cuts deep and points out all the worst aspects of the song’s singular audience, immediately calling them on whatever possible defenses they’ll throw up.
Over an aggresive, see-sawing guitar, Crutchfield lets her target know exactly how the dissolution of their relationship will play out.
“Everyone will hear me complain,” she sings. “Everyone will pity my pain.”
The backing chorus of voices seems to point toward Crutchfield being right. This isn’t going to end well for “you.”
As she explained in a recent interview with Uproxx, “Never Been Wrong” is just one facet of an unhealthy former relationship that’s being aired out on her upcoming album Out In The Storm. And though Crutchfield is angry and stumbling in the dark on the track, she says that she is 100 percent beyond the subject matter covered.
“You have these relationships with people; sometimes they’re really damaging and something that stays with you for a really long time,” she said. “You grow; we all grow from that, we learn from that. I really feel like I’m in a good place now because I went through that.”
Out In The Storm is out on July 14 via Merge.
