Katie Crutchfield decamped to her parents' home in the dead of winter to record an album. It was 2011 and Crutchfield was nearing the end of P.S. Eliot, the band she had started with her twin sister Allison a few years earlier. Like many bands before them, its members wanted to go in different directions, and Katie's path led her to that house, hunkered down during a rare Alabama snowstorm. Shortly after New Year's Day and right around her 22nd birthday, she spent a week recording what would become American Weekend, her first album as Waxahatchee, a project that she named after a nearby creek that snaked through her childhood memories and a name that would come to define her adult life.