Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee on Songwriting Process, Alabama Roots

Earlier this month, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield joined Rolling Stone contributing editor Rob Sheffield for a live conversation as part of Rolling Stone‘s RS Styled New York Fashion Week event.

During the wide-ranging half-hour conversation, Crutchfield shared an in-depth chronology and personal history of her various bands (Waxahatchee, PS Eliot, The Ackleys, Bad Banana), and offered insights into her songwriting process.

“There’s pockets of ideas and there’s melodies and there’s lyrics and there are little pieces of the puzzles that are fragmented and scattered all over the place in my life,” Crutchfield says of her writing. “When I have a moment to really organize everything, that’s when the full songs come to fruition.”

Throughout the interview, Crutchfield opens up about her upbringing in Alabama alongside her twin sister Allison Crutchfield. “We started our first band when we were 14,” she tells Sheffield. “That became our whole world. We would write music and practice every single day, and through that found a very small music scene in Birmingham. Everything kind of went from there.”

Later on, Crutchfield also traced the arc of her varying musical heroes — from the Velvet Underground to Lucinda Williams — and shared her thoughts on everything from One Direction to Fleetwood Mac to her go-to karaoke song.