Waxahatchee Channels a Delicate Fury With ‘Lilacs’ Performance on ‘Kimmel’

Waxahatchee performed a pristine rendition of her song “Lilacs” on Jimmy Kimmel Live Tuesday, February 9th.

The performance took place in a big room with high ceilings, light pouring through the windows and reeds and other dry florals arranged around the room. As her backing band picked out the country-tinged tune, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield delivered a masterful vocal performance: “And if my bones are made of delicate sugar/I won’t end up anywhere good without you/I need your love, too.”

“Lilacs” appears on Waxahatchee’s most recent album, Saint Cloud, which was released last March and landed at Number Seven on Rolling Stone‘s Best Albums of 2020 list. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Crutchfield said “Lilacs” was one of the last songs she wrote for the album and its delicate fury emerged from a day where she felt herself slipping into old habits.

“It was definitely one of those days,” she said. “I was just in a bad mood. Through all of my personal growth and the path that I’ve been on, you have these days where you slip back into bad behavior and patterns of thought. When I wrote that chorus, I was like, ‘All right, we’re going to make this a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel.’”