Arkadelphia

Katie Crutchfield closed Saint Cloud with “Arkadelphia,” a five-minute Americana ballad named for a town in Arkansas, told from the passenger seat of a car moving through a landscape she is trying to remember accurately. The arrangement is patient, spacious, built around an acoustic guitar and a small band that holds back until the last chorus.

The song is Crutchfield at her clearest — a writer who has gotten sober, who is telling you about a person she knew before she did, who is no longer in any hurry to dramatize her own experience. The cinematic quality is quiet. The light in the song is late afternoon. The road keeps going. Put it on in the car.