Echoes of Getting By

**Finding Lost Highways: A Personal Journey with Kelsey Waldon’s “I’ve Got a Way”**

There are albums that slip into your life quietly, like midnight trains you weren’t expecting to catch, but years later you wonder how you ever got anywhere before their arrival. Kelsey Waldon’s 2016 album “I’ve Got a Way” is one such train. It didn’t chart on Billboard, it didn’t break the Spotify algorithms, and chances are your friends have never heard of it. When it crossed my path in a sleepless summer of 2018, its honest, sinewy sound was a shaking of the soul that’s hard to explain—maybe because what Waldon writes about is what so many of us struggle to say out loud.

**Lyrics that echo like old wounds**

There’s a certain kind of loneliness native to country music—the almost sacred satisfaction of sadness. In the title track “I’ve Got a Way,” Waldon mourns and celebrates with the same breath:
*“I’ve got a way / Of making things harder than they need to be / I’ve got a way, babe / Of making things much harder on me.”*
I hear that, and I think of the late nights I’ve spent inventing obstacles to happiness, inventing heartbreaks from thin air, suffering for the sake of authenticity. When Waldon sings, she doesn’t pretend to outgrow these self-destructive spirals. Instead, she sketches the cycles in plain pencil, showing the smudges and the hesitations.

My own life is a tangle of such cycles—the gentle sabotage of joy, the certainty that neutrality is safer than hope. I remember, five years ago, finding myself alone in a city apartment, scrolling endlessly, looking for the thing that would “fix” the ache. Instead, Waldon’s voice found me: honest, lonesome, filled with the wisdom that comes from having tried and failed at being someone you’re not.
*“It’s just one of those things / I’m a queen of lost causes…”*

**Honest songwriting as therapy**

Throughout “I’ve Got a Way,” Waldon draws a line directly from her Kentucky homeland to the broken heart of anyone who’s ever wanted to go back but knows they cannot. In “High in Heels,” she writes:
*“I’m going nowhere fast, high in heels / Ain’t got a penny or a prayer, but I know how it feels…”*
It’s not just nostalgia but diagnosis: of want, of dislocation, of trying to appear taller (better, more put-together) than you really are.

For someone steeped in self-doubt—someone who always wonders if they are enough—the album became a quiet revelation. I thought for years that country music was about pickup trucks and whiskey and things I’d never lived. But Waldon’s country is about the daily grind of not measuring up, and of finding pride even in small survival. The poetry isn’t in grand gestures but in sticking around when everything inside says run.

**Songs as old friends who accept your flaws**

“False King” is a standout song that I keep returning to, especially in those mornings when the mirror feels like an adversary.
*“You can’t place a crown on the head of a clown / And then hope he turns out to be a king.”*
The mask of togetherness—of trying to be what others need, when you’re hardly sure what you are yourself. For so long, I played at being stable: the successful, the good, the one who didn’t ask for or need much. The song dares me to admit the joke, and in doing so, lets me off the hook.

There’s more wisdom in Waldon’s restraint, in her refusal to wrap things up in neat morality. In “All By Myself,” she confesses:
*“Don’t need no one to fill my cup / I’ve got enough, or maybe not…”*
– a line that circles the truth of independence when it’s equal parts choice and necessity. It’s the song I put on when the weight of solitude feels like too much, or not enough. Waldon reminds me—and herself, I suspect—that sometimes the bravest act is to acknowledge what we lack.

**Production and sound: old soul in a new world**

Musically, “I’ve Got a Way” is an unapologetic embrace of roots. The pedal steel shivers, the fiddle aches, the percussion is sparse and present. It’s the kind of production that listens carefully to its own lyrics. If you close your eyes, you’ll hear echoes of Loretta Lynn, John Prine, even the ghost of Townes Van Zandt. But it doesn’t feel like mimicry; it feels like someone claiming what’s best in the tradition and offering it honestly, bruises and all.

I grew up far from Kentucky, yet somehow Waldon’s music makes me believe in those places—honest, un-hyped, where the stakes are small and enormous at the same time. I listen to this record cleaning my kitchen, taking the long way home from work, or just lying on the floor feeling the weight of unmet expectations. Her voice tells me it’s okay to be unremarkable, to take my own damn time, to survive without a storyline.

**The album’s priceless imperfection**

If I have one quibble, it’s that the stoic adherence to tradition, wonderful as it is, can make the album’s sound a little too safe at times. There are moments in “Dirty Old Town” or “You Can Have It” where I wish Waldon let her voice shake loose, let the band play wilder, less polished. She’s not afraid to be vulnerable, but I wonder what she would sound like if she let the unresolved tension in her lyrics show just a little more in the performances themselves.

**The art of loving your flaws**

But maybe that’s the point—maybe what is so staggeringly rare about “I’ve Got a Way” is its lack of spectacle, its refusal to be more than it is. For people like me—chronically self-critical, haunted by the idea of being “enough”—Waldon offers a balm not by fixing us, but by giving us a soundtrack to the fact that fixing isn’t always possible, or even necessary.

*“I’ve got a way of getting in my own way / But I’m learning not to mind.”*
That line plays like a mantra on my worst days. Country music, at its deepest, is not about perfection or flash. It’s about getting by, learning to laugh in the face of the things you cannot change, and, sometimes, finding some grace in what’s left behind.

I’ll keep listening to this album when the loneliness settles in, when the days feel a little too long, when I want to remember that simply being here is sometimes as much as any of us can hope for.

**Kroes den Bock**