**Hauntings in the Heartland: Revisiting Kelsey Waldon’s “I’ve Got a Way” (2016)**
Not long ago, my therapist suggested I start keeping “emotion logs.” On my phone, in a battered notebook, or even scrawled out on receipts—wherever a feeling grabs me, write it down. “You’re deflecting,” she said, “losing touch with your real emotions behind all that bravado and rationalization.” At the time, I shrugged and mumbled something about trying. That same evening, shuffling through playlists and crumpled receipts in the passenger seat of my own life, I stumbled upon an album that, in its quiet, aching honesty, became an unwilling emotion log for me: Kelsey Waldon’s “I’ve Got a Way,” released in 2016 but largely kept off the mainstream radar.
Kelsey Waldon, a Kentucky-bred singer-songwriter, cuts through the noise with her voice—gravel and honey, habitual heartbreak and rebellion—wrapped around country music that feels less like a throwback and more like a necessary correction to what the charts stubbornly feed us. You probably don’t know her name. Most don’t, and maybe that was her doom and her salvation. “I’ve Got a Way” is an album that didn’t just orbit under mainstream notice; it tunneled underneath it. And in the burrowing, in the simplicity and self-excavation, it became the kind of record that doesn’t search out its audience—it waits for the ones who learn to listen for it.
The opening track, “Dirty Old Town,” sneaks in like dusk—quiet, almost embarrassed to ask for your attention. “Tired of walkin’ these same old streets, throwing down my money just to stave off defeat,” Waldon sings, and it’s the lilt in her voice—teetering on weary, stubbornly hopeful—that yanked me straight out of my late-night denial scroll. For anyone who has ever felt trapped, resigned, or lost in the recurring choreography of their own decisions, Waldon’s lyrics are balm and blade. I heard myself: tired, limping from comfort to comfort, looking for a new geography inside the same old town.
I’d grown up on the outskirts too—different town, similar ghost. My father packed up and left before I learned how to throw a baseball or say “no” to a second helping of sadness. Since childhood, I have returned to certain emotional landscapes over and over, like Waldon walks her “same old streets”: seeking escape but always circling back to familiar wounds.
Waldon’s songwriting never lets those wounds scab over without picking at them. In “All By Myself,” she is neither triumphant nor tragic. She is honest:
*“I’m all by myself, but I don’t mind,
Sometimes I like it that way”*
Some afternoons, after a new disappointment or another text message fizzled with ellipses, I would turn to that line as if it were a prescription. Loneliness isn’t just endured, Waldon suggests—it’s sometimes chosen. The production is stripped and earthy: a clutch of guitars, her voice swimming through, a pedal steel that sits in witness but never overshadows. It’s no place for posing. She’s saying what you’d say, if only you knew how to say it without sounding pathetic, or bitter, or too hopeful for your own good.
“False King” takes it even further, sending a warning to anyone—myself included—who misplaces faith in charisma or old promises. “Don’t build your house with someone else’s tools,” she sings, and I remember every time I tried to construct my self-worth out of external validation or temporary comforts. Waldon’s heartbreak wisdom feels like it was earned from failures she keeps in her back pocket—not as souvenirs of old love affairs, but as blueprints for moving forward sans illusion.
What really hurt—and healed—was “High in Heels.” Here Waldon tells the story of women seen and dismissed, strength camouflaged as prettiness:
*“You say I look so strong, but I am weaker than you know,
High in heels, on the edge of letting go.”*
I’ve never worn heels, but I know about disguising fracture lines. I know the exhaustion that comes from holding in doubt, aligning your gait to expectations, and still, somehow, ending up “on the edge of letting go.” I wonder if healing ever looks like simply accepting that precariousness—as Waldon does, with empathy that is neither self-pitying nor stern.
After a week of living with these songs, I started logging emotions for real. Sometimes it was one word—*cornered*, *longing*, *almost*—scribbled next to a lyric that refused to leave my brain. Waldon’s approach to songwriting reminded me that beauty doesn’t just come from catharsis; it comes from honest witnessing. Her lyrics are not dressed up for radio play but stripped down to nerves and marrow.
If you know anything about Kentucky, you know the way tradition and resistance interlace there, like rivers splitting through limestone. The finest moments on “I’ve Got a Way” are not in the riffs or refrains, but in the way she looks tradition dead in the eye, nods in respect, and still chooses her own language. This album reminded me, embarrassingly, that not all my pain is precious. But it *is* universally human, and worth tending to like a small, stubborn garden.
There’s a tiny flaw worth mentioning—and maybe it’s not even a flaw, but a form of reticence that comes with the territory of such intimate songwriting. Across the album, the pacing is so consistent, so carefully guarded, that sometimes the emotional temperature never fully boils over. There are moments where I longed for Waldon to break form and rupture her own reserve, to go off a cliff musically or let grief scream. The carefulness is beautiful, but sometimes a song needs to let its teeth show.
Still, I can’t shake these songs. I’m writing emotion logs, badly, clumsy and present, because Waldon’s record taught me what real honesty—fearful, hopeful, tired, resilient—sounds like. “I’ve Got a Way” isn’t just an album. It’s the map you draw for yourself, after you realize you can’t keep walking the same old streets, and the only honest way out is through.
Kroes den Bock