Songs for a Weathered Heart

**Review: The Healing Grit of Kelsey Waldon’s “I’ve Got a Way” (2016)**

Sometimes music that deserves to etch itself into the American canon ends up only a secret handshake among a small audience. Kelsey Waldon’s 2016 album “I’ve Got a Way,” quietly released on Oh Boy Records, is one of those rare country gems that never made its way into the hands of the masses. While Chris Stapleton and Kacey Musgraves made genre headlines that year, Waldon’s muscle and wit remained criminally overlooked, her words and voice carving deep truths into dusty woodgrain with every careful verse.

I stumbled across “I’ve Got a Way” during the most nondescript visit to a friend’s kitchen. I was in a foul mood, I’d been wrestling with the old monsters: futility, self-loathing, the vague, muggy sense that life simply wasn’t what I’d been promised. The world of streaming is a landfill of distractions, yet on a battered bluetooth speaker in rural Tennessee, Waldon’s “All by Myself” cut through the noise, and I stood, for a rare, precious moment, still. I saw myself, exposed, looking in a dusty mirror she’d left behind in her words.

“I’d rather be all by myself
Than to be with someone who don’t care.
I’d rather walk this road alone
Than to be with someone that’s halfway there.”

I’ve read more than my share of self-help books, probably too many, resulting in a head full of aphorisms but a heart still full of ache. Some folks use prayer, others whiskey, others meditation apps that gently tell you when to breathe. For me, this album became the spiritual practice I could actually believe in. It understands disappointment, because it’s made of it—spun into gold the way only real country can.

From the opening track “Dirty Old Town,” Waldon extends an arm around you, wordlessly, as if she already knows your secrets. She sings about loving something that’s lost its shine: “I learned to love your secrets, I learned to love your smell / I learned to love you, dirty old town.” On hard days, I’ve felt that dirty old town wasn’t just the landscape she was painting, but the one in my own chest, the battered but still-beating center of me. There’s a dogged acceptance in her songs—neither romanticizing suffering nor dismissing it, just standing with it, sturdy and forlorn.

Waldon’s lyrics dig into the earth of self-reckoning but with no self-pity, so you feel less alone. “You Can Have It,” one of my favorites, is devastating in its resignation, echoing the experience of letting love go not because you want to, but because you can’t keep holding it—“If you want my heart, you can have it / ‘Cause I’ve had enough.” It’s the sort of radical vulnerability I struggle to admit in the real world, let alone say out loud.

I’m not the kind of person who finds catharsis in stadium anthems. I fall apart late at night, alone with a glass or three of something brown, in the liminal spaces where doubt lives. For years I’ve worried if numbness was becoming my baseline; Waldon’s blend of sharp ache and wry defiance was, if not a cure, at least a diagnosis. A song like “False King” gives armor to anyone who’s felt the bite of being undervalued, whether in a job or a relationship: “You can’t place a crown on the head of a clown / and then hope he turns out to be a king.” Sometimes you need a song like that just to get through a workday, to walk a little taller in your own skin.

Her voice is pure Kentucky limestone—sinewy, flinty, unaffected—and she draws from influences that run deeper than modern radio. You hear Loretta’s grit, John Prine’s storytelling, a dash of Townes Van Zandt’s bleak sardonicism. But what makes “I’ve Got a Way” so rare is how rooted it feels: unvarnished, proud, never pining for big city lights or pretending heartbreak is fashionable. Listening to Waldon, you fall in love with imperfection, your own and the world’s.

My childhood wasn’t exactly the American gothic that some country stars sing. I didn’t grow up in poverty, but I was definitely raised on the wrong side of contentment. Some ballads remind me of how far I feel from feeling at home inside myself. In the closing track, “Don’t Hurt the Ones (Who’ve Loved You the Most),” she sings, quietly, plainly: “Don’t burn down the bridges that still have your name.” There’s no judgement in it—just a hope we’ll make it back across. I think of bridges I’ve torched, the regrets I can’t phone up just to apologize. And while I know there’s more fire in the future, Waldon’s simplicity stokes a strange sense of forgiveness.

Once, I tried playing “I Put the Hammer Down” on repeat after getting fired from a job I’d been clinging to out of fear rather than love, imagining myself eligible for a new kind of bravery. Waldon’s “I put the hammer down on a dream / Ain’t it funny how life can turn out?” reminds me that failure isn’t terminal, it’s just another line in the ledger. The way she acknowledges mistakes makes my own seem less monstrous, more human. It’s an album that dignifies bitterness as evidence that you tried at all.

If there is a flaw to this beautiful, unsung project, it’s that sometimes, in its understated arrangements and production, Waldon’s formidable voice could have soared further. The instrumentation, gloriously raw, sometimes edges a little too close to lo-fi; there are moments—just a few—where you wish the pedal steel or the harmonies would swell, offering counterpoint to the loneliness echoing in her lyrics. But maybe that’s the point: sometimes music just sits with you quietly, the way a true friend does, refusing to make false promises.

Music, like memory, is often a private language. Waldon’s “I’ve Got a Way” unlocked a new tongue for me, one that trusted listeners to fill in their own histories, to sew their wounds together in the melody. It might never boast platinum sales, but it has earned a permanent home in the bruised, brave cells lining my own heart.

If you let yourself, this album will shelter you—not from the rain, but with you through it. That’s all I ever really wanted from country music. That’s all I ever needed.

Kroes den Bock