You Learn to Love Alone

**A Review of Kelsey Waldon’s “All By Myself” (2014): A Song for the Quiet Outsider**

*by Kroes den Bock*

There’s a line in Kelsey Waldon’s “All By Myself” that burrowed into my mind the first time I heard it:
_“Sometimes empty rooms feel like home,
If all you’ve ever known is leaving,
You learn to love alone.”_

Released in 2014, buried on her beautiful but criminally overlooked record *The Goldmine*, “All By Myself” walks the line between gentle modern Americana and the poetic directness of old-school country. Waldon’s voice is the kind that would hush a noisy bar—pure, slightly tremulous, singing the truth like she’s humming a lullaby to her own bruises.

I found her by accident, following a midnight YouTube trail, bleary from insomnia and the drinks I’d had with dinner. The algorithm tossed me her way, perhaps sensing I needed the gentle nudge of a song that understands what it is to be held at arm’s length by life. You’d think country music was made for these moments—a bottle, a night, too much thinking—but most songs settle for cliches. Not this one.

**A Song that Didn’t Need an Audience**

Perhaps it’s fate, or cosmic irony, that “All By Myself” never made a dent on the charts. Dig around—there are no viral TikTok videos, no endless reviews on Rolling Stone. Waldon isn’t a Nashville superstar. But there’s a vein of poetry in songs like this, hidden from the world by bad luck or indifference, that grows all the richer for its solitude.

The song is quietly devastating. It’s about choosing solitude over the mess and heartache of mismatched company. It’s about loving yourself enough to be lonely. The opening verse is as honest as breathing:
_”I ain’t one for crowded rooms,
I don’t need someone to lean on,
Some folks think I’m shelterin’
But they don’t see the reasons why”_

There is a courage in loving your own company, though it’s a courage rarely praised. Society mistrusts the loner, the introvert. We’re told to go out and live louder, join the chatter and the mess. Yet for some of us—the ones who feel like all of life’s invitations are written for someone else—this song is a warm, flickering light in a cold foyer.

**My Own Company, My Own Ghosts**

In my twenties, I thought solitude was my flaw. I watched friends couple up and pair off, slip away into tangled lives with husbands, girlfriends, children. I envied their fears—the fear of losing, the fear of tears—because those things meant they belonged. Meanwhile, my phone shrank and my weekends emptied. People called me “aloof,” “hard to know,” “too withdrawn for her own good.”

It took years and a therapist before I realized this was not a curse, not some dour sentence. Like Waldon, I learned that “empty rooms” can feel more like home than anywhere else.
Sometimes, like tonight, when the city is an ocean and I’m adrift, a song like “All By Myself” reminds me that I’m not the only refugee seeking harbor alone. In her trembling alto, I hear my own excuses; in her affirmations, my own reclaimed strength.

_”If I come or go, it’s only me
No one to disappoint or blame
I light a candle in the kitchen
And dance inside my own flame”_

The lines are simple, but simplicity is the hardest victory for any writer to win. These words land with a gentle finality. They say: you’re enough. Stop waiting for someone else to hand you permission.

**A Sound Like Home, Even if Home is Empty**

Sonically, “All By Myself” is as modest as its message. Waldon’s acoustic guitar floats at the center, gently picked, the occasional sigh of pedal steel winding through the song like a ghost. There are no stadium choruses, just a voice so close you can hear the ache behind every word.

It’s the kind of music I reach for on bad days—when anxiety is a black wave, or when I can’t quite believe that being alone isn’t the same as being unloved. We all wear loneliness differently. For me, it’s a low hum, a steady ache I only feel when the rest of the world has gone quiet. Waldon’s song lets that ache breathe, gives it words without sadness or apology.

I’m not naive: there are days when I want company, someone to witness me, to say “I see you.” Alone is not always the same as okay. But there is a peculiar delight in “lighting a candle in the kitchen and dancing alone.” It’s the freedom to know yourself, and to be a home unto yourself, if only for the length of a song.

**Why This Song is Important Now**

To those who have never spent a summer afternoon sitting on your own front stoop, watching cars pass, hot wind stinging your face, and thought to yourself, “This is fine, this is enough,” you may not need this song. But for the rest of us—those who carry the burden of shyness like an old coat, who move softly through crowded rooms, who retreat to books and music when the crush is too much—songs like “All By Myself” remind us that we’re not failures in need of repair.

We are complete unto ourselves. And we’re not, as the world keeps lying, a project to fix, nor a puzzle missing half its pieces. Kelsey Waldon understood this long before I did. Her gift to us is this quietly defiant hymn, a country song about the romance of solitude, brave enough to stand apart from the crowd.

*”You learn to love alone,”* she sings. And sometimes, that’s the bravest thing you can do.

*Kroes den Bock*