One of Kelsey Waldon’s New Year’s resolutions is to start gardening again. “If time allows,” she tells the Scene, talking by phone as snow falls outside. She resolves to write better songs, read more books and get her hands in the soil. “One of these days,” she says, “I’ll have my land.”
For now, that land is limited to Waldon’s plot in Woodbine, where she tends to spend time at home when not on tour or sipping a drink at the American Legion Post 82 in East Nashville. She’ll get her space sooner or later — a move to the country is on the horizon. That’s where she can re-create a bit of her youth spent in Monkey’s Eyebrow, Ky., (population: miniscule) and plant a tomato or two. But for now, she’s part of Nashville’s newest class of artists helping grow something even stronger than a backyard garden: a space for traditionally built, modern-focused country that exists independent of Music Row but still earns artists their self-defined success.
“I do believe it is a very powerful and beautiful place to be in, when you can plow your own row from the outside and prove that if the music holds up, people will find it,” says Waldon, who released her Michael Rinne-produced sophomore LP I’ve Got a Way in August. With the album came some milestones. She made her debut on the Grand Ole Opry, sold out The Station Inn and garnered numerous accolades from the likes of NPR. Like contemporaries Sturgill Simpson, who just snagged an Album of the Year Grammy nomination, and Margo Price, who appeared both on Saturday Night Live and the Billboard charts, Waldon is helping chisel a space in the national scene for Nashville’s independent country artists, without worrying about writing truck tunes for radio programmers.
Waldon’s songs are thick with classic elements — jangly, Roy Nichols-inspired Telecaster guitar, steel twang courtesy of Brett Resnick — that address both her interior and exterior life. After moving to Nashville six years ago and graduating from Belmont University, Waldon released her debut, The Goldmine — her first collection examining the similar shadows beneath skyscrapers and silos — in 2014. Those 11 tracks unveiled a keen lyrical gift for using small-town problems as allegories for life’s largest struggles, all while adding that eternal variable — love, and its loss and gain — into the mix. On I’ve Got a Way, it’s an approach she finely polishes.
“I really feel like I was sobering up, trying to look inside myself and finding a confident ‘sense of place,’ ” she explains. “Have cake and tea with my demons and what not, confront issues, and then get on with them.”
Take “All By Myself,” I’ve Got’s first single. With its touch of rasp on the stick of her Kentucky vowels, it is a more direct and chilling song of self-acceptance than any of the numerous attempts offered by pop radio: “If you ain’t your own man,” she sings, “you’re nobody’s man.” Loretta Lynn is the easy — and fair — comparison, but perhaps also Gillian Welch, who often lets her imagination wander as far as her personal narrative, with a moody, bendable palette. Waldon doesn’t try to target mass appeal through Americana-friendly instrumentation — a few bars in and it’s immediately clear this is a country record through and through. But her lyrics are what make her most approachable.
“I challenged myself to be as open as possible, even with things that might have been sensitive,” she says about I’ve Got. “I’ve challenged myself to be that way in songwriting. All my favorite songwriters, they just went there. Art can get pretty boring if you hold back.” It’s an ethos that will lead her into her third album, which she’s plotting now. That LP will probably be finished before she ever starts that garden, but the ideas she conjures are just as shareable as bounty from a farm stand.
“It’s inner happiness and gratitude,” as she puts it, “and all that boring stuff that they talk about on country music records.”
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