Every Ghost finds the Kentucky songwriter addressing sobriety, trauma, and family dysfunction: "You think you’re done with this thing, and it comes back to you"

In a moment of clarity, Kelsey Waldon brushed aside the chaos of New York on a Friday evening.

She was in the city on June 20 to release her latest record, Every Ghost, in the basement-level concert hall at Hill Country Barbecue. The show was branded as a Honky Tonkin’ in Queens event, and it brought out 200 of the city’s diehard country music dancers, dressed to the nines in their boots and belts. But Waldon was having one of those “typical New York” days that crop up regularly.

She and her band, the Muleskinners, missed their soundcheck after trying to take the Holland Tunnel into the city (it wouldn’t allow the trailer they were pulling), and her day was out of sorts even before an interview with Rolling Stone in the corner of a barbecue restaurant overlooking a window opened up to Manhattan’s Garment District. When the interview wrapped and she was making her way back downstairs, it abruptly dawned on her that she had just listened to Every Ghost, start to finish, for the first time earlier that week.

“I cried,” Waldon admits.

Waldon has released seven studio albums — three on the late John Prine’s Oh Boy Records label — in her two-decade career, along with a handful of EPs. But none of them feature the Kentucky native picking at her own wounds the way that Every Ghost does.

“I care enough about the things I need to care about,” Waldon says. “But I think you have to go there if you’re gonna write.”

Every Ghost finds Waldon confronting all the spirits in her life that are haunting her. Or at least every one that fits on the record she recorded at Memphis’s Southern Groove Studios and co-produced with Justin Francis.

“I shifted,” she says. “I made a lot of transitions until, one day, there was nothing left to do except make art. It was really therapeutic for me, because I put a lot into it, and I saw a lot of myself, too, and a lot of things I thought I was done with. That’s what a ghost is, though. You think you’re done with this thing, and it comes back to you. After 37 years of life, or however old you are, you find yourself going, ‘I thought my trauma was over,’ but they have unfinished business, these little ghosts.

“The theme of this album is, the more we learn to live with those ghosts, the more we’re all gonna be alright,” she continues, “because they’re not gonna go away.”

On the record, Waldon gets into addiction and sobriety, grief, and the trauma in her life that can rightly be called “generational.” She wrote eight of the nine songs, save for Hazel Dickens’ “Ramblin’ Woman” that ends the album.

On “Falling Down,” she confronts the addiction part head-on, from the opening lament of an empty liquor bottle and its consequences with the lines, “Don’t be surprised if I’m pitchin’ a fit/because there’s just one thing that I can’t quit.”

It’s a personal allusion. Waldon’s choice of sobriety is a recent one, and she’s still getting used to it.

“I never meant for this to become a thing,” she says, “but I started realizing that the more of us that do it — a lot of members of my band have the same issues — the more it helps… Now, I still smoke a little J when I need it to get to bed, but I have a very different relationship with that. It doesn’t tap the little angry hillbilly inside of me that still rages.”

The haunting ballad “My Kin” finds Waldon examining her past, and her upbringing. She is a product of a broken home, and it’s what drove her to start playing music as a teenager. But the song is not confrontational in nature. Rather, “My Kin” is a slow burn of acceptance, as Waldon wraps her mind around the notion that she carries a life filled with trauma and triumph every place she goes.

“I’m the best and worst of my kin,” she says. “This is just me kind of, honestly learning to accept every part of who I am, and not being afraid. I’m just not being scared all the time. Who cares, you know?”

Releasing the record in Manhattan sounded fun to Waldon. The two New York-based DJs behind Honky Tonkin’ in Queens, Charles Watlington and Johnny Nichols — DJ Moonshine and DJ Prison Rodeo, respectively — offered Waldon a spot on a riverboat cruise for the occasion. But she preferred a landlocked saloon. Hill Country Barbecue’s concert room — with its low ceilings, small stage, and hardwood floors and walls — is small enough to feel intimate but large enough to accommodate the two-steppers and line dancers that always show up to Honky Tonkin’ in Queens events, and it made sense for Waldon. That same atmosphere spurred Charley Crockett to release his $10 Cowboy record at Honky Tonkin’ in Queens in spring 2024. Like Crockett, Waldon is a classic fit for the event’s hard country vibe.

She took the stage after Olivia Ellen Lloyd, a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, played an hour-long set that mixed original tunes with traditional country covers. Lloyd is a fan of Waldon’s and aims to lock down opening spots when Waldon is playing in her area.

“Every time Kelsey comes through the Northeast, I ask to open for her,” Lloyd tells Rolling Stone. “Her music inspires me so much, and so does her determination and grit. Kelsey is the real friggin’ deal, and it’s always a dream to get to play music with her.”

In summer 2019, Waldon opened for Prine at a pop-up show in Manhattan’s Webster Hall after weather canceled a festival the two were slated to play. It ended up being Prine’s last New York show; Waldon joined him to sing “In Spite of Ourselves,” “Unwed Fathers,” and “Paradise.”

Waldon’s Every Ghost show may have lacked the gravity of that 2019 concert, but it was magical in its own way.

“Everything that I ever wanted to happen is happening,” she says. “Obviously, there’s always more that we want, but everything we set out to do — even if that means packing out a small club — we’re doing it.”

Her 90-minute set, backed by the Muleskinners, showcased all nine songs on Every Ghost. She walked on in a long black coat embroidered with red roses and musical notes to kick it off with “Ghost of Myself” as fans wanting to get as close to her as possible crowded the dancers off the floor. The disruption for the two-steppers was brief, and the dancing resumed in the second song, “Let It Lie,” and lasted the rest of the night.

Beyond Every Ghost, the setlist spanned Waldon’s entire catalog and reminded fans of her Kentucky roots at nearly every turn. Before she started playing “Backwater Blues,” Waldon paid tribute to the devastating floods that Kentucky endured in April. “The water, personally, ruined a lot of shit in our lives, but I’m still proud to be from flood country,” she boasted from the stage.

When the show ended, Waldon’s time in Manhattan did the same. She had a show in Philadelphia the next night, and suddenly another tour was under way. She’ll tour this record through the summer and likely be on the road the rest of the year — including her Ryman Auditorium debut on November 15 opening for 49 Winchester. 

For the moment, Waldon is simply glad to have Every Ghost off her chest. There’s not a lot of time in her world right now for pondering where she takes it from here.

“I think all of us kind of wonder what’s next,” Waldon says. “It feels scary for a lot of people out there right now. But you know what? The only way through is through. I’m definitely not in it for the money, but I am thankful that I do make a little more now, so I can at least make it work.

“So much has happened,” she continues. “I was in the Country Music Hall of Fame last year. I feel like we’re playing some of the biggest festivals out there. Everyone tells me that I’m killing it, but I’m so in the middle of it that I don’t think I can see it unless I zoom out. At the humble, lowest level, I just want to be able to treat my band well and keep getting to where it’s a little easier. That’s all I want.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.