Ready for Prine Time

With a new album prepped and ready, Kelsey Waldon was perfectly content issuing her third LP in the same fashion as her previous two—through her own independent label. The Kentucky native’s 2014 debut quickly stirred critics, raising her profile from Nashville upstart to a nationally recognized, fresh-face archetype of authentic country music. Her 2016 follow-up, I’ve Got a Way, landed on several “best of” lists, drawing the attention of a couple of high-profile fans who personally confessed their affection for her work—songwriting legend John Prine and his wife, Fiona.

Stunned, Waldon graciously accepted their compliments, and their suggestion to consider Prine’s Oh Boy imprint as a home for her next project. And, two years later, Waldon will not only release her latest LP, White Noise/White Lines, through Oh Boy Records, but will also tour with Prine this fall. She even joined the songwriter for a show-stopping duet on “In Spite of Ourselves” at this year’s Bonnaroo.

“It was really rowdy. The smile on John’s face said it all,” Waldon says about the sit in. “It’ll probably go down as a favorite time in my history of singing that [song] with him.”

Despite her shift in distribution, Waldon still proudly carries a deep and reflective respect for the Southeast, using her music to muse naturally about the rural region in a way that echoes Prine’s enduring appeal as an iconic American storyteller. Waldon insisted on bringing her live band into the studio this time around, despite working with session veterans on her previous releases.

For a while, Waldon even considered naming the album after a song that references her home state, “Kentucky, 1988,” but ultimately felt the title would imply too narrow a scope. If anything, then Waldon’s recent mileage around the U.S. reaffirmed her thoughts on how small the country really is, even in these polarizing times. “We’re really all very similar,” says Waldon. “I know some Jersey girls that have the same kind of grit as some country girls back home.”

Waldon wrote and road-tested some of White Noise/ White Lines’ 11 songs on tour and built others in the studio during some especially spontaneous moments. Forgoing a click-track, she and her band recorded live, to “capture lightning in a bottle,” she says, keeping takes that crackled with the energy and atmosphere of a concert performance.

“I wanted the danger, and the magic, that can happen onstage. I really wanted to feel that in the studio,” Waldon says. “I wanted that raw heat. Even if it wasn’t perfect, it was perfectly imperfect.”

This article originally appears in the September 2019 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.