\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIn a moment of clarity, Kelsey Waldon<\/a> brushed aside the chaos of New York on a Friday evening.<\/p>\n \n\tShe was in the city on June 20 to release her latest record, Every Ghost<\/em>, in the basement-level concert hall at Hill Country Barbecue. The show was branded as a Honky Tonkin\u2019 <\/a>i<\/a>n Queens<\/a> event, and it brought out 200 of the city\u2019s diehard country music dancers, dressed to the nines in their boots and belts. But Waldon was having one of those \u201ctypical New York\u201d days that crop up regularly. <\/p>\n \n\tShe and her band, the Muleskinners, missed their soundcheck after trying to take the Holland Tunnel into the city (it wouldn\u2019t allow the trailer they were pulling), and her day was out of sorts even before an interview with Rolling Stone<\/em> in the corner of a barbecue restaurant overlooking a window opened up to Manhattan\u2019s 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<\/em>, start to finish, for the first time earlier that week.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI cried,\u201d Waldon admits.<\/p>\n \n\tWaldon has released seven studio albums \u2014 three on the late John Prine\u2019s Oh Boy Records label \u2014\u00a0in 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 <\/em>does.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI care enough about the things I need to care about,\u201d Waldon says. \u201cBut I think you have to go there if you\u2019re gonna write.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tEvery Ghost<\/em> 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\u2019s Southern Groove Studios and co-produced with Justin Francis.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI shifted,\u201d she says. \u201cI 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\u2019s what a ghost is, though. You think you\u2019re done with this thing, and it comes back to you. After 37 years of life, or however old you are, you find yourself going, \u2018I thought my trauma was over,\u2019 but they have unfinished business, these little ghosts.<\/p>\n