Happy Friday, everyone! It feels a little different in the Flathead Valley today. I’m not sure what exactly is driving that feeling. Maybe it’s the marked increase in the cowboy-hats-to-baseball-hats index for tourism activity, or the increasingly questionable choices of my fellow drivers. Or just the slightly trapped and panicked look that I feel like I’ve been seeing in the eyes of my neighbors over the last few days. It’s a look that seems to wordlessly communicate that they’ve absolutely got to get out of town, and fast.

Could that different feeling  in the air be coming from some event or another in the Flathead this weekend? I guess. But pinning it down could be hard. You see, there’s the giant music festival, Under the Big Sky, happening just outside of Whitefish. And then there’s The Event, a free dressage competition at Rebecca Farm in Kalispell. Oh, and the small but mighty Backwoods Accordion Festival starts up in Trego on Saturday afternoon. But wait, I’m forgetting Arts in the Park! Arts in the Park! It kicked off this morning at Depot Park in Kalispell, and the foot traffic has been slowly building throughout the day just a few blocks away from the Flathead Beacon’s office in the Kalispell Pizza Bank District.

Am I missing anything? Could it be Pioneer League Baseball action, with the Glacier Range Riders’ home stand against the Oakland Ballers? Oh wait, there’s also the 10^th Annual Flathead Lake Festival of Art at Sacajawea Park in Polson. And then the accomplished Livingston singer-songwriter John Lowell is playing two nights at Home Ranch Bottoms. I almost forgot, Polson is also playing host this weekend to the Montana Dragon Boat Festival!

I’m starting to think the answer to my question about just what’s driving that different feeling in the air could simply be all of the above. But of course there’s even more happening this weekend, if you want to pop on over to flatheadevents.net to peruse the offerings. Regardless, if you’re looking for something to do outside of your regular weekend activities, I think it’s pretty evident that there’s much to choose from. However you spend your time, I hope that everyone has a safe and enjoyable weekend. I’m Mike Kordenbrock bringing you the Daily Roundup …

If I could only see one musician at this year’s Under the Big Sky, (it’s just a hypothetical, people!) I think it just might be Kelsey Waldon. When the festival lineup gets announced every year, I try to familiarize myself with the acts that I don’t know (admittedly, sometimes there are a lot), and Waldon was one such musician this year. Not long after I started listening, I couldn’t help but wonder why I hadn’t heard her music before. To satisfy my curiosity, I started trying to learn more about her, and her career.

Back in 2019, she became the first artist signed to John Prine’s label, Oh Boy Records, in 15 years. The announcement came when she joined him to perform onstage at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. It was a major achievement for Waldon, who had been steadily ascending in the country music world since her 2014 album “The Goldmine,” earned plaudits in the likes of The Fader, Rolling Stone and The Wallstreet Journal.

Waldon grew up in a hunting lodge in the rural community of Monkey’s Paw, Kentucky, and was a self-taught guitar and piano player before she started taking lessons in middle school and high school. In a 2021 interview with Oxford American magazine, she described music as something that women in her mother’s family took an interest in. Her grandmother would write songs and play the piano as a hobby, and her great grandmother was a thumb-picking guitar player. “Apparently, it’s just down the line on that side of my family,” she said.

When Waldon moved to Nashville as a 19-year-old, no one in her family had ever finished college. She started working a minimum-wage day job and playing nighttime shows, before she eventually turned towards earning a degree in songwriting at Belmont University, according to a 2016 feature from Native magazine in Nashville.

On June 20 she released her latest album, “Every Ghost,” and it’s earned praise so far. Over at the website Saving Country Music, a review described her as being on an intentional journey of self-improvement, which has included living a sober life, “and reflecting back on the past not with regret or as problems, but as lessons to be learned from.”

“That is one of the reasons why six albums into her career, it feels like Waldon is just now hitting her stride,” the review continues.

In an interview earlier this month with Rolling Stone, Waldon talked about the experience of recording an album in which she confronts the things that are haunting her life.

“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 the 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.”

She went on to say that the theme of the album is “the more we learn to live with those ghosts, the more we’re gonna be alright. Because they’re not gonna go away.”

My entry point into the album was the single “Comanche,” which begins with a slow, bouncing beat and opens with the lines “It’s the night before a holiday, everything’s closed and gone away, everyone’s trying to make it to opening day. It’s just a silent night in the country.”

The lightly humming beat coupled with the lonesome lyrics has a way of transporting me to the place where the song takes place, which just happens to be an old Jeep Comanche truck cruising down country roads. It’s a song about driving around and thinking about life and love. I don’t know about you, but it feels pretty relatable.

Quite a few listens through the album, I think my favorite track has got to be “My Kin.” It’s a slower track that seemingly comes from deep down inside an emotional well, but it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re drowning. The song’s confessional-seeming lyrics explore the hardship, and wonder, of knowing a person and where they come from. It’s weighty stuff, but Waldon’s song manages to make it beautiful, too.

Kelsey Waldon plays Under The Big Sky on Sunday, July 20 at 4 p.m. on the Big Mountain Stage. For more information about the festival, including set times, go to underthebigskyfest.com.