Benjamin Tod & Lost Dog Street Band with Kelsey Waldon
Sitting at a corner café table, Benjamin Tod’s eyes light up when asked what it’s like to finally embrace happiness and accept love. With a slight grin, he sips his coffee and leans back, one arm draped casually and comfortably over the chair.
“I’m kind of settling into my age, into allowing myself to be happy,” the 33-year-old says. “For years, I led myself and the people around me into a lot of unnecessary darkness. And now, I’ve learned how to give and receive affection — it’s helped heal a lot of parts of myself.”
Tod’s demeanor is a far cry from his usual stiff posture stance with arms folded, this permeating sense of trepidation and scrutiny for what trouble may be coming down the pike. The relaxed, calm aura is a sign of a human being who has overcome lifelong personal demons, one who has finally become liberated — not only in his personal life, but also his music.
“This latest record is so unusual for what I do,” Tod says. “It’s almost a spite album, to prove what I can do as a writer in whatever medium I step into.”
Titled Shooting Star, the album carves a fresh creative path for Tod, a storied singer-songwriter and frontman of Lost Dog Street Band. The self-proclaimed “proprietor of misery,” Tod finds himself transcending into a life of gratitude, patience, and stability.
“People evolve and change. You’re growing as a person,” Tod says. “If you want to get healthier, you have to start intentionally behaving like a healthy person. You have to look around you and adapt to those things — if you don’t change your identity, it’s hard to change yourself.”
For this latest solo endeavor, Tod tapped some of Nashville’s finest to conjure country gold. Shifting from his signature somber tone of struggle and survival, Tod and his coal fire throat radiate a feeling of clarity and new beginnings in the face of adversity. The result is this intrinsic, musical crossroads — more Hank Williams than Bob Wills, more Marty Stuart than George Jones.
“Most of my career has been laser-focused on poetic, piercing songwriting in mainly a folk tradition.” Tod says. “I wanted to prove to myself and the industry that I could write an elite country record with ease. Either way, if I didn’t accomplish that goal, I sure as hell came closer than anyone on pop country radio.”
The inspiration for the project struck in the summer of 2022, with Tod penning the opening track “I Ain’t The Man.” From there, it became this unrelenting, internal thirst for Tod to begin “imagining what all I could do within a genre slightly outside my comfort zone.”
With a thick thread of honkytonk woven into it, the album leaves fingerprints on seemingly every style of country, from outlaw to red dirt, folk to indie, the culmination of which being a happily welcomed challenge for Tod — the ethos of his life and career at this juncture howling loudly “obstacles are opportunities.”
Shooting Star is also a full-circle moment for Tod. Coming of age in Music City, he found himself squarely in the midst of rough-n-tumble Lower Broadway. Busking on street corners playing Woody Guthrie and Jim Ringer tunes for spare change. And getting kicked out of Robert’s Western World or Layla’s Honky Tonk “more times than most regulars had been before the age
of 20.”
“Growing up on Lower Broad, the influences that I received kind of came later in life,” Tod says. “That sound was always on the tip of my tongue, but it wasn’t until about five or six years ago when I started getting back into my roots, really listening to country again and enjoying honkytonk — this record feels like a homecoming.”
Tod views Shooting Star as a rebuttal to the current state of affairs, for good or ill, of his native Nashville and of the music industry itself. The 10-song LP harkens to the golden era of country music. It’s taking “three chords and the truth” and actually holding yourself to those standards of vulnerability and authenticity.
“I want to make music that helps people on a personal basis, to work through their own trauma and problems, to better serve their families, themselves, and their communities,” Tod says. “As a society, we need to reform back to our spirit. And my intent is to direct people back to their spirit — mind, body, and soul.”
In reflection of the long, arduous road to where he firmly stands today, Tod acknowledges his whirlwind, volatile past. But, the troubadour does so with pure intent, pushing headlong into this unwritten chapter of possibility and purpose.
“Right now, I’m very excited for the future, and very thankful,” Tod says. “I’ve worked incredibly hard and made changes in my life — I’m becoming the person I’ve longed to become for years.”
In the six years since she signed to John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, Kelsey Waldon has earned wide praise for her “self-penned compositions [with] the patina of authenticity” (Rolling Stone). On her new album, Every Ghost, she confronts addiction, grief, generational trauma, and even herself — and comes through it stronger and at peace.
“There’s a lot of hard-earned healing on this record,” Waldon says of the nine-song project, recorded at Southern Grooves studio in Memphis with her band, The Muleskinners. As she sings in the record’s title track and first song, “Ghost of Myself,” she’s put in the work not only to better herself and leave behind bad habits, but also to learn to love her past selves.
Doing so wasn’t easy, Waldon admits. “It took time and experience,” she says, adding that she can now find compassion for her younger self.
“I think you’ve gotta respect her,” Waldon says, “because she was trying as hard as she could for where she was at, and she was doing a damn good job.”
Compassion is a throughline on Every Ghost, whether it’s for Waldon herself, for the person in the throes of addiction in “Falling Down,” or for a suffering world in “Nursery Rhyme.” The people in Waldon’s songs aren’t irredeemable — they’re struggling.
“You’ve got to have compassion; you gotta stay humble and have gratitude,” Waldon says. However, she’s learned that you also can’t let people take advantage of an empathetic heart. “Comanche” — which Waldon jokes is her very own truck song — finds Waldon grappling with the loss of a loved one, not to death but to boundaries she’s set for her own good. Waldon owns a 1988 Jeep Comanche, and driving it serves as a kind of therapy for her.
“I love the whole aspect of when design mattered,” she says, “and owning your car was an expression of yourself.”
“Comanche” is deeply personal, but Waldon’s most introspective reflections bookend My Ghost. Its penultimate song, “My Kin,” extends the idea of loving yourself in spite of yourself beyond the choices she’s made and the circumstances she’s put herself in, to reckon with both the good and the bad that come from her family tree. Those traits, Waldon concludes, make her who she is.
“As the song says, ‘I’m the best and worst of my kin,’ and I love that for myself,” says Waldon, who was born and raised in a hunting lodge at the end of a dead-end road in the rural, unincorporated community of Monkey’s Eyebrow, Ky. “And I’m also at a point where I’m willing to break these cycles, I’m willing to grow, I’m willing to evolve.”
Among those best parts of her lineage is Waldon’s grandmother, who died in June 2024. “She was a remarkable woman. The women in my family have been rocks, and they’ve all been colorful and full of character,” Waldon says.
“Her garden and her yard, that might have been one of the things she took the most pride in,” Waldon adds, recalling how her granny would often stop to dig up roadside flowers, then transplant them into her yard. A display of tiger lilies, some of which now grow in Waldon’s yard in Tennessee, was a particular point of pride.
“Transplanting is such a tradition — it can teach you a lot,” Waldon says. “Life goes on, beauty can grow from anywhere, and as long as a person is remembered, they’re never gone.”
Waldon honors her granny with the song “Tiger Lilies.” She didn’t want an over-the-top sentimental song, so she instead leaned into the idea of traditions as a way to remember loved ones. “I’m sure Granny would love it,” Waldon says.
Every Ghost concludes with a Hazel Dickens cover, “Ramblin’ Woman.” Waldon covered two Dickens songs on 2024’s There’s Always a Song and had added “Ramblin’ Woman” to their live sets as well. While Waldon didn’t originally intend to include their cover on this album, it served as “a sonic star” during the recording process and has a message Waldon feels is still relevant decades after Dickens wrote it. “Hazel was ahead of her time,” Waldon says. “Our existence is more than just what society expects of us. We’re more than just somebody’s girlfriend or wife or mother, and those are all beautiful things, but we can have our own independence, and we don’t have to do it for anybody else. We’re beautiful, magical, and powerful creatures.”
That’s certainly how Waldon sees herself after completing Every Ghost. “It feels like there’s a spirit of fearlessness throughout this album,” Waldon says, “and I’m really proud of that.”
Waldon’s fearlessness is among the reasons she landed at Oh Boy Records in 2019, as the independent label’s first new signee in 15 years. It’s attracted fans to her headline tours and her festival sets, and prompted artists including Tyler Childers, Charley Crockett, Robert Earl Keen, Margo Price, and Lucinda Williams to invite her on tour. It helped earn her both the title of “Kentucky Colonel” — an honor recognizing goodwill ambassadors of Kentucky’s culture and traditions — and a spot in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s annual American Currents exhibit in 2024.
“True outlaw shit is sticking to your guns, and I feel like I’m doing that,” Waldon says. “I’m not saying I’m unbreakable, but I feel almost unbreakable. I’ve already hurt the worst that I could and lived to tell the story. We can be thankful for our ghosts.”