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Alexa King
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Alexa King
There are certain artists whose lives, from the outside, seem to follow a destined path, which takes them through a sierra of bad times so they can find inspiration in the good.
With his debut LP Dying Star, released September 7 on Rounder Records, Ruston Kelly reckons with his troubled past from a place of newfound peace. He began writing the songs on Star in early 2016, in the wake of his second overdose.
“The next day, I was standing on my porch just thinking, ‘what the hell,’” he says. “And then this term ‘dying star’ came into my head. I was in this period of trying to readjust myself. I just said, ‘okay, I’m gonna’ write about that.’”
A few months before this revelation, Kelly finished tracking his solo EP Halloween, which garnered critical praise from media outlets like RELIX, and Consequence of Sound after its release in April 2017. It supplied his first high-streaming song “Poison,” and “Black Magic” was featured on the CBS program Scorpion. Like Star, Halloween, Kelly’s “first real recorded attempt,” was part ode to his thorny personal history and part cryptic storytelling.
Unlike most songs heard on country music radio, Kelly’s do not contain clean-cut librettos and simply put emotions. His songwriting is indistinct, with more creative broad strokes than sharp edges, and his stories are foggy, which is perhaps how he remembers them.
“Before getting my shit together, I was living this way that started to deteriorate people around me,” he says. “I loved them too much to see that happen. I think I had this breaking point of, ‘okay, you’re going to become a junkie unless something changes.’ That was enough for me.”
Kelly gives credit to his family, including his wife, country music starlet Kacey Musgraves, whom he married in October 2017, and friends for their rockbound support throughout his recovery. And though his music career spurred him to self-issue an ultimatum to stop using certain substances, Kelly didn’t always take it as seriously as he does now.
Raised the youngest of three by his mother and father, a paper mill operator, Kelly moved around frequently as a child, first living in Georgetown, South Carolina, then Ohio, then Pennsylvania, and then Belgium. Some of his earliest memories are of his father’s steel guitar playing.
“It was the first instrument I ever heard,” he says. “I started playing guitar because he played guitar, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.”
Kelly finished high school in Europe and decided to move to Nashville on a whim. He had fallen in love in love with the music of the Carter family and Johnny Cash, and he wanted to insert himself into the narrative of their home city without any “vocational” plans to have a major career in music.
“As far as a means to make money, I never really thought of music like that,” he says. “I just thought it was part of this spiritual quest I was on to understand myself better. But at the same time, I knew I would never stop doing it.”
He started a short-lived bluegrass band called Blood, Bath and Beyond before his songwriting career began to take shape. He co-penned Tim McGraw’s 2013 humbling ballad “Nashville Without You” and Josh Abbott Band’s “Front Row Seat,” among others. He started focusing on his career as a solo artist after the aforementioned ultimatum, and he’s worked hard for his life today.
Star listens like a tribute to Kelly’s former self. “Faceplant” is a tuneful track sung from a man who can’t seem to stay on the wagon. Stories like this abound throughout the album, with Kelly’s raspy voice, intimate at every decibel level, triumphing over his past misadventures. At times, his phraseology seems deliberately cryptic, especially in “Son Of A Highway Daughter.” With lines like, “she was breathing fire, I was a worn-out tire…so I traded her hand for a bag of sand and I headed on down the road,” he shrouds his lyrics in mystery, and instantly clarifies them with the tenacity in his voice. In this way, the songs themselves are vague without being complex; plaintive without being maudlin; self-mythologizing without being narcissistic. In line with his musical heroes Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie, Kelly transmutes his very human mistakes into art that is at once accessible and timeless.
“The fact that, as human beings, we have the ability to create something beautiful out of a very lonely and destructive place,” Kelly says, “in my opinion, that’s the whole point.”