Interview: Ruston Kelly

NASHVILLE SINGER-SONGWRITER RUSTON KELLY DOCUMENTS A HELL-RAISING PERIOD OF LIFE ON DYING STAR. HERE HE REFLECTS ON THE SIX-STRINGS, SOBRIETY AND SPONTANEITY THAT FED INTO HIS DEBUT ALBUM

084

There is a law in music journalism that says whenever a country musician channels their chequered past, you must compare them to Johnny Cash. In the case of Ruston Kelly, though, a few parallels are justified. Like Cash, the rising songwriter has a pill addiction in his past and only cleaned-up when he fell in love with fellow country star, Kacey Musgraves, now his wife. John Carter Cash himself said the couple reminded him of his parents, so it follows that he approached Kelly and Musgraves to appear on the recent Forever words album, which set unrecorded Cash poems to new music.

“It does sound cliched,” Kelly acknowledges. “But it’s really true in my story [too]. It wasn’t until I met Kacey that I was able to say, ‘I can be finished with this.’ She became my end-point, the strongest redemptive force in my life.”

The couple utterly inhabit Forever Words’ highlight, To June This Morning – a poem of typical clarity, bottling the domestic bliss that was magnified by Cash’s hard-won sobriety – and yet Kelly is most definitely not Cash reincarnate. Listen to his debut Dying Star – a record that charts a journey from bottoming-out to sobriety

– and you’ll hear an artist that owes more to Ryan Adams, the Beat poets’ stream of consciousness and a deep love of black metal’s blunt lyricism.

Aged 14, Kelly had one lesson and hated it, instead developing his own approach and jamming with his father

Tim – who now plays pedal steel in his band. Songs quickly followed. “I could not wait [to write],” he says. “It was like this feeling that I had a waterfall in a closet and I just needed to open the fucking door – and I have been waiting my entire life, through the pitfalls and the meanderings from the right path to actually do that.”

Even now Kelly will make up songs onstage, laying whatever words come to mind over his

Bb open tunings. “F C F F C,” he says, enthusing about his current favourite – dubbed “Maria tuning”. “Go explore that. It literally feels like angels singing when you play it.” Brightly Burst Into The Air, the closing track on Dying Star is a notable example of his spontaneity. Born on the spot in the studio, he had only some vague chords and a title that entered his mind a year or so previously, following an overdose.

“I think I knew had two choices then,” says Kelly of the title’s origins. “That I could let it be the end of that chapter in my life, or I could fucking die, again. And maybe this time, it would be for good. ‘Brightly burst into the air’ had the feeling of extinguishing but at the same time giving life to something... I’d love to say that I had this ‘OD moment’ and everything was clean from then on, but it wasn’t. But I’ve been clean for the last two years because I did, at one point, say, ‘I’m going to take this road.’”

Throughout this challenging period, Ruston’s dad, Tim Kelly, was on tour with him, witnessing the good and the bad. “It was really fucking hard,” says Kelly. “When I finally got this record on vinyl pressing, I listened to it and I was really hearing my dad’s playing for the first time on a real record. It blew me away. I asked him about it a couple of months ago, ‘Where the fuck did that come from?’ He said, ‘Well, I went back to how I felt when I watched you go through that. Being your dad, but also being your friend, and seeing you suffer and feeling like I didn’t know what to do.’ He was like: ‘That’s what I played from.’”

There are a few of those throatcatching moments in Dying Star. It becomes clear to TG how Kelly was able to so convincingly inhabit those scrawled Cash lines in the poems that would become Forever words, bottling a little moment of happiness that came in a quiet morning at home before the birth of his son. “[Cash had] written at the bottom like ‘April 20, 1970. 7am,’” says Kelly. “To me, as a sober person, when there’s something you don’t want to forget, you mark down the time. It was about being clean and being happy. Hearing your wife making coffee when you’re sober and you’re happy is one of the most phenomenal feelings, ever, that an addict will experience… For me, waking up and having Kacey be like, ‘Hey, I made you some toast! I hope you have a good day.’ That shit,” he laughs. “That’s what I fucking live for… Quite literally.”