Kelly rebuilds house, restructures his identity
Stability carved by musician charted in ‘dirt emo’ album
When singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly’s marriage to Kacey Musgraves ended, he sought solace in old houses.
First, at the invitation of his friend John Carter Cash — Johnny and June’s son — he retreated to the bungalow in the mountains of Virginia that had belonged to Maybelle Carter, the family’s matriarch. “I just wept on Mother Maybelle’s kitchen floor for three days,” Kelly said.
Then he bought and set about restoring a 120-yearold home, first owned by the mayor of the Tennessee farming community of Portland, 40 miles north of Nashville, where he knew no one.
“This house saved me,” Kelly said on a recent gray afternoon, as he sat in a guitar-lined songwriting studio that would normally be the living room. It’s where he wrote most of “The Weakness,” his third and most assured and expansive studio album.
It wasn’t intentional, but it was “poetic,” he added, “rebuilding a house, and also restructuring my identity as a person and artist at the same time.”
“The Weakness,” now available, charts the fragile stability that Kelly, 34, has carved for himself, after an unusual path to music that included training to be a competitive figure skater and a decade of drug addiction. He briefly relapsed midway into his three-year marriage to Musgraves, the pop country star. (He was already sober when they divorced in 2020.)
The album’s dozen songs, propelled by his Americana and pop-punk tastes, thread the tension between downbeat and shimmery; he calls his style “dirt emo.” Its title track features reverb-heavy
vocals and a slow build to guitar peels, finding power in fallibility.
“I wanted this record to sound like you’re in this field,” he said, “when the air blows hot. It might be twilight. And it’s about to really storm.”
He shot the video for “Mending Song” at his home, wearing paint-splattered overalls among his power tools. It’s an achingly personal and finespun track plucked out on baritone ukulele. “I will forgive what I’ve done out of despair,” he sings. “I’m trying to find the happiness and healing, in the things that still need some repair.”
The multi-instrumentalist Nate Mercereau, who helped produce the album, said Kelly’s journal-entry style of songwriting often led to catharsis. “You’re putting these details of your life into something that is going to create what your
next life is going to be — the future, after the record,” he said. That’s true for any artist, “but Ruston really puts it on display.”
Kelly and Mercereau recorded in Mercereau’s Los Angeles studio, just the two of them on nearly every note. Kelly abandoned both his usual collaborators and some of the instrumentation, like the pedal steel guitar (played by his father) that had featured on his previous work, and turned up influences such as the National, Sufjan Stevens and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. “I had to take a couple risks on this record,” he said.
Though some of the songs deal directly with his marriage unraveling, and some have oblique references that fans may read into, it is not a divorce record, according to Mark Williams from Rounder Records, who worked on
it — the first time Kelly engaged with an A&R rep. “We talked about it more as a transformative record, one of transition,” Williams said.
Kelly was born in South Carolina, the youngest of three siblings, but grew up all over; his father, Tim, was a high-flying executive at a paper company. Their household was always musical: His father played the steel guitar expertly and harmonized with Kelly’s mother, Sherre. “They would sing Jackson Browne songs and Linda Ronstadt; Bonnie Raitt; older folk songs. It was wonderful.” By middle school, Kelly was plotting his own albums.
When Kelly was 8 or 9, he also started figure skating, following his sister, Abigail, to a rink. Soon he was competing and winning awards, and as a young teen, he went alone to live with married coaches in Michigan, his eye on the Olympics. But they didn’t take care of him, he said, and the coaching program ended in a sex scandal with another young skater. As Kelly’s life there was imploding, he hid out in his room, and wrote a song.
“It was the first time that I was using creative expression as a tool to feel better — to make sense of a situation,” he said. “I felt like I unlocked something, like I had this safe space in this house. I was invincible. Music became like a tangible weapon.”
It helped him through what he described as the lifelong emotional fissure that led to an addiction in his 20s to amphetamines and cocaine. “There was a crack somewhere that just never quite could close,” he said.
Three months after an overdose — following a performance at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe — he met Musgraves.
“I fell so in love,” he said, “in such a cleareyed way. And that was sustenance for me.”
Their union seemed like a honeyed country music matchup: They duetted on a June and Johnny Cash tribute, and Musgraves wrote the floaty love song “Butterflies” for her breakthrough Grammy-winning album “Golden Hour.”
Kelly went cold-turkey from pills at the beginning and was fully sober later. For a time, the relationship filled all his needs — “which is really beautiful, but it’s not sustainable,” he said.
Musgraves released her own divorce album, “StarCrossed,” in 2021, which included sentiments that she said she hadn’t shared with him. (He didn’t fare so well in some accountings.) Apart from a track or two, Kelly said he hadn’t listened to it. “I don’t know her intention,” he said. “I know her heart, and it’s a wonderful one.”
Kelly credits his family and support network — including his girlfriend, Tori Barnes — with reorienting him toward joy and experimentation.
At Mercereau’s suggestion, the track “Better Now,” a circumspect meditation on hope late in the album, ends with audio of Kelly walking around Carter’s mountain bungalow. He first visited predivorce, when Carter Cash told him, “There’s a lot of secrets in that house, and I really think you should go and find them.”
He opened drawers and rifled through books, discovering Johnny Cash’s handwritten notes to his family and to country luminaries like Kris Kristofferson. It was a lineage — and an industry — that Kelly hadn’t felt quite ready to step up to before.
His foundation is as firm as it has ever been: “I feel very ready now.”