Weakness, Etc Ruston Kelly

• 1The Watcher03:28
• 2Belly Of The Beast03:48
• 3Heaven Made The Darkness03:24
• 4Cold Black Mile (Hotel Version)03:35
• 5Mending Song (Piano Version)04:11
• 6Nothing Out There03:35
• 7The Wreckage05:49
• Total Runtime27:50

Info for Weakness, Etc

The South Carolina-born Kelly arrives after landing a 1-2 punch of vulnerability with last year's record "The Weakness" and a companion EP "Weakness Etc" out this week. Here, he's building a unique canon, bending earlier, country-informed albums into a more expansive pop sound with wide-screen concerns and intimate colors.

And Kelly uses the language of weakness like few pop stars: naming his failures, living along fault lines as he rebuilds and redefines terms like strength and self-acceptance.

In the wake of these projects, Kelly has seen and reckoned with the price of vulnerability, he said. He understands why other artists might be afraid to set up their tents on shakier ground.

"But also I said something very large about myself to myself about things I continually try and work on," Kelly said of his recent albums.

"There are these little areas, these little cracks in myself, I'm trying to mend as we all do. But I made it in this expressive, forever-lasting form that I can't really get away from. ... It's helped me maintain continually working on myself and expressing myself through weakness, but that being a form of healing and then becoming stronger because of it."

"Weakness Etc." recasts a couple songs from its sibling record. Here, "Cold Black Mile" remains warm and atmospheric but cuts a more acoustic path, forming a sort of bent, not-broken soul music; a fresh version of "Mending Song" harnesses the spirit of a plaintive piano and nudges Kelly's voice forward to a place just behind your ear.

Before Kelly began work on his third album, he moved out of his Nashville home and into an old Victorian bungalow in the small Tennessee town of Portland. There, he spent months on end in deliberate solitude, in an attempt toprocess a number of life-altering changes he’d endured over the past year, including a very public divorce as well as major upheaval in his immediate family.

“I felt a real need to understand myself a little better, and to rediscover the true foundation of who I am,” says Kelly, who candidly detailed his struggle with drug addiction on his 2018 full-length debut Dying Star. Pushing forward with the intensely self-aware truth-telling he’s always brought to his music, Kelly soon immersed himself in the making ofThe Weakness and the result is a blisteringly honest but profoundly hopeful album that ultimately reveals our vast potential to create strength and beauty from the most painful of experiences.

The Weakness finds Kelly collaborating for the first time with producer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Nate Mercereau (Sharon Van Etten, Leon Bridges, Maggie Rogers), who welcomed the artist into his Los Angeles-based Studio Tujunga. “The way I’d always worked in the past is that the song comes first, and the production helps to lift its meaning and intent,” Kelly explains. “But this time there was a much greater focus on creating a sonic atmosphere that speaks just as loudly and feels just as emotional as the lyrics and voice.”

Out today, the album’s first single and title track is a potent burst of energy that emerged from a moment of cathartic self-reflection typical of Kelly’s writing process. “I started working on that song and the refrain just kept coming to me – ‘We don’t give in to the weakness,’” he recalls. “The overall narrative of the record is that there’s a variety of weaknesses that I need to deal with, and a variety of strengths that I need to bolster. I truly do believe that acknowledging your weaknesses and digging deeper to understand yourself goes hand-in-hand with becoming a greater human being.”

Ruston Kelly

Ruston Kelly
Kelly’s debut for Rounder Records, Dying Star follows his acclaimed EP Halloween—a 2017 release produced by Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes, First Aid Kit, Jenny Lewis) and praised by Rolling Stone (who described Kelly as a “scruffier-voiced Ryan Adams obsessed with both Merle and the Misfits”). Kelly co-produced Dying Star with Jarrad K (a songwriter/producer who’s previously worked with Kate Nash and Weezer), enlisting local musicians like singer/songwriter Natalie Hemby and Joy Williams of the Civil Wars to bring the album’s gracefully melodic, guitar-driven arrangements to life. And while Dying Star has its share of sonic flourishes—the elegant electronic effects, the all-female background vocals provided by singers like Kelly’s sister, Abby Sevigny, and his wife, singer/songwriter Kacey Musgraves—each track centers on Kelly’s soul-baring lyrics.

“When stars die, it’s one of the most galactically powerful things that can happen in the universe, it’s one of the most beautiful things you could ever witness, and it also gives life to new stars—so basically that death is essential. To me that all connects back to how I knew I needed to change, and I needed to see that change as a promising thing.” (Ruston Kelly)

Born in South Carolina, Kelly started playing guitar under the guidance of his dad, Tim “TK” Kelly, a pedal-steel guitarist who now performs in his band. “When I was a kid my dad would play steel guitar to help me to get to sleep, so that’s the first instrument I’ve got any recollection of,” he says. Since his father worked for a paper mill and frequently changed job locations, Kelly grew up moving nearly every two years, living everywhere from Alabama to Belgium. But it was during a stint on his own in Michigan—where he went to train with an Olympic coaching team in hopes of furthering his figure-skating career—that he made his first attempt at songwriting. “The family I was living with were contractually obligated to provide me with food, rides to school and the rink, money for miscellaneous things I needed—but they didn’t do any of that,” says Kelly, who was then 14. To soothe his homesickness, Kelly holed up in his room with the Jackson Browne album and guitar his dad had passed off to him before he’d left for Michigan. “I didn’t know this then, but when I was little my dad would sneak cigarettes by taking me out for a drive,” he says. “He’d just smoke and play an entire Jackson Browne album while we drove all around the neighborhood, so when I put on For Everyman in Michigan, I felt like I was home.”

Although Kelly first dabbled in songwriting in Michigan, it wasn’t until his family moved to Brussels his senior year of high school that he began to find his voice as an artist. “Moving to Belgium completely destroyed my sense of cultural placement,” he says. “It’s populated by so many different types of people, and it gave me this new understanding of all the possibilities there are in terms of what you can do with your life.” While in Belgium, Kelly also discovered the music of the Carter Family, which turned out to be another milestone in his growth as a songwriter. “Before then I didn’t know much about Johnny Cash, other than that he was a fucking thug,” he says. “I ended up going all the way back to the Carter Family, and becoming so mesmerized by the way Mother Maybelle played guitar. Being enchanted by that music ended up changing my life.”

At 17, Kelly left Belgium and took off for Nashville to live with his sister, but had no firm intentions of launching a music career. “I had no idea what I was going to do in Nashville, but I knew it was going to be different from how everyone else had done it,” he says. “Everything kind of started out of necessity—like, ‘I need to pay rent, how am I gonna do that? Well, I’m pretty good at writing songs, so I guess I should get a publishing deal.’” That deal arrived several years later, in 2013, when Kelly signed with BMG Nashville. Along with penning songs for artists like Tim McGraw and Josh Abbott Band, he continued working on his own material, releasing Halloween in April 2017.

This album contains no booklet.