Ruston Kelly writes for the part of you that can’t be fixed

The easy narrative would be to frame him as another Nashville-based singer-songwriter wrestling with demons and redemption, but Kelly resists oversimplification. His journey has demanded that he face the darkest corners of addiction, grief, and self-destruction. What he uncovered is rarer: sustained joy, hard-won peace, and a commitment to communion with those who listen.

My path into Kelly’s world began in 2018 with an algorithm-dealt clip of “Mockingbird” from his debut album, Dying Star. What strikes you first is the duality in his writing. At times, he can be brutally plain:

“I took too many pills again / Blacked out for a week / Didn’t eat, didn’t sleep / Came to and did it all again / I feel like I’m gonna fall down [...] I was born and raised in an earthquake state / So I’m better on shaky ground.”

Elsewhere, he turns to dreamlike metaphor:

“Hey, pretty little mockingbird, keep singing them sad, sad songs / There’s already rain on my window / I’m dying when the morning comes.”

Together they reveal the full reach of his lyricism: equal parts unflinching diary entry and dark poetry.

At Brighton’s Patterns later that year, Kelly was opening for The Wandering Hearts, and I was one of the few attendees who had come only for him. When he sang “Faceplant”, the audience splintered: laughter at its twisted humour from those hearing it for the first time, while I stood motionless in tears. His songs don’t offer answers so much as mirrors: a reminder I wasn’t alone in the earthquake aftermath. Hearing him sing (on his subsequent record Shape & Destroy), “I know you think you’ve let all of them down / I know you believe you won’t figure this out / But I’m here to say, ‘What if you could?’” felt like permission to stop sprinting from my doubts and sit with them instead.

There are no self-help mantras in Kelly's music, no prescriptions for how to heal. What he offers instead is honesty, the kind that cracks open something inside of you. His songs don’t tell you where to go; they walk you to the threshold and leave you to take the step. By making himself vulnerable, he clears space for you to be: to fall, to learn, to stitch together meaning from both the wounds and the good days that follow.

Across his first three records – Dying Star, Shape & Destroy, and The Weakness – Kelly chronicled collapse and recovery in real time. Dying Star circled addiction in heavy metaphor, angels and demons hovering at the edges of every line. Shape & Destroy sounded like survival notes taped to the bathroom mirror, each song an act of daily combat. By The Weakness, defiance had arrived: “We don’t give in to the weakness,” he sang, hammering the refrain like a mantra to himself as much as to us.

By the time he reached the end of that chapter, success had arrived, but satisfaction hadn’t. He had sold out Nashville’s legendary auditorium the Ryman twice, toured until exhaustion, and even ticked off small milestones like buying his long-desired truck. Yet the feeling was hollow. “I had done all the things I thought I wanted to do since Dying Star,” Kelly tells me. “And it didn’t make me feel anything other than, ‘Okay, what’s the next thing?’ That felt like a human failure of experience.”

It was less about professional frustration than about gratitude slipping through his hands. “I wasn’t revelling in what was right there: my family, even being alive after so many bouts of substance abuse, keeping myself intact after several attempts – whether by my own hand or others – to dismantle me. This surely is not it. I don’t want to just keep planting flags on top of the mountain only to salute myself.”

So when I suggest Pale, Through the Window sounds like his rawest and most joyous record, Kelly lights up. “It’s the most raw self, through and through,” he says. “It’s not painting over the past because I’m good now. It’s just telling an honest story.”

What followed was something he describes as “a deep inhale and exhale,” a shift that seemed to arrive all at once: through spirituality, through the people around him, through love, through family.

The opening title track finds him “Spending most my days alone / Dreaming of connection / Pale, through the window / I see your ghost / But it’s only my reflection.” Kelly admits he almost left it off. “The loneliness wasn’t just a feeling; it was the doorway. I had to sit in it before joy could even be real.”

From there, the record pushes outward. Faith rubs shoulders with doubt, exhaustion with hope. Some songs name wounds so they can finally heal; others revel in love, which Kelly once resisted writing about. “I used to think writing love songs was cheesy,” he shares. “Now it feels like the bravest thing I can do.”

“Me and You” is striking in its simplicity: no veil, no irony, just devotion laid bare. “Great Wide Open” lifts into surrender, sounding as though he’s finally let go. “This isn’t about covering up mistakes,” he said. “It’s about showing them in daylight, and saying: ‘I’m still here.’”

“Wayside” extends that clarity, marking the doorway into this new chapter. The song begins with taut verses before easing into a half-time chorus, a musical exhale that matches its lyrical surrender. Here, joy takes precedence over pain, carried by love, faith, and the small pleasures of living:

“Just wanna lay next to her and vibe / I don’t wanna be a lone wolf howling to an old moon / Looking for a new truth / Buried in the stars and the sky / Every brighter star I’ve seen is burning in your eyes / And suddenly, I only know one thing / And it’s all I need to know for a lifetime / I belong with you and you belong with me / Let the rest just fall by the wayside.”

For all his gravitas on record, Kelly in person is quick to laugh. “People say, ‘Whoa, I thought you were this really dark guy,’” he tells me. “But my natural state is to be joyful. I love people. I love the potential people have. Life doesn’t have to be taken so seriously all the time. That zen chuckle is really important.” His offstage fixations make the point even clearer: marathon sessions of Super Smash Bros. with his band that verge on competitive sport, and a running fascination with the oddest Pop-Tart flavours offered by America’s supermarkets.

That humour runs through his catalogue: sometimes in self-deprecation, sometimes in the sheer absurdity of carrying on after ruin. “Joy doesn’t cancel out pain; it sits right next to it,” Kelly says. “I didn’t want to make a record that pretended I was healed. I wanted to make one that showed I’m still living with it, but also laughing, also in love.”

If Pale, Through the Window is about presence, its sound reflects community. For the first time, Kelly recorded with his touring band – the same group who had already lived inside his songs night after night, including his songwriting partner and producer Jarrad Kritzstein and his dad, Tim Kelly, on pedal steel. “I didn’t care what it took; we had to use my band,” he says. “It feels like pure form. The only purest form of me playing is with my boys, with my dad, with Jarrad.”

That choice runs through every track. The record moves with a looseness that feels lived-in, warmth spilling from musicians who already know where the songs bend and break. You hear it in the shimmer of “Me and You”; in the way pedal steel winds through “Half Past Three”, less arrangement than instinct.

“Pickleball” drags his pop-punk roots into the room, baritone guitar snarling against steel, while his sister’s harmonies and his father’s playing turn raucous into tender. “Waiting to Love You” opens in exhaustion, then swells until the chorus feels built to be carried by more than one voice. “Still”, co-written with Nashville collaborators Emily Weisband and Peter Raffoul, gathers like a hymn, harmonies glowing at the edges, while “Twisted Root” coils darker, guitars snapping and fraying until Kelly’s voice almost gives way.

After wrestling with ghosts and storms, Kelly allows himself to picture stability, not as fantasy but as something tangible. “House in the Country” sketches that vision plainly: “And she dreams of a house out in the country / Walking around barefoot with the chickens and goats.” In another writer’s hands, it might sound naive, but Kelly sings it like a vow, daring himself to believe in permanence. The final track, “All In”, is equally dedicated: “You can have me and I’ll honour this the best that I can / With everything I am, I’m all in.”

Where earlier albums hovered around relapse, this one closes with commitment: to love, to life shared, to staying. The closing songs act as a benediction. They don’t erase the loneliness that opened the record, nor do they claim the storms have passed. Instead, they offer a vision of what it might mean to keep going.

Rather than smoothing the edges, the record leaves them visible. Synths blur against pedal steel, pop-punk crunch rubs up against plain-speaking folk, and the songs breathe in their own raggedness.

Kelly puts it plainly: “I can’t not tell the transparent truth. It’s the only thing I know how to do. That’s my job as a writer. That’s my calling.”

Kelly has always been drawn to music that can shift shape: the improvisational spirit of jam bands, the thrill of alternate versions. That curiosity lingers here. “When I was a kid, if I heard a different version of a song I already loved, it would shake me to my core,” he tells me. “I’ve been chasing that feeling my whole life.” The Dirt Emo EPs, with their reimaginings of blink-182, My Chemical Romance, Avril Lavigne, and Taylor Swift cuts, aren’t detours so much as opportunities to recharge and reinspire – reminders that play keeps the work alive.

In Nashville, Kelly has found kinship with artists like Annie DiRusso, Katie Pruitt, and Samia, friendships that take the weight off and remind him why he makes music. In Kelly’s world, art and community are inseparable. Whether it’s friends trading demos, bands jamming in Airbnbs, or lifers bound together through years on the road, the ties hold the songs in place. If the early music begins in solitude, the closing stretch imagines what it means to finally belong.

I finished writing this piece while sitting on a bench in a park, after being startled at a crossing by a souped-up Mazda blasting not grime but bluegrass. I laughed, but it also felt fitting: joy in an unlikely place, a reminder that country and Americana have seeped into spaces where you don’t expect to hear them. Kelly may be rooted in Nashville, but his reach, like that of Zach Bryan and the younger wave of voices reshaping Americana, speaks to something bigger.

Perhaps what we crave now is what his songs offer: truth, unvarnished; presence without disguise. Kelly doesn’t deliver tidy redemption arcs. He offers something messier, and perhaps more valuable: a hand outstretched in the storm, a laugh in the middle of tears, a song that makes you feel less alone.

Kelly is one of our clearest examples of how music can heal a broken soul and spirit. He proves that when hope is numb and faded, when your back is against the wall, there is always something left to reach for – and his hand might just be the one to pull you from the ground.