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

- Matt Parker

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 in habit 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.