RUSTON KELLY: Mending Through Music

Growing up, there was always music around,” said Ruston Kelly, a Nashville-based singer-songwriter.

If Kelly had a soundtrack to his childhood, it would certainly include his father’s guitar and mother’s harmonies.

“Steel guitar was a sound that I heard my entire life growing up. It was peripherally there, just kind of part of our family environment,” said Kelly.

“A lot of family moments happened when we gathered around. Dad would be playing something, and then mom would come in and sing harmonies.”

Kelly’s upbringing gave him more than a musical ear; it taught him how to create community through song, and it gave him the gift of self-expression.

“When we were going through something difficult as a family, we would sing it out. It’d be like this reinforcement of whatever emotions were going on, whether it was to help us feel better about them, or even to sustain our joy together,” Kelly said.

“That really affected the way that I saw the purpose of music as a personal, emotional tool that you can apply in your life.”

Alongside his family, Kelly found an early musical connection with American folk—a genre he discovered as a teenager while living in Belgium.

“The intent behind folk music was so community based, and, in a lot of senses, politically based, to rally people together for a cause. I felt very connected to that when I was displaced from what I knew,” Kelly said.

Bolstered with inspiration from artists like Woody Gutherie, early Bob Dylan, and the Carter Family, 17-year-old Kelly uncovered these records with pride.

“I just felt like I had found this secret, that no one had ever heard this music before, even though it was recorded in the 1920’s,” Kelly said.

“Basically, this music was able to say that the human condition can be tough, but it’s worth it when we come together. We can find joy in it somehow.”

It’s hardly daring to conclude that Kelly’s musical childhood and early inspirations founded his robust artistic career. Named one of Billboard’s Top 50 Emerging Artists in 2020, his album Shape & Destroy peaked at number 17 on the Americana/Folk Albums chart in the same year. With four records released and another on the way, Kelly has solidified himself as a cherished voice in contemporary songwriting.

One of Kelly’s strongest musical instincts is his vulnerability. While many artists have to wrestle away layers of selfprotection to express themselves, Kelly wears his honesty like a favorite jacket.

“I didn’t see songwriting as this craft. I just saw it as this second nature. To me, it was understanding my place in the world, from when I was 14 and got my heart broken, to when I was 24 and needed to go to rehab,” Kelly said.

“My mode of operation when it came to sitting down and expressing myself has always been with the most clear cut expression, and rawness, and realness of what was happening in my life at a time, whether it was good or bad. I’ve never known how to write any other way than that.”

His upcoming album, The Weakness , falls in line with this narrative approach. Kelly wrote the record while navigating familial and personal upheavals, as well as rebuilding a home he’d moved into during the pandemic.

“I’d been writing this batch of songs as a way to understand what was going on in my life, and to retool what my foundation was as a person.”

While these songs weren’t originally meant for a record, Kelly realized their potential after his label approached him to start planning the next release cycle. Even with tens of tracks to choose from, something still wasn’t right.

“There was, I felt, a capstone song missing. That’s when I told the label, ‘Hey, why don’t you send me out to Joshua Tree, and I’ll write my opus, or the most masterpiece song I can think of.’”

Fast forward to day six of his weeklong trip, and Kelly hadn’t written anything. On his final morning in Joshua Tree, he bought a baritone ukulele from a small music shop near his cabin.

“The first thing that came out when I got back, after I had turned my, quote ‘writer’s brain,’ off and was just sitting on the bed looking out the window, was the riff for Mending Song ,” said Kelly.

He continued to write Mending Song from his hotel room in LA, where he traveled to after Joshua Tree to begin making his next record. But before he actually reached the studio, Kelly needed to capture a blueprint of the track.

“I got out my little battery-operated Tascam and recorded two different tracks for the same thing on vocals and on the ukulele, and then panned them really hard left and right, so it kind of gave this eerie quality. Not to mention there’s this hiss to it, and this kind of distance to it, because the mic was pretty low fidelity.”

To finish it off, Kelly recorded a synthesizer he found from a YouTube video,

The Intersection - Stache

133 Cesar E. Chavez Ave. SW, Grand Rapids April 28, 7 p.m. sectionlive.com which consisted solely of a sustained F sharp note, and mixed it into the demo.

“And then I realized that I didn’t have the technological know-how to be able to send this demo to the producer,” said Kelly.

“So I just opened my headphones, and I pushed record on my voice memos on my phone, and I recorded the output of the headphones.”

This iPhone recording is what landed on the final record—YouTube synth, microphone hiss and all.

“We tried to do a high fidelity version of it, and it just sucked,” Kelly said.

“We added some stuff around it, but that recording I did in my hotel room ended up being the track that is on the record for Mending Song.”

The album’s April 7th release is in tandem with Kelly’s The Weakness Tour, where he will be performing at The Stache in Grand Rapids on April 28th.

From singing with his family and listening to American folk, to becoming a chart-making artist, Kelly hasn’t lost sight of how songwriting has–and can–better himself and his community,

“I’ve always said that art is a way for us to be more in touch with our center, and expressing ourselves can be a route to becoming a better person, because when you understand yourself better, you can become better.” Kelly said.

“The point of music is being able to bring people together through your own experience.” ■

Dave Mason is bringing his 2023 Endangered Species Tour to Grand Rapids with one night only at DeVos Performance Hall on Thursday, May 25, 2023. Along with special guests The Outlaws.

Dave Mason left Traffic in 1969 to pursue a solo career in the U.S. Dave has penned over 100 songs, has 3 gold albums: Alone Together, Dave Mason, Mariposa De Oro, and platinum album Let It Flow, which contained the top-ten single “We Just Disagree”. In addition to cranking out hits, Dave has performed on, or contributed to, a number of famous albums, including: The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, Paul McCartney and Wings’ Venus and Mars, and Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. Mason is featured playing acoustic guitar in “All Along the Watchtower” on Electric Ladyland, a favorite in Dave’s live shows!

Singing all the songs that first hit the airwaves in the 60’s and 70’s along with new song Dave’s 2023 Endangered Species Tour is a not to miss live music event.

For The Outlaws , it’s always been about the music. For more than 40 years, the Southern Rock legends celebrated triumphs and endured tragedies to remain one of the most influential and best-loved bands of the genre. Today, The Outlaws have returned with new music, new focus, and an uncompromising new mission: It’s about a band of brothers bound together by history, harmony, and the road. It’s about a group that respects its own legacy while refusing to be defined by it’s past. But most of all, it’s about pride.

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