Ruston Kelly Says New Album 'The Weakness' Is Him 'Sifting Through' a Series of Major Life Upheavals (Exclusive)

Ruston Kelly was stumped. There he was, six days into a solo trip out to Joshua Tree, where he'd ventured to be alone with his thoughts as he started work on his third album, and a case of writer's block had reared its ugly head.

It'd been a strange few years for the singer-songwriter. Though Kelly, 34, is familiar with the curveballs life can throw one's way — his first two albums, Dying Star and Shape & Destroy, cover his experience with drug addiction, then the struggles of living in recovery — who could possibly be prepared for a painfully public divorce, a global pandemic and a family health scare?

For a musician who's made a career on searingly truthful storytelling (he doesn't call his music "dirt emo" for nothing) the flood of upheaval should've been a material goldmine. And yet…

"I got there and I was like, 'This is a mistake,'" he recalls. "There's literally nothing coming.'"

So a bored Kelly drove into town, where he bought a baritone ukulele. Before long, the riff that would become "Mending Song," the second single off his new album The Weakness, out Friday, emerged and boom—the creative floodgates had opened.

"That one kind of cracked the code," he says of the track, an autobiographical tune that follows his journey from an early childhood in South Carolina and a move to Nashville as a teen, to his 2020 divorce from fellow musician Kacey Musgraves.

That idea of taking stock of your life and making peace with it forms the crux of The Weakness, an expansive and more rock-influenced offering that Kelly says is his foray into what he calls his "self-help rock era."

"I didn't fully realize quite what the concept of the record was this time around. Dying Star was about substance abuse and the story is like, 'Oh, what's being clean like?'" he says. "This record's like, 'OK, this is just a straight-up life scenario. Just like, this is Rusty sifting through it all.'"

It all includes the dissolution of his marriage, his sister's marriage, a cancer scare involving his mother and a move some 30 miles north of Nashville, where he bought a 120-year-old house in a small town. The sudden onslaught of life changes is part of the reason he felt compelled to take that solo trip to Joshua Tree in the first place, as Kelly says he was on the sojourn in search of his "true foundation."

The result is a testament to keeping your feet on the ground when your life is turned upside down; take album closer "Cold Black Mile," for example. "It might have taken everything/But it gave me back my life," sings Kelly, who celebrated four years of sobriety in December.

Of course, as he would learn, figuring out who you are on your own is hard. But doing so with the world watching is harder. On Kelly's first two albums, his battles were his own—but this time around, much of his identity crisis was rooted in his divorce, meaning there was now someone else to be mindful of (Musgraves covered their divorce from her point of view on her 2021 album Star-Crossed).

"That was the tricky part of it. How do I approach this in an honorable way? Honorable to myself by being straight up, because that's the only way that I've ever created... But then at the same time, involving someone else that you care so deeply about? Even, I would say, moreso after the fact, care about their wellbeing and perspective?" he says, mulling it over. "My initial move was to be protective of her and be protective of myself."

That protection didn't exactly yield output initially. Kelly says at first, he didn't have any interest in writing about the split, especially knowing the ways in which anything he did write would likely be put under a microscope due to the pair's high-profile status.

As Kelly worked through his emotions ("I feel like I had anger almost at God of, how is this wrong?" he says), the songs soon came.

The jaunty, acoustic "St. Jupiter," for one, features Kelly venting his frustrations with himself for growing annoyed at his partner while shopping for flowers on a blisteringly hot day. Like the rest of the songs in Kelly's catalog and on The Weakness, the track is anything but angry; the beauty in his songwriting lies in his ability to recognize his own responsibility in the setbacks that plague him.

"I love her, I'll always love her. When there was a public statement made, that's kind of all I really had to say on it until I made this record of course," he says of his and Musgraves' July 2020 split. "I needed to express myself, but at the end of it, all I really care about is her being happy. I got to deal with my own s---, with the road of me getting to where I'm happy."

If songs like "Better Now" and "Dive" are any indication, Kelly — who has been dating model Tori Barnes since 2021 — is well on his way. The musician says "Dive," a sweet ditty that finds him readily embracing all the good that lies ahead, is about falling in love again after being "completely thrown the wringer," while "Better Now" is about the ways in which bettering ones' self can serve a relationship.

"Those perspectives ultimately reminded me that though my first attempt at [marriage] failed, I believe in the idea of being a partner for someone," he says. "I think it's a wonderful, beautiful, functional thing. It just didn't work that time around."

Though Kelly calls himself "a professional at not knowing what the f--- I'm doing," with change comes adaptation, and with adaptation comes growth. He finally feels he has a grasp on both.

"This record is a way to say that things do get better if you feel like they never will," he says. "At the end of it all, that's really the point to me."

The Weakness is out now. Click here for tour dates.