Bio : Ruston Kelly

Since making his debut with 2018’s Dying Star, Ruston Kelly has built a catalog of songs that search for transcendence in the most devastating and demanding of experiences: addiction, the strenuous work of self-evolution, the fallout of broken relationships. But in the writing of his latest album, the South Carolina-born artist found himself in unfamiliar emotional territory—a state of sustained joy and inner peace, brought on by a spiritual breakthrough and the dawning of a new love. Brimming with the grit and depth that’s always defined his output, Pale, Through the Window ultimately affirms Kelly as one of modern music’s most astute observers of the human heart and spirit.

“For most of my life I’ve felt comfortable writing about darker subject matter with a slight silver lining of hope, asking questions like ‘Why do people suffer, and how can we find communion and joy in the middle of the suffering?’” says Kelly. “Before this album I didn’t quite have the songwriting muscle required to write about joy more directly, which meant that I had to develop some new muscles and find my voice in a whole different way.”

Before undergoing the transformation that gave rise to Pale, Through the Window, Kelly endured a period of existential and creative crisis. “I was at the point where it was time to start working on the next record, but in my heart I knew I didn’t have an album in me,” he says. With no inspiration to fuel his songwriting, he headed out on a solo acoustic tour that only intensified what he refers to as a “spiritual and internal listlessness.” “I spent so much time alone and I was feeling so low, and I started wondering ‘What’s the value in being joyless when good things are happening to you?’” he recalls. “I wanted an answer, so I started gathering information about God and the divine and the way other people experience their faith, but at the end of all that I felt like I knew even less.”

At a loss on how to move forward, Kelly formulated a prayer that he began repeating each day. “It started with acknowledging that there’s a higher power or benevolence at work—the fact that I’m still alive after an overdose and several bouts of addiction speaks to that,” he says. “The prayer was essentially me asking, ‘Shouldn’t I be able to honor that by knowing who You actually are? What is Your name?’” After receiving no answer for six months, Kelly had a life-altering moment of revelation while playing the piano one night before bed. “Suddenly I felt overcome with gratitude for being able to play and sing,” he says. “I realized what a gift that is, and I bowed my head and said ‘thank You.’ My soul felt activated and there was a sense of peace beyond anything I could describe, and I knew I’d found the answer I’d been looking for.”

Not long after that night, Kelly had another momentous encounter during a family vacation to South Carolina’s Pawleys Island, where he serendipitously met a fellow Nashville resident named Tia Cubelic. The two began dating upon returning to Nashville, quickly bonding over a shared desire to deepen their faith. “I still didn’t have an album, but I wasn’t worried—I wasn’t worried about anything,” Kelly says. “I just wanted to live my life, so that I’d have something real to say.” While hanging out in Cubelic’s kitchen one night two weeks before pre-production was slated to begin, Kelly grabbed her roommate’s guitar and impulsively wrote a sweetly hopeful love song he later named “House in the Country.” “It felt like a levee broke, and all these songs just started pouring out of me,” he says. “Within two weeks, I’d written the whole album.”

The follow-up to The Weakness—a 2023 release that earned major acclaim from the likes of Rolling Stone, The New York Times, NPR and led to his appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers”—Pale, Through the Window finds Kelly reuniting with his longtime collaborator Jarrad K, who also helmed production on Dying Star and 2020’s Shape & Destroy. “This record feels like a return to the truest, purest, most complete version of who I am as an artist and a human being, and Jarrad’s the only producer who knows me down to my internal fabric,” he explains. Recorded at Jarrad’s studio Chateau Noir, the album marks the first body of work Kelly has recorded with his longtime touring band. “My band and I have been on the road together for six years now, and I wanted to capture the feeling of us playing off each other,” he says. “It felt so easy to record with them, almost like you’re blazing a new trail but with the same caravan you’ve been with all along, so there’s never any fear in stepping into new terrain.” Formed from a singular sonic palette that often merges synth with pedal-steel guitar (courtesy of his father, Tim “TK” Kelly), Pale, Through the Window also fully embraces Kelly’s ardent love of classic pop-punk and emo—ultimately bringing a raw and potent energy to his soul-searching songwriting.

Although much of Pale, Through the Window inhabits a radiant open-heartedness, the album opens on the somber rumination of its title track—the LP’s only song fully written before Kelly’s awakening. An achingly lonesome ballad rooted in his warm vocal work, “Pale, Through the Window” manifests as a remnant of his former life (“Pale, through the window/I see your ghost/But it’s only my reflection”). “I wrote that song alone at home one night, imagining that the light through my window was the ghost of old relationships or substances or anything I’d used to provide a false sense of everything being okay,” he says. “As we put the record together I knew that song should be the first track, because it’s the beginning of the whole story. Maybe that light was not the ghost of things from the past that I still longed for, but a new light that was slowly coming through.”

As Pale, Through the Window unfolds, Kelly soon arrives at the breakneck emotional whirlwind of “Wayside”: a euphoric but unvarnished portrait of love against the backdrop of a world in flames, graced with a glorious burst of gang vocals supplied by his and Cubelic’s families during a spontaneous trip to the studio. “The world is so crazy right now and there’s such a risen temperature in the way we interact with each other and the information we’re digesting every day—it can make you believe we’re on the brink of destruction and everything is hopeless,” says Kelly. “But in spite of the world potentially burning, I still find hope in the love that I’ve been given. And as long as I have that, I know I’ll be all right.”

True to the exacting introspection he’s brought to all his work, Kelly imbues Pale, Through the Window’s love songs with equal parts unbridled feeling and clear-eyed reflection. A synth-heavy reimagining of an unfinished fingerpicked folk tune he started back in 2014, “Me and You” emerges as a larger-than-life, brightly anthemic expression of devotion (“I’d lasso a hurricane and put it in its place/Grow you an Eden/If I had the grace/And I would wait a thousand years/If that’s how long it’d take”). Another song reconstructed from an unearthed demo, “Waiting to Love You” takes the shape of an arena-sized epic with a sing-along-ready refrain. “I wrote that in 2016 but it wasn’t about anyone in particular,” says Kelly. “It’s funny to write a love song for nobody, but when I listened again it was so clearly in line with where I’m at now.” And on “Pickleball,” Kelly details his first date with Cubelic, adorning the track with thick baritone-guitar riffs, punchy pop-punk rhythms, and dreamy background vocals from his sister, Abigail Kelly (backup vocalist for seminal emo outfit Dashboard Confessional). “We went to the YMCA and played pickleball, and Tia instantly put me into a place of calm where I felt free to be my goofy self,” Kelly remembers. “I wrote that song about the mark she made on me, and how it made me want to be the person I know I can be.”

One of the most heavy-hearted moments on Pale, Through the Window, “Half Past Three” beautifully exemplifies the album’s emotional complexity, presenting a pensive meditation on the frequent yet mystifying coexistence of happiness and overwhelming sorrow (“’Cause your dog gets sick/And your parents get old/And everything that used to stick/Well, I just can’t seem to hold on to them”). “Sometimes when an artist is public about either returning to or discovering faith, there’s a sense that they’ve figured everything out and now they’re completely perfect,” says Kelly. “But so far my experience has taught me that this is where the work really begins. Even when you’re feeling so much joy, you’re still going to have those moments of questioning and doubting—because that’s what it means to be a human.”

Before closing out with “All In” (a quietly rapturous piano-and-vocal ballad recorded in one take), Pale, Through the Window offers everything from the rueful longing of “Twisted Root” (an intimate look at Kelly’s history with addiction) to the tender reverie of “House in the Country” (a song revealing the couple’s plans for the future, featuring Cubelic on violin and her father Charles Cubelic on upright bass). In sharing such an all-embracing account of his journey to acceptance and peace, Kelly aspires to provide others with the courage to persevere through their own personal chaos. “If someone’s struggling with doubt or hopelessness because of the state of the world or their relationship with God or with themselves, I hope this record leaves them with the sense that it can be okay and that love truly is the most powerful force we have available to us,” he says. “I also hope they feel at least a sliver of the freedom and joy I felt in writing these songs—even if they’re just having a good time bobbing their head to ‘Waiting to Love You,’ I want everyone to be reminded that the world can be a joyful place.”