Weakness, Etc Ruston Kelly

• 1 The Watcher 03:28
• 2 Belly Of The Beast 03:48
• 3 Heaven Made The Darkness 03:24
• 4 Cold Black Mile (Hotel Version) 03:35
• 5 Mending Song (Piano Version) 04:11
• 6 Nothing Out There 03:35
• 7 The Wreckage 05:49
• Total Runtime 27:50

Info for Weakness, Etc

The South Carolina-born Kelly arrives after landing a 1-2 punch of vulnerability with last year's record "The Weakness" and a companion EP "Weakness Etc" out this week. Here, he's building a unique canon, bending earlier, country-informed albums into a more expansive pop sound with wide-screen concerns and intimate colors.

And Kelly uses the language of weakness like few pop stars: naming his failures, living along fault lines as he rebuilds and redefines terms like strength and self-acceptance.

In the wake of these projects, Kelly has seen and reckoned with the price of vulnerability, he said. He understands why other artists might be afraid to set up their tents on shakier ground.

"But also I said something very large about myself to myself about things I continually try and work on," Kelly said of his recent albums.

"There are these little areas, these little cracks in myself, I'm trying to mend as we all do. But I made it in this expressive, forever-lasting form that I can't really get away from. ... It's helped me maintain continually working on myself and expressing myself through weakness, but that being a form of healing and then becoming stronger because of it."

"Weakness Etc." recasts a couple songs from its sibling record. Here, "Cold Black Mile" remains warm and atmospheric but cuts a more acoustic path, forming a sort of bent, not-broken soul music; a fresh version of "Mending Song" harnesses the spirit of a plaintive piano and nudges Kelly's voice forward to a place just behind your ear.

Before Kelly began work on his third album, he moved out of his Nashville home and into an old Victorian bungalow in the small Tennessee town of Portland. There, he spent months on end in deliberate solitude, in an attempt toprocess a number of life-altering changes he’d endured over the past year, including a very public divorce as well as major upheaval in his immediate family.

“I felt a real need to understand myself a little better, and to rediscover the true foundation of who I am,” says Kelly, who candidly detailed his struggle with drug addiction on his 2018 full-length debut Dying Star. Pushing forward with the intensely self-aware truth-telling he’s always brought to his music, Kelly soon immersed himself in the making ofThe Weakness and the result is a blisteringly honest but profoundly hopeful album that ultimately reveals our vast potential to create strength and beauty from the most painful of experiences.

The Weakness finds Kelly collaborating for the first time with producer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Nate Mercereau (Sharon Van Etten, Leon Bridges, Maggie Rogers), who welcomed the artist into his Los Angeles-based Studio Tujunga. “The way I’d always worked in the past is that the song comes first, and the production helps to lift its meaning and intent,” Kelly explains. “But this time there was a much greater focus on creating a sonic atmosphere that speaks just as loudly and feels just as emotional as the lyrics and voice.”

Out today, the album’s first single and title track is a potent burst of energy that emerged from a moment of cathartic self-reflection typical of Kelly’s writing process. “I started working on that song and the refrain just kept coming to me – ‘We don’t give in to the weakness,’” he recalls. “The overall narrative of the record is that there’s a variety of weaknesses that I need to deal with, and a variety of strengths that I need to bolster. I truly do believe that acknowledging your weaknesses and digging deeper to understand yourself goes hand-in-hand with becoming a greater human being.”

Ruston Kelly

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.”

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. The first body of work he’s recorded with his longtime touring band, the album centers on a singular sonic palette that often merges synth with pedal-steel guitar while fully embracing Kelly’s ardent love of classic pop-punk and emo—ultimately bringing a raw and potent energy to his soul-searching songwriting.

Over the course of Pale, Through the Window’s 13 songs, Kelly offers up everything from the somber rumination of the LP’s title track and the rueful longing of “Twisted Root” (an intimate look at his history with addiction) to the radiant open-heartedness of love songs like “Waiting to Love You” and “Wayside” (a euphoric but unvarnished portrait of love against the backdrop of a world in flames). And in sharing such an all-embracing account of his journey to acceptance and peace, he 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,” says Kelly. “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.

This album contains no booklet.