Join us at The Dreamland
for a special evening with Ruston Kelly who’s been touring the
world this past year in support of his latest album “Shape & Destroy”.
Ruston will be singing all your favorites and his biggest hits for one special
evening at The Dreamland overlooking beautiful Nantucket Harbor.
Artist Bio:
With his sophomore album Shape & Destroy,
Nashville-based artist Ruston Kelly now documents his experience in maintaining
sobriety, and finally facing the demons that led him to drug abuse in the first
place. But while Kelly recounts that journey with an unvarnished honesty, his
grace and conviction as an artist ultimately turn Shape & Destroy into a work of unlikely
transcendence.
With its unsparing reflection on what
Kelly refers to as “the cycle of frustration and temptation after getting
clean,” Shape &
Destroy took form during a period of painful transformation. “It
wasn’t surprising to me that getting sober was a challenge, but there were
moments when it was challenging in a way I’d never experienced before,” Kelly
says. “There’s so much repair your brain has to do—spiritually, emotionally,
physically—and at one point I really felt like I was losing my mind.”
As a means of self-preservation and
catharsis, Kelly eventually turned to the ritual of free writing, a practice
that led him to the album’s title. “This phrase just came to me one day: ‘Shape
the life you want by destroying what obstructs the soul,’” he recalls. “I
realized that was the ticket to healing myself and healing my mind: figuring
out what kind of person I want to become, and then getting rid of everything
that keeps me from being that person.”
In light of that epiphany, Kelly felt
a profound lucidness that soon catalyzed his creative process. “From reading
about other artists who’ve gone through recovery, I was sort of expecting a dry
spell after getting sober, but that didn’t happen,” he says. “Instead I felt
this very heightened awareness that lent itself to so much more artistic
output, and the songs just started pouring out.”
That momentum continued as Kelly
headed into the studio, co-producing Shape
& Destroy with his longtime producer Jarrad K (Kate Nash,
Weezer, Elohim). Working at Dreamland Recording Studios in Upstate New York (a
space converted from a 19th century church), Kelly enlisted
musicians like Dr. Dog drummer Eric Slick, bassist Eli Beaird (who also
performed on Dying Star),
and a number of his own family members: his father Tim “TK” Kelly played steel
guitar, while both his sister Abby Kelly and his wife Kacey Musgraves
contributed background vocals. And in shaping the album’s nuanced yet potent
sound, the band deliberately channeled the raw vitality Kelly continually
brings to his live show.
“This was the first time I ever
recorded completely sober, and I wanted to take the intensity of whatever it
took to get me here and leave that splattered all over the wall,” says Kelly.
“Rather than telling the band how or what to play, I translated that intention
to them to get us all on the same page, and the songs came together exactly the
way I needed them to.”
Though Kelly booked nine days at
Dreamland, the sessions were so kinetic that the band tore through almost the
entire album in the first 48 hours. That unchecked urgency is particularly
evident on tracks like “Brave”—a plea for redemption made even more poignant by
its stark recording, several times spotlighting a tearful crack in Kelly’s
voice. “My father was supposed to play on ‘Brave’ with me, but I decided to do
a take by myself to get my bearings,” says Kelly. “It was just me and my dad in
a room late at night, him watching me sing this song about trying to live up to
the principles he raised me with. I’ll never forgot how powerful that felt.”
Describing Shape & Destroy as a “mental-health
record,” Kelly reveals all the false starts and setbacks in getting sober with
a specificity that’s unflinching but never heavy-handed. As the album unfolds,
his lyrics drift from forthright to poetic to sometimes even storybook-like (an
element manifested in its recurring images of wishing wells and stars, flowers
and wild storms). On the piano-laced and luminous “Mid-Morning Lament,” for
instance, Kelly proves his gift for gracefully entwining wit and confession
(sample lyric: “I wanna spike my coffee, but I know where that leads/And it
ain’t the safest feeling when the angel on your shoulder falls asleep”).
Another elegantly layered track, “Alive” twists classic love-song sentiment
into a moment of tender revelation, its dreamy mood magnified by TK’s sighing
steel tones and Kelly’s delicate storytelling (“On the horizon/The sun is
setting pink/You’re cooking something in the house/Singing John Prine/What a
beautiful thing/To be alive”). “To me ‘Alive’ is a testament to how powerful
love can be, especially love from someone who embodies a very strong and
empowering feminine spirit,” says Kelly. “It’s like they’re able to lend that
spirit to you, so you can pick yourself back up and declare who you really want
to be.”
Like most of Shape & Destroy,
“Alive” was captured in one of the very first takes that Kelly and his band
laid down. To make the most of their time at Dreamland, the musicians ended up
recording two songs that weren’t initially intended for the album, including
“Jubilee”—a warm and rumbling track with a magical backstory. “For a long time
I’ve been a huge fan of the Carter Family, especially Mother Maybelle, and a
while back John Carter Cash invited me to stay at his grandmother’s if I wanted
a writing retreat,” says Kelly, referring to the son of Johnny Cash and June
Carter Cash. “I wrote ‘Jubilee’ at Mother Maybelle’s dining room table and
didn’t think it would ever make it on the record, but in the studio it turned
into this train-song thing that felt really good. It’s just so strange to me
that this Johnny Cash spirit came out without me even meaning it to.”
For the closing track to Shape & Destroy,
Kelly chose “Hallelujah Anyway”: a minute-and-half-long piece centered on
choir-like harmonies from Kelly and his collaborators (including recording
engineer Gena Johnson), its lyrics nearly prayer-like in invocation (“And bury
me in ?owers/When I go I wanna bloom/And come back as the color of a lovely
afternoon”). “For me that’s probably the most important song I’ve ever
written,” says Kelly. “It’s about having thankfulness for whatever it is that
gives us this ability to be positive even in the thick of the blackest moments,
and I can’t think of any greater weapon to turn against your lesser self. If I
wrote that song and nothing else in my life, I’d be very pleased with what I’ve
done as an artist.”
In bringing Shape & Destroy to
life, Kelly again tapped into many of his longtime inspirations—Jackson Browne,
Dashboard Confessional, the brutal and visceral energy of Kurt Cobain’s live
performance—but also looked to such unexpected sources as transcendentalist
philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. “A huge turning point in my spiritual life was
reading his essay ‘The Poet,’ which talks about how artists love wine and
narcotics, but the true artist doesn’t ingest anything but water from a wooden
bowl,” he says. “As soon as I read that I thought, ‘Damn, you’ve got my number
there.’” And through the process of creating Shape
& Destroy with total clarity, Kelly emerged with a greater
understanding of how to fulfill his purpose as an artist.
“The more I’m doing this thing of
touring and gathering a fanbase of people who seem to appreciate these songs
and make them their own, the more it fuels the fire to keep doing it—and to do
it with even more honesty, now that I’m clear-headed and clear-eyed,” says
Kelly. “Making this record definitely taught me that I don’t want to be
selfish: I want to channel something larger than myself, and give myself to the
process as fully as possible, because these songs also become the story of
whoever hears them. Whatever someone might get out of listening to this record
and hearing me express myself in this way, it’s completely theirs.”