Ruston Kelly’s new album, Pale, Through the Window, released on Friday, Sept. 12, 2025, and just a few weeks later, Kelly visited The Current studio to play solo acoustic versions of songs from the new record.

After the music, Kelly sat down with The Current’s Zach McCormick to talk about the making of the record. Kelly talked about his discoveries, including learning how to embrace joy … and how to play pickleball! Beyond the album, Kelly shed light on how he came to collaborate with singer-songwriter Annie DiRusso, and he shares a couple fun memories from his time as a competitive figure skater.

Watch the music performances above, and find the interview and a full transcript below.

Interview Transcript

Zach McCormick: Zach McCormick, joined by Ruston Kelly in The Current studios. Thank you so much for making it down here and playing some great songs for us today, man.

Ruston Kelly: Yeah, man, thanks for having me. I love coming in here.

Zach McCormick: Your fantastic new record is called Pale, Through the Window; it's out now. And the last time you stopped through the studios, you'd just put out that kind of pandemic-era record, The Weakness.  Been an eventful couple of years in your life, ever since. You experienced some personal growth.

Ruston Kelly: Yes.

Zach McCormick: You fell in love, you found some new connections with faith, and it's all right there on this new album. But it sounds like you kind of had, like, a start that was a little trickier with this new record. There was was some writer's block at the start and stuff.

Ruston Kelly: Yes.

Zach McCormick: Take us back to that early part of the album process for Pale, Through the Window.

Ruston Kelly: I mean, I was just like, annoyed. I was, like, annoyed at my what seemed to be an inability to, like, find the spark. It wasn't that I was having an issue with creativity, per se, but it was creativity with purpose. I enjoyed playing guitar. I mean, I play guitar every night, I play piano, I play an instrument every night. But as far as that translating into some, like, you know, journalistic scribe of what's going on internally versus, you know, externally, I just couldn't, like, meet the two. So I kind of wondered what the problem might be, but I felt it wasn't just like writer's block. I felt it kind of in my steps and how I generally was assessing my day and the quality of my self-interaction and my interaction with other people. So it seemed to be more of a wholesale issue, which I thought was tantamount to a spiritual malnourishment or something going on.

Zach McCormick: So you were, you know, you're working through this. It's not just your creative life. It's also your personal life.

Ruston Kelly: Yeah.

Zach McCormick: It's affecting your family, all that kind of stuff, and you're trying to kind of work through this. It strikes me that, as a songwriter, you've got a real knack for, like, exploring pain, exploring sadness.

Ruston Kelly: Yeah.

Zach McCormick: And on this new record, it seems like you're trying to kind of tackle the challenge of writing about sort of the inverse of some of those emotions, like joy and happiness. What did you like about trying to explore writing about that sort of inverse, and how did it go for you? What was the process like?

Ruston Kelly: I think, like in a retroactive way, looking back into it, it's kind of the same thing about, like, you can't try too hard to do something otherwise you won't really do it. Or if you do it or achieve it, you've squeezed it so hard you don't really even know what it is. And that's how it was with, like, writing from places of pain or suffering. Like, I didn't want to do that, you know what I mean? That wasn't part of the plan was to just be, like, not feeling good ever!

Zach McCormick: Yeah.

Ruston Kelly: Or abusing myself, you know, with drugs. But I lived it, and it was healing. The interaction between me and the muse, per se, was a healing interaction, whereas writing about that experience could be funneled into like a therapeutic act. And it was interesting, because this time, the kind of delivery of that inspiration was already a healing sense to it, so I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. So I did kind of like what the genesis of writing from those other transparent, painful places, I just went and experienced what it felt like to be joyful. Like in joyful, joy isn't a light emotion. It's such an arcing emotion. Pleasure spikes up and down. But joy is something that has to be almost prayerfully studied by oneself, because it doesn't, you know, just because, like, today was great doesn't mean tomorrow is great. And you can still say that you're in a period of joy in your life. And I was in that period, and I wasn't really sure how to put that into song. And so I just, like, lived in it. I tried to remain present in it, present and mindful, and I guess have like a grateful awareness to even just the little moments in the day that you know I hadn't really thought about ever. And over time, I just seemed to, like, that inspiration just kind of kicked in, like, it always does when you understand what something is.

Zach McCormick: With this, the Pale, Through the Window record, too, it's not like, it's, you know, "Walking on Sunshine for, you know, 12 tracks. There's definitely an emotional arc to it throughout the record. And so I don't want to, like, give people the wrong idea, but, you know, you're writing these sort of, like, open-hearted, vulnerable love songs in a way that I maybe hadn't heard you write before. And there's been a lot to be happy about in your life recently, as you were saying, both the career and then also your relationship. And it's not just like something that you're vaguely alluding to either. I mean, your new sweetheart is like on this album, contributing to the actual text of the record.

Ruston Kelly: Which is pretty cool.

Zach McCormick: I was gonna say, was it cool? Was it scary to connect those parts of your life?

Ruston Kelly: Like anything that's worth undertaking artistically, there's just like a natural thread that you keep pulling from. There's no forcing it, you know what I mean? You don't try to make this experience magical. You can hope for that, but like, I would even keep hope kind of blurry in the distance with it. And I have found that the less I try to squeeze to a situation of how I want it to be and just let it be, it's like 10 times better than like what that hope was that I used to strangle things with, and a great example is when she came in to record her part, because she plays fiddle, I had to convince her, she's a bedroom musician. She's not trying to, like, you know, like, "la, la, la," in front of anybody. But I got her to bring that out. And then it just so happened that her dad was coming into Nashville from Pittsburgh, and he's an upright bass player, and it was on the last day that we were recording. And then come to find out that the rest of the family was coming in town, and so I just had them all come over on the same day. The timing, I couldn't have made that timing work. And he was able to record upright bass on one of the songs about his daughter, you know? And she sang and played on it, and we all just, like, listened to the record. Those were the first people that I got to share the record with. So it was even better than, like, "I hope it goes well with her." Like, in the studio, not only was it magical, but like, her dad was able to come in and play on it, and then her family came in and were the first people to hear the album. Yeah, that's like, 20 times more special than I ...

Zach McCormick: Well, it's, I mean, that's a brave moment, you know, "Hi, partner's family. By the way, I'm also going to show you my new record." I'm probably a little bit creatively, still trying to get into a place that you were happy with it. That's got to be both cool and a little scary, I would imagine.

Ruston Kelly: Yeah. And I think, like, you know, they ... I've been around them, and they're incredible people. Like, if you look up any article about me, you know, like, "drug addiction" comes up, like, first! There's a joke now that we have, or like, someone will be like, "You know, I'm worried," and I was like, "Oh, about my checkered past?"

Zach McCormick: Yes.

Ruston Kelly: But it was such a moment of, like, I think they really understood, like the quality of love that I was feeling towards their daughter by this, like, piece of work that's devoted to her.

Zach McCormick: And you can hear it on a couple of the songs that we played on this record, including during your in-studio session today, a song that you wrote early in the romance that I read was kind of like a real skeleton key to unlocking that rest of the record, was "House in the Country." Can you talk about how that song came together?

Ruston Kelly: Yeah, I didn't really expect myself to be writing any lines with chickens and goats in it.

Zach McCormick: Yeah! You're not a farm guy? 

Ruston Kelly: I mean, I am. I worked on a chicken farm and grew up kind of in the South, around farms, but, like, I don't know, she kind of unlocked that in me when I felt like that's, you know, one of her dreams. And I was just kind of thinking like, what would be a song that, like, would make her smile? You know what I mean, like about that? Writing from that perspective. And she was getting ready for dinner or something, and her roommate's an amazing songwriter. And I just like, grabbed her guitar real quick, and I felt it coming, and so I just started singing the first two lines, and I was like, "Oh, yeah." Like, "This is the perfect way to start writing for this record is this dream that we kind of have together."

Zach McCormick: Yeah. And then it kind of, it was sort of spooled out into like, a couple-week period where you were writing, like, a ton of the material for this record, right?

Ruston Kelly: Yeah, yeah. I went through like a — I felt like a kid, like I was like, come home from school and throw my backpack down and go straight up to like, you know, instead of playing video games, went straight up to to write. Well, I wasn't in school. I was I'd wake up and I would write for a couple hours before my — I'm a staff writer at Sony for other artists.

Zach McCormick: Oh, awesome. Yeah, totally.

Ruston Kelly: So I would go in and clock in, you know, and then write for other people, and then I could not wait to get home to, like, literally throw my backpack down and run upstairs to my office and start writing for the record. And I'd write till about 10 or 11. I did that for about two weeks.

Zach McCormick: That's awesome. Ruston Kelly talking about his new album, Pale, Through the Window, right here in The Current studios, talking to me, Zach McCormick, thanks, man.

Ruston Kelly: Yeah!

Zach McCormick: One of the tracks that really captures those sweet early days, "Pickleball."

Ruston Kelly: Oh boy!

Zach McCormick: And it's a song that really isn't about the sport, but I have to ask, like, how's your pickleball game? You have an athletic background. I mean, you were like a junior Olympian type cat.

Ruston Kelly: I was, you know, low key.

Zach McCormick: So are you nice on the court there? 

Ruston Kelly: Yeah. I was like, kind of a Will Ferrell, Blades of Glory type figure skater.

Zach McCormick: I don't know if people know this about your background.

Ruston Kelly: A lot of people do and a lot of people don't.

Zach McCormick: Yeah, totally. It's all part of the checkered past.

Ruston Kelly: It's all part of my checkered past. That's where it began, was on the ice.

Zach McCormick: Yes.

Ruston Kelly: With blades of flame. No, I called it "extreme skating." I was skating to Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

Zach McCormick: Rad.

Ruston Kelly: And I was like, "I'm not doing a triple Salchow; I'm doing a 900."

Zach McCormick: Oh, yeah, totally.

Ruston Kelly: You know what I mean? "I don't know what you guys are calling these moves, but this is a 1080."

Zach McCormick: You're like, "I'd be out here on my hockey skates if I could."

Ruston Kelly: Exactly, and I would — yeah, the hockey dudes would always come out, you know, early and, like, they did the thing where it's like, "We're hockey players, and you're just like, you know, prancing around, you know, with a pinky up, or something like that." And so I challenged them to a race, and I'm just going to say: Smoked 'em.

Zach McCormick: You dusted these guys?

Ruston Kelly: Yeah, they actually, they got completely bucketed.

Zach McCormick: Wow. Challenge is out there. This is the state of hockey in Minnesota. Ruston Kelly will dust you on skates. Beware.

Ruston Kelly: Absolutely true. Get ready for this smoke!

Zach McCormick: So this song, "Pickleball." I love that you filmed it on a pickleball court for the video, too. Do you like to play? Is this something that you —?

Ruston Kelly: Yes, I do. My pickleball game is OK. She's better than I am.

Zach McCormick: It's good to have a good doubles partner.

Ruston Kelly: Yeah! Like when she, I asked her to go on, like, a first date, and she recommended pickleball. And I mean, I didn't know anything about, like, a first date being wholesome like that.

Zach McCormick: You're like, "We go to a bar. What do you mean?"

Ruston Kelly: Yeah, I thought that's just what you do. But I was like, "You know what? Yeah." She's like, "Do you play?" And I was like, um, "A hundred percent. Duh? I've played every day of my life." Called my friend, and I was like, "First off, what's pickleball?" Second off, the date is on." So I just showed up. And, yeah, I have never played worse. It must have worked, I guess, because we got a second date.

Zach McCormick: There's something charming, a little bit about, you know, fumbling and bumbling through some athletic—

Ruston Kelly: That's right. But she's really good.

Zach McCormick: Oh, that's good to hear. That's good to hear. Awesome. You're reunited with a longtime producer, Jarrad K. You recorded for the first time with the longtime members of your touring band on this record, too. Like, what did each of those personnel decisions bring to the record? And what do they mean to you?

Ruston Kelly: Yeah, they were all, they were all part of the the plan to kind of return, not to old ways necessarily, but return to when we did make music together, when there wasn't any stakes to it,

Zach McCormick: Right.

Ruston Kelly: You know, when there was like barely any team involved. Like there was barely any like, "How many listeners are you getting? Like, "How many followers?" And like, "How many tickets?" And like, when we were just making music to just make it, and like, just tell a true story. Not that we haven't done that on all my records, but, you know, as things progress, there's more of a business to run.

Zach McCormick: Expectations.

Ruston Kelly: And there's expectations, and a lot of people have opinions on how that should be shaped, and those are welcomed, because you want to win as a team. But I wanted to go back and just say, like, even shutting off the idea of approaching this professionally at all. Like, "Let's get all the business taken care of." And then, "We're just gonna be like boys, like we are on the bus, like when we were touring." That's why I used my touring band. We wanted to return to the kind of chemical interaction that happens energetically onstage between us, because we know each other so well. And then me and Jarrad just kind of telepathically being able to communicate in the studios from working together for so long, just to bring the original joy of making music that means something to us just by the sheer act of doing it. That's what I wanted to capture on record. And then we could kind of go and like, you know, work it.

Zach McCormick: Yeah, totally. When you have people that you're familiar with, when you have that chemistry, you're maybe able to work a little more like intuitively.

Ruston Kelly: Yes. Feel.

Zach McCormick: You're not thinking about it as process as much. You're just kind of going straight into creativity.

Ruston Kelly: Yeah. Also, my guitar player is a very sought-after guitar player in the session world in Nashville, Juan Solorzano. They call him "the Blake Mills of Nashville." But he doesn't listen to anything prior to the studio work, and this was no different. And a lot of the guitar — like, solos or riffs that he kind of coined on this album — were just off the cuff and he played them exactly, it was first take stuff.

Zach McCormick: Awesome!

Ruston Kelly: Yeah.

Zach McCormick: So he kind of locked into it?

Ruston Kelly: Yeah, we all kind of did. TK, my dad, who plays on steel, is notorious for doing the most incredible take ever, and then we're like, "All right, just do that one thing again." He's like, "Well, I don't even really know what I did."

Zach McCormick: Yeah, "I just did it."

Ruston Kelly: So everyone kind of played that way.

Zach McCormick: That's awesome.

Ruston Kelly: Yeah.

Zach McCormick: I got one more question for you here. You had a hand — speaking of your pro songwriting career here — you had a hand in one of our listeners' favorite songs last year, Annie DiRusso's "Wearing Pants Again."

Ruston Kelly: Oh, yeah!

Zach McCormick: We brought her in for a session here at The Current that she did, and it's just a cool record. I was wondering how the two of you got connected and what it was like working on that song.

Ruston Kelly: Ah, Annie and I are so ... just, we love each other so much. We just instantly became friends so quickly. She opened the first leg of my Weakness Tour.

Zach McCormick: Awesome.

Ruston Kelly: And to be honest, out on the road, I'm kind of, like, I'm locked in on my thing, like in my band and crew, and obviously, like, I kick it with other supports. But like, there was something about her and her crew that I just ... and I just recorded a thing with Samia who — her and Samia are best friends, and I had met Samia through doing music stuff, and they were best friends — and it turned out that when we played in Charlotte with Annie, that Samia was on tour and had a day off in Charlotte. And like, we all just hung, and I just, I don't know, I met Annie, it was backstage at Iron City in Birmingham, and I just sat in her dressing room, and we just chatted for I was, like, late to sound check, and I was like, "I love this person." And we stayed homies ever since.

Zach McCormick: That's great.

Ruston Kelly: Her and my partner share the same birthday. So, no shocker there that we get along!

Zach McCormick: The Zodiac lined up for that.

Ruston Kelly: That's right. Both Virgos.

Zach McCormick: Oh, there you go. Cool. So happy belated birthday to both of them, we're doing this in early October. But yeah, I was gonna say, you strike me as both people who have, like, one foot in whatever you want to call it, Americana, country, etc, and one foot in the rock world. Kind of, given the balance of both your sounds, did you find like a natural affinity working with her when you were writing together like that?

Ruston Kelly: Yeah, because I think, man, like the gap that maybe I would bridge of those worlds to someone like Annie is with a lot of the aesthetic that comes visually with bands. Like when Annie gets on stage, it's like a whole spectacle to see the show, but, like, it wouldn't mean anything if there wasn't a delicate care to the craft of songwriting. Annie's such a songwriter, you know? And I think, like, and a lot of those artists, and especially in the alternative world, are like that; they really want to get the best song possible. It's not just like a, you know, audio shtick, you know, for some type of aesthetic to be brought out. They want a song.

Zach McCormick: That's beautiful, man. You put on a great song there, and you put a bunch of great songs in this new this new record, Pale, Through the Window. Ruston Kelly, thank you so much for joining us in The Current studio, man. 

Ruston Kelly: Thank you, man.

Zach McCormick: Pleasure. Thanks for coming.

Ruston Kelly Thank you, man.

Zach McCormick: Sorry about the sweaty palms.

Ruston Kelly: Hey, dude, I'm sweating too, so don't worry about it.

Gallery: Ruston Kelly in studio

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Songs Performed

00:00:00 Wayside
00:03:39 Waiting to Love You
00:07:23 Twisted Root
All songs from Ruston Kelly's 2025 album, Pale, Through the Window, available on Rounder Records.

Musician

Ruston Kelly – vocals and guitar

Credits

Guest – Ruston Kelly
Host – Zach McCormick
Producer – Derrick Stevens
Video – Evan Clark
Audio – Cameron Wiley
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Production – Reed Fischer, Luke Taylor

External Link

Ruston Kelly – official site