Ruston and Tim Kelly.Photo: Stephen Kinigopoulos
As they ate hot dogs and waited in vain for the skies to clear, Kelly, 66, unloaded something that had been on his mind: finally, after decades of putting his musical aspirations on the shelf, he was ready to make an album.
“He was like, ‘You know, I’ve kind of gotten together these songs.’ I thought I knew all of his songs, but he just started playing a few and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really inspiring me. What if maybe you did this here, or did this here?'” Ruston, 33, recalls to PEOPLE. “It was a comically bad trip, but something good came out of it.”
That something good, Kelly’s debut albumRide Through the Rain, is out on Friday, with Ruston serving as producer and featuring on its lead single “Leave This Town.”
The album is decades in the making for Kelly, who says that putting out a record of his own has been a dream of sorts in the back of his mind for years.
“Life kind of gets in the way of doing some of the things that you want to do, because you have to do them,” he says.
He’s not kidding; Kelly’s life story could very well be its own country song — the tale of a 9-5 father who put his dreams of stardom on the back burner in order to raise and support his family.
Tim Kelly.john chong
“I don’t know whether it was a combination of trying to satisfy my dad, or not really having the courage to step out, the self-confidence, with the music,” he says. “It was just a decision that I made and I stuck with it.”
Though Kelly put his own music career on hold, he encouraged the talents of his children, recalling fondly the days when a young Ruston would “sit at the top of the stairs and pretty much wail at the top of his lungs Dashboard Confessional and all that stuff.”
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Kelly has toured with Ruston as his pedal steel guitarist, and played on his 2018 debut albumDying Star, as well as its 2020 follow-upShape & Destroy.
“You don’t kill a passion. You can mute it for a minute in different aspects of your life, but what you are always comes out, and what Dad was is always a musician,” Ruston says. “It didn’t matter if he had the most stressful day of all time at work, he’d come home and there’s always an instrument being played… I would say that because of the stresses, and because of leaving a dream aside, those nighttime sessions of him playing the piano, or the steel guitar, or singing ‘Old Friends,’ meant even more, I think, to him, and therefore imbued in me a greater sense of power in the emotions that were being expressed.”
“Old Friends,” a song Kelly wrote when he was 18, made the cut on the album, though the rest of the tracklist spans years — some he wrote days before heading into the studio, while others he likens to “the land of misfit toys,” and were things he’d tinkered with over the years.
Though he and Ruston have written together before, Kelly says it was important to him that he write all the songs himself: “The songs needed to be 100 percent mine,” he says. “I wanted it to be my voice.”
Still, he leaned on his son in the studio, relying on Ruston to help him look inwards and become more comfortable with vulnerability.
“He can do that because he’s that way, that’s part of his makeup,” Kelly says. “For me, it took a little bit of chiseling away the business thing to try to actually get back to what I truly always was. When you’re in the business world, you don’t feel a whole lot of anything. It’s been a really good experience to, like everyone, try to find their center and who they are, truly. Rusty’s helped me to do that.”
As for what’s next, Kelly says he doesn’t really have any expectations. He just wants to put his album out into the world for as many people as will listen.
“I’ve had a lot of success in my life doing other things,” he says. “But this is something that I love, and where it goes, it goes. I’m going to keep playing music no matter what.”
Adds Ruston: “You’ve got a ton of records in you, Dad.”
source: people.com
