RUSTON KELLY shared a third song off his forthcoming release, album highlight “Michael Keaton.” The wildly anthemic track spins a real-life incident into the new album’s most fantastically offbeat moment (from the chorus: “It’s 3:35 in the morning/And I thought CBD would not get me high/But here I am thinking/What if Michael Keaton killed himself in Multiplicity?/Would that be genocide?”). Kelly explains “That really did happen, but the song’s mostly about experimenting with what it means to be me. At the time I was trying to date again and eventually realized that I needed to step back from that, and just let myself live in that space of thinking weird stony thoughts at 3 a.m.”
Listen to “Michael Keaton” HERE or by clicking the image below.
Kelly’s new album, The Weakness, will be released on April 7th by Rounder Records. The new album is a blisteringly honest but profoundly hopeful body of work that ultimately reveals our vast potential to create strength and beauty from the most painful of experiences. Pre-order for The Weakness is available HERE.
“Michael Keaton” follows the release of previous album tracks “Mending Song,” a song that leans into Kelly’s lyrical talent, with Consequence saying it, “details his troubles over a lighthearted riff,” and “The Weakness.” Writing in Rolling Stone, Jon Freeman proclaimed it a “massive rock anthem,” while WFUV’s Kara Manning praised the “shimmering, slow burn of a song,” with its “ghostly, lushly-conceived rock arrangements.”
The Weakness Tour begins April 12th at Louisville’s Mercury Ballroom and will find Kelly playing NYC’s Webster Hall (April 21st), Chicago’s House of Blues (April 29th) and Los Angeles’s The Fonda Theater (May 14th), and ending with a hometown show at Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater (June 2nd) with Jenny Lewis opening. Information about tickets and VIP packages, which include an intimate soundcheck performance and Q&A, can be found at https://www.rustonkelly.com.
Before Kellybegan 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 to process 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. Kelly soon immersed himself in the making of The Weakness, pushing forward with the intensely self-aware truth-telling he’s always brought to his music.
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.”
