Ruston Kelly on His New Album ‘Pale, Through the Window’ (Exclusive)

Ruston Kelly has made his name on haunting ballads and dirt emo rock songs — songs that, over the course of three albums, have often focused on what he calls the “rain clouds,” or life’s darker aspects. Struggles with addiction. Life in recovery. The fallout of broken relationships.

So the release of his new album, Pale, Through the Window (out now) feels like something of a reset. For the first time in a long time, Kelly is letting the light in — and if the joyous new record is any indication, the singer-songwriter is… dare he say happy? 

“This seems to be a general sentiment I’m hearing. It’s like, ‘Whoa, he’s happy,'” Kelly, 37, tells PEOPLE over a recent Zoom call. “To me, I just write about whatever’s going on in my life, and I definitely am writing from a place of gratitude and love and feeling pretty solid.”

Writing from such a place is new for Kelly, who in December will mark five years of sobriety. On past records like Dying Star, Shape & Destroy and The Weakness, he used his music to process life’s troubles, and says that for a long time, he felt as though his creative purpose was to “articulate the hope and suffering in the human condition… My work is, I’m focusing on the clouds.”

Cloudy tunes came easily for the star — on songs like “Brave,” he sang of how he hoped his loved ones would remember his courage when he one day died. On “Mending Song,” he sang about trying to heal from his 2020 divorce from pop-country superstar Kacey Musgraves.

But when it came time to write this album, he struggled. Writer’s block reared its ugly head, something that went hand in hand with what Kelly describes as his deep desire for perfection in all aspects of life.

“I just felt like I was falling short all the time. ‘Why have I not sold out Red Rocks? Why have I not met my wife?'” he recalls. “It was very much like, ‘What am I worth if I can’t express myself?'”

He’d soon come to realize that what he needed was a new perspective — an appreciation of all the things he had achieved. 

“For the first time, instead of trying to just climb an ever-growing wall of creative block, I just was like, ‘Well, I’m going to walk the other way. I’m going to actually turn around and look at this garden and be like, ‘I planted that. That’s beautiful. That’s worth something. That has intrinsic value regardless of what it does for me,'” he says.

It was thanks to that new perspective that Kelly was in the right headspace to allow fate to do its thing. In June 2024, he met his now-girlfriend Tia Cubelic while on a family vacation. The stars were certainly aligned; though they met in South Carolina, the pair soon learned they lived just eight minutes apart in Nashville.

At that point in his life, after a series of failed relationships, Kelly says he was living in the “classic trope” of thinking he’d likely be single for the rest of his life. He’d even written a song while in what he calls “the loneliest place” of his life, one in which he was haunted by the ghosts of his past (It would go on to become the title track “Pale, Through the Window”).

“I wondered, ‘Am I the problem in relationships?’ I’ve certainly done my best to maintain relationships that just seemed to not work out at the end of the day,” he says. “Especially post-divorce and all of that, my lens for what being with someone [should look like] just didn’t quite exist anymore. I certainly didn’t want to get myself in a situation where I got hurt or I hurt someone else.”

But then came Tia, and then came the night he picked up her roommate’s guitar while waiting for her to get ready for a night out. Something clicked as he strummed and played that night, and before long, his writer’s block was gone, helped along by the burst of inspiration that comes with the excitement of new love.

For two weeks, Kelly wrote from sun up to sun down, crafting odes to Tia like “Me & You,” which features the jangle of a The 1975-esque guitar, and the emotional “I See You,” as well as self-reflections like “Twisted Root,” which lays bare the mistakes of his past.

“The floodgates were open,” he says. “It was a little mad scientist, but I was loving it because there weren’t drugs fueling that. There wasn’t a mania fueling that. It was a clear-driven purpose.”

Even “Pale, Through the Window,” which he’d written before they met, took on a new clarity. The ghosts of his past he’d thought he’d seen lurking were just his reflection.

“You realize that that’s not a ghost in the window, you’re just staring at yourself,” he says. “I was like, ‘What if that light in the window, it wasn’t just the things that don’t belong anymore? It actually was the light that was arriving, of the goodness that I was about to encounter?’ I was like, ‘Okay, that’s the title of the record.'”

Kelly was helped along in his inspiration by a “psychedelic” spiritual awakening, something he says was “not on my bingo card,” but he welcomed with open arms anyway. Tia was with him every step of the way; she plays violin on “House in the Country,” about the couple’s dream to own a country home, and is credited with background vocals on three songs. 

He says Tia “drew some lines in the sand” when it came to certain aspects of his past (A conversation he recounts on the single “Pickleball”), and made it clear what she wouldn’t stand for when it came to their future together.

“It was very clear that it was like, ‘Yeah I’m into you, but if X, Y and Z still remain, that’s kind of a non-starter for me. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve fallen in love with you.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, alright. That’s someone that knows their worth.’ That’s a very attractive quality,” he says. “My old self would’ve probably balked and been like, ‘I’m going to do whatever I want.’ It inspired me to continue the growth process.”

As for what’s next, Kelly says he’s already starting thinking about his next chapter. For now, he feels that this era is setting up the way he plans to live the rest of his life.

“I know that life is not going to be perfect and there’s going to be weaves in and weaves out and difficulties here and there,” he says. “But I think being able to write from the perspective of knowing who I am and knowing who I belong to will actually deepen that impulse of, when it is time to write about the rain clouds, there will be even more substance and a root to it. I know that life is life and I think I’m excited to look through everything through this lens.”

Pale, Through the Window is out now, and Kelly will began a nationwide tour on Oct. 2.