Before setting to work on his third album, Ruston Kelly moved out of his Nashville home and into an old Victorian bungalow in the small Tennessee town of Portland, then spent months on end in deliberate solitude. As he busied himself with remodeling his house and tearing through a stack of John Steinbeck novels, the South Carolina-born singer/songwriter began processing 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. Pushing forward with the intensely self-aware truth-telling he’s always brought to his music, Kelly soon immersed himself in the making of The Weakness: a blisteringly honest but profoundly hopeful album that ultimately reveals our vast potential to create strength and beauty from the most painful of experiences. Made with producer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Nate Mercereau (Sharon Van Etten, Leon Bridges, Maggie Rogers), The Weakness is a bold departure from the elegant simplicity of his first two albums. The resulting body of work matches its kaleidoscopic sound with some of Kelly’s most illuminating material to date.