Ruston Kelly has one of those back stories so strange you couldn’t make it up. Born in South Carolina Kelly's early childhood was fragmented as his dad worked in paper mills and travelled often for work, so every couple of years the family upped sticks. In his early teens Kelly hoped for a career in figure skating, so he moved to Michigan and joined an Olympic coaching team, which proved to be a very tough and lonely existence. Those dreams didn’t pan out, but with the music of Jackson Browne and his dad’s old guitar for company, the songwriting seed was sown. It wasn’t until his senior year in high school that he discovered The Carter Family and Johnny Cash in, of all places, the Belgium city of Brussels that things really started to click. At seventeen he returned to the USA and moved in with his sister in Nashville. Eventually, in 2013 a publishing deal was signed and Kelly placed songs with Josh Abbott and Tim McGraw — that helped pay the rent — before he snagged his own record deal and released the ‘Halloween’ EP in 2017 to impressive reviews.