Tim Kelly's New Album with Son Ruston Kelly Proves It's Never Too Late to Realize a Dream

Stephen Kinigopoulos Ruston and Tim Kelly

Inspiration can strike in the unlikeliest of places, and for Tim "TK" Kelly, that rang true as he and his son, the singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly, sat in a dismal Alabama lake house, their father-son getaway spoiled by endless rain.

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 album Ride 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.

Though he's played guitar since age 12 and always planned to pursue music, Kelly heeded the advice of his Great Depression-era father and went to college in order to have a backup plan. He showed promise, winning in 1971 a national songwriting contest organized by Bob Hope that offered him a record deal and management.

john chong Tim Kelly

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Still, life had other plans, and soon, Kelly fell in love, got married, and before he knew it, had spent decades working for a paper company while raising Ruston and his siblings, Abby and Chip.

"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."

Adds Ruston: "I feel like it's important to know that he sacrificed something that he wanted to provide for his family. And I feel like sacrifices like that, they don't go unnoticed by the universe. It comes back around in an even better and more substantial way, in my opinion. And we're seeing that era of my dad's life right now."

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."

tim kelly

The family lived in Belgium by the time Ruston graduated high school, but he moved to Nashville around 18 years old and soon made a name for himself in the country music world, racking up accolades thanks to his painfully honest lyrics that focused on his struggles with drug addiction and sobriety.

Kelly has toured with Ruston as his pedal steel guitarist, and played on his 2018 debut album Dying Star, as well as its 2020 follow-up Shape & Destroy.

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"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."

Kelly also credits the rest of his family, including his wife, with helping the album come to fruition – daughter Abby, who is currently singing with Dashboard Confessional, sings on the track "The Deep," while son Chip handled the art direction.

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."