Kelly was born in South Carolina, the youngest of three siblings, but grew up all over; his father, Tim, was a high-flying executive at a paper company. Their household was always musical: Tim played the steel guitar expertly — not country-twangy but “highly emotional, washy, heavy reverb,” Kelly said — and harmonized with Kelly’s mother, Sherre. “They would sing Jackson Browne songs and Linda Ronstadt; Bonnie Raitt; older folk songs. It was wonderful.” By junior high, Kelly was plotting his own albums.
When Kelly was 8 or 9, he also started figure skating, following his sister, Abigail, to a rink. Soon he was competing and winning awards, and as a young teen, he went alone to live with married coaches in Michigan, his eye on the Olympics. But they didn’t take care of him, he said, and the coaching program ended in a sex scandal with another young skater. As Kelly’s life there was imploding, he hid out in his room, and wrote a song.
“It was the first time that I was using creative expression as a tool to feel better — to make sense of a situation,” he said. “I felt like I unlocked something, like I had this safe space in this house. I was invincible. Music became like a tangible weapon.”
It helped him through what he described as the lifelong emotional fissure that led to an addiction in his 20s to amphetamines and cocaine. “There was a crack somewhere that just never quite could close,” he said.
Three months after an overdose, following a performance at the storied Nashville songwriter venue Bluebird Cafe, he met Musgraves.
“I fell so in love,” he said, “in such a cleareyed way. And that was sustenance for me.”
Their union seemed like a honeyed country music matchup: They duetted on a June and Johnny Cash tribute, and Musgraves wrote the floaty love song “Butterflies” for her breakthrough Grammy-winning album “Golden Hour.”
