Ruston Kelly doesn’t just play music. He dissects music, turns it inside out, and forces it to tell the truth. And Dirt Emo? That’s his proof that heartbreak hits just as hard whether you’re wearing cowboy boots or Converse.
The Shared DNA of Emo and Country
“I don’t play country; this stuff is dirt emo. It’s like crying in a barn or anguishing in your room with a banjo,” Kelly once said. But strip them down, and country and emo are the same animal: raw emotion, heart on your sleeve, even if no one’s listening. A guy alone with a guitar, saying the thing out loud that everyone else is too scared to admit.
Country music loves its specifics: the truck, the bar, the bottle, the old flame still burning in the rearview mirror. Emo classics do the same thing, they just swap out a few: the basement show, the club, the ex who’s probably kissing someone else right now.
Stephanie Amador / The TennesseanWhen Kelly covered “Dammit,” Blink-182’s bratty teenage anthem of growing pains, he didn’t just slow it down. He exposed it. The words hit harder. “Well, I guess this is growing up” becomes a quiet gut punch instead of a sneering shrug. And “Teenage Dirtbag”? It’s no longer a somewhat goofy anthem. It’s lonely and longing, the sound of a misfit who never quite grew out of that feeling.
Dirt Emo and the Art of Transformation
With Dirt Emo Vol. 2, Kelly is pulling the thread even further. His cover of “Complicated” (with Annie DiRusso) slows down Avril Lavigne’s pop-punk angst and turns it into something weightier. The original was all frustration, eye rolls, and teenage rebellion. Kelly’s version is weary. It stretches out. The anger softens into understanding. “Complicated was always a banger,” he said. “Especially when you’re an angsty teen at the local swim club, fantasizing a relationship with the lifeguard who’s older than you.”
But that’s what Dirt Emo does. It doesn’t just cover songs; it time-travels through them. It takes songs we thought we understood and gives them back to us, changed. The teenage tantrum in “Complicated” turns into a knowing sigh. The reckless abandon in “Dammit” becomes something softer, a realization rather than a rebellion.
The Beauty in Being Broken
Kelly’s whole career has been about taking pain and making it into something worth singing about. Dying Star was full of the wreckage of addiction. Shape & Destroy was the long, slow climb out. The Weakness wrestled with heartbreak and his own past, searching for grace in the wreckage. Together, they are all Dirt Emo. The musical equivalent of accepting that you’ll never outrun heartbreak, pain, or regret, but can learn to live with it.
“I think there’s something really special about the way these songs make you feel, no matter when you hear them,” Kelly reflects on his covers. The songs that gave us life at sixteen still hit at twenty-nine, and they’ll still hit at forty-five, at sixty. The heartbreak changes shape, but it never really disappears.
And that’s why Dirt Emo works. It reminds us that all the things we tried to grow out of, the melodrama, the unfiltered sadness, the messy, desperate longing, were never childish at all. They were just honest.
Because Dirt Emo isn’t a genre, it’s a feeling. And it’s sonic proof that those emotions never faded. They just found a new way to sing.
Kelly’s Dirt Emo, Vol. 2 releases on March 14th.