Ruston Kelly and Tour Crew Escape ‘Insane’ Bus Fire on the Highway [Watch]
Ruston Kelly and his touring band and crew are safe after a scary highway incident on Sunday morning (Sept. 10), in which the singer's tour bus caught fire while driving down the highway.
"We're all safe thanks for all the kind messages but HOLY F--K that was insane," writes Kelly on Instagram, alongside with video footage of the bus going up in flames as the singer and his crew roll their suitcases down the shoulder of the highway away from the blaze.
"Bus caught fire this morning and it was crisis drill mode to get off in time," he continues.
Appropriately enough, the video is set to Kelly's song "Hellfire," a song off his 2023 album The Weakness.
The footage was filmed by Kelly's tour drummer John Chung — who also happens to be a photographer — and Kelly joked that Chung "for some reason captured this s--t so we can be haunted by it forever."
Thankfully, the "crisis drill mode" paid off, as everyone onboard the bus was able to evacuate safely, carrying most of their possessions and preserving enough of their essential tour gear to finish Kelly's current tour, which has been running since April and is scheduled to wrap later this month.
"Luckily we all got most of our belongings. Gear in the trailer is fine and a new bus is on the way so we can finish this tour totally transformed by fire," Kelly writes. He didn't mention whether any remaining tour dates will be affected by damages caused by the fire. His next scheduled stop is in Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday (Sept. 12).
After the scary incident, Kelly's sense of humor was very much still intact. "I'm most appreciative of the DMs asking if the fire started because I left my album on the bus," he writes on an Instagram Stories slide.
A staple of the Americana genre, Kelly is known for his sharp lyricism and his musical exploration of themes like addiction and recovery. He is a self-described "Dirt Emo" artist, and even lent that phrase to a project covering songs by Dashboard Confessional, Taylor Swift and more in 2019. He is also the ex-husband of Kacey Musgraves. The couple divorced in 2020.