John Kelly is a writer. Sometimes, he’s a songwriter. And with “Three Bright Stars,” he proves he’s a pretty damn good one.
Best known for his work as the Virginia Film Festival’s PR pointman, Kelly has been writing for decades—penning reams of corporate communications along with songs.
Before moving to Charlottesville in 2001, Kelly started his journeyman music career playing shows around his hometown in Connecticut and in New York. In 2000, he released his first EP, Brighter Days. It was a promising early effort, a kind of Leonard Cohen-meets- Springsteen nugget of earthen salt.
Family life—particularly Kelly’s two children, small at the time—slowed the songwriter’s gigging through the aughts. But he never completely gave up the strings and singing lifestyle, and around 2010, he went back to it.
“Since then, it’s just been steadily building,” Kelly says. “It’s a matter of me recognizing again where that fits in my life.”
Where exactly does it fit? Like many singer- songwriters dotting Charlottesville’s live music scene, it’s no longer about making it big for Kelly. He’s at a point in his life and career where if he weren’t happy making music for his own reasons, he wouldn’t do it anymore.
Since 2010, Kelly’s found more and more reasons to keep writing songs. He’s grown some critical musical relationships, played lots of shows, and consistently released tunes and tidbits on his social media channels. His second album, In Between, came out in 2020.
“I have watched the songwriting scene here evolve for a long time, and there is a great history here that we all know very well, but there are also the people that work behind the trade,” Kelly says. “I’m continually impressed with the art makers in Charlottesville and the singer-songwriters that come from so many different approaches. In this region, I think you have to speak in your own language.”
Helping rekindle Kelly’s love for making music has been local guitar legend and band shapeshifter Rusty Speidel. The pair hit it off when they met over 10 years ago and soon began discussing an album. For In Between, they went into the booth with James McLaughlin, and the result was a ringing tone and clean production under Kelly’s earnest vocals and bittersweet lyrics with spiritual underpinnings.
Kelly and Speidel have continued to collaborate in the three years since, and Kelly says he has nine songs in the bank for when they decide to record again.
“Three Bright Stars,” an ode to the UVA student-athletes shot and killed last November, is likely to be on any forthcoming John Kelly record. The pop gospel dirge, which has drawn nearly three times more streaming listens than any other track Kelly’s produced to date, tells the story of the student vigil on UVA’s South Lawn shortly after the shooting.
The song’s first verse describes the crowd arriving on the Lawn: “There had been microphones and TV lights, till the kids said take ’em down.” The second verse follows the students on their way home: “There’s a man who sits beside the bridge—he’s there most every day and night; tonight the only thing he’s asking is, ‘Is everyone all right?’”
After arriving home himself, Kelly saw a photo of the event on social media. He said it clearly showed “three bright stars shining over the proceedings.” He had his chorus.
With the blessing of Matt Weber, UVA’s chief creative officer, who took the photo that inspired the song’s title and refrain, and Jody Kielbasa, vice provost for the arts, Kelly headed back to McLaughlin’s Mountainside Studio with Speidel, as well as Michael Clem, Chris Holden, and Richmond-based keyboardist Daniel Clarke.
They laid down the track, but Kelly felt it was missing a beat.
Sensitive to the tragedies Charlottesville’s endured in the past several years and feeling his own tangential position in the student shooting, he’d had some reservations about putting “Three Bright Stars” out in the world. It was the students dealing with the tragedy whose story it was to tell, and he wanted them represented. “I asked myself, ‘Does there need to be another voice, and does it need to be mine?’” Kelly says. “I made a pact with myself to make sure I only recounted what I saw and what I experienced. It wasn’t going to make a statement about what should be done or assume any understanding of the way that these students felt or the way that these families felt.”
Kelly asked Michael Slon, director of UVA’s University Singers, to help complete the song. Slon gathered eight students to record a choral backing vocal, and “Three Bright Stars” was ready for release.
As for his own future, Kelly’s small kids have grown into young adults—and musicians themselves—and he has more time for writing these days. There’s that third album possibly coming soon, and he’s found a niche in local live performances, particularly on the winery and brewery circuit.
“I’m just really delighted to be any part of this incredible music community and to be able to release a song that seems to be resonating with people,” he says. “It was almost like it was supposed to happen in the way it did. And I feel honored that anyone is taking the time to listen.”