Posts Tagged ‘Robert Ellis’

ROBERT ELLIS – ” Texas Piano Man “

Posted: January 30, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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AUSTIN, TX - MARCH 15: (EDITORS NOTE: Image has been converted to black and white.) Robert Ellis performs onstage at New West Records during the 2019 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Mowhawk on March 15, 2019 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Chris Saucedo/Getty Images for SXSW)

Robert Ellis began his career as a pretty conventional guitar-toting troubadour (and a good one at that). But he’s gone through one of the more memorable reinventions in recent memory with his stylish new album Texas Piano Man, which should be subtitled “Captain Fantastic and the White-Suit Cowboy.” Sporting an immaculate white tux and fedora, Ellis sat down at the piano and began to croon: “I’m fuckin’ crazy…” He couldn’t seem to stay seated as the set progressed, standing up to play even though it meant bending down to the microphone on odes to everything from passive aggression to Topo Chico. It was fantastic Elton John-style showmanship. 

Speaking of Sir Elton, what would his music be like if he lived in Texas, loved smoking, abhorred passive aggressiveness, wore strictly white suits, and had a penchant for consuming a specific bubbly water with lime? You can get a pretty good idea by listening to Ellis’ Texas Piano Man.

From the album ‘Texas Piano Man,’

ROBERT ELLIS – ” Texas Piano Man “

Posted: December 15, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Robert Ellis recasts himself from an alt-country guitar-slinging troubadour to a white-suited, top-hatted barroom pianist making an album full of jaunty stompers about growing up and growing sober (“Topo Chico” and “Nobody Smokes Anymore”) and acerbic, affecting love songs (“Fucking Crazy” and “Passive Aggressive”). Ellis teared down a set at SXSW , The album  is among our music highlights of 2019, and this record is a perfect companion for all the turns 365 days can throw at you.

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Released February 14th, 2019

Pianos and Keyboards – Robert Ellis
Guitars – Kelly Doyle
Bass Guitar – Geoffrey Muller
Drums and Percussion – Michael “Tank” Lisenbe
Congas and Auxiliary Percussion – Josh Block
Background Vocals and Vocal Arrangements by Robert Ellis and Michael Lisenbe

All songs written by Robert Ellis

ROBERT ELLIS – ” Drivin “

Posted: January 1, 2017 in MUSIC
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There’s something about Robert Ellis that you can’t turn away from. Sure, he looks like he could be part of The Rat Pack. Yes, he can shred with the best of them. But the real reason is he’s a musician hitting on all cylinders. Listen as often as you can.

Breakups are heart-shattering, life-changing, momentously difficult, clinically depressing, spiritually enlightening, and many other things.

“Drivin,” a track from Houston songwriter Robert Ellis  brilliant, self-titled fourth album, brings the listener into those lost moments between saying goodbye and actually leaving. Over a fast-paced arrangement colored in shades of rolling electric bluegrass, Ellis rolls out a checklist of ways to avoid that soon-to-be ex. He’s ruminating, but not quite ready for a full confrontation with himself or his lover. “I’ve changed all the light bulbs and had this conversation about three million times or more. I guess I’ll walk around the grocery store…again,” he sings in his slightly tense tenor. He hits some parking lots, returns home and sweeps the floor. The painful details keep pouring out; it’s like the chapter before George Jones’s classic tale of domestic abandonment, “The Grand Tour” Is Ellis’s narrator staving off the cruel end, or just hoping it will unfold without his full participation? He can’t fully say. We’ve all been there.

Co-written with Angaleena Presley, another of the South’s most skillful and unsparing current songwriters, “Drivin'” is one short chapter in the novel that is Ellis’s new album, a cold-eyed but passionate examination of a relationship’s wax and grey wane. Musically varied, impeccably structured, Robert Ellis recalls the “confessional” songwriters who set the bar in the 1970s, as well as recent Americana landmarks like Jason Isbell’s Southeastern. There are traces of Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon on this cohesive work, and the laconic insight that James Taylor offers at his best. Robert Ellis is not always a light listen – the narrator bluntly claims his sins throughout – but the musical adventurousness that’s in Ellis’s blood makes it an irresistible one. On the road toward loneliness, Ellis holds tight to the wheel, even when he has no idea where he’s going.

ROBERT ELLIS – ” You’re Not The One “

Posted: December 11, 2016 in MUSIC
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The Houston-based maverick Robert Ellis did something very gutsy on his fourth album: he took on the subject of his own divorce, not necessarily as autobiography, but as the grounding element within a brutally honest assessment of how a dream can fail. Divorce, as it happens, was also one of the major themes pursued by such artists as James Taylor and Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s, when the rules of marriage were being rewritten alongside those defining what a singer-songwriter could be. On his fourth album, Ellis is living up to those heroes. Framing each song in rich arrangements redolent with strings, jazzy keyboards and wicked guitar, Ellis makes sure each piece of his narrative fits with the next, from the starry-eyed optimism of the power-poppy “Perfect Strangers” to self-laceration of “You’re Not the One” — “you’re not the one that I should want,” he laments, going pure country for a tortured moment. In assessing love that doesn’t fly and the injuries sustained when it crashes, Ellis pushes himself in every way, and it pays off.

ROBERT ELLIS – ” Robert Ellis “

Posted: June 28, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Robert Ellis

Album opener “Perfect Strangers” is a work of friskily acrobatic, cinematic orchestration that traces initial infatuation to inevitable antipathy. The protagonist’s wryly bleak prediction? Getting to know a lover intimately is bound to ruin everything.

A couple of tracks later, in the fetchingly broody “California,” Ellis zeroes in on a woman depleted by rearranging and relocating her life for her partner, only to be left alone. “Maybe I’ll move to California, with the unbroken part of my heart I still have left,” he sings in a keen, reedy tenor lost in listless daydreaming. “Maybe I’ll fall in love again someday; I’m not gonna hold my breath.”

Ellis can’t decide exactly how fatalistic the vignette is. “Sometimes I hear ‘California’ as very hopeful: ‘In the wake of this tragedy, I have all these opportunities, things that I can do.’ Then other times I hear it as almost sarcastic, like she’s really saying, ‘I don’t know what-the-fuck I’m supposed to do.’”

The musical liveliness of “Drivin,’” propelled by a light-footed train beat and beelining acoustic and electric guitar licks, belies the lyrics’ vivid portrayal of passivity—a man cowering from mutual dissatisfaction in his marriage. “Oh, I just wish you’d go to bed,” Ellis whines impatiently, “without the expectation that I’ll come up there and say something to help you feel like things aren’t such a mess.”

In “You’re Not the One,” “It’s Not OK” and “Elephant,” the protagonists tie themselves in knots. One strains against the stranglehold of lust for a forbidden woman. Another is tormented by the pattern he’s fallen into: undermining the partnership he’s supposedly committed to by indulging in the trysts he craves. But the album’s most conflicted character appears on “Elephant.” Over a tense, prickly guitar figure, Ellis plays a man who’s lost faith in the model of marriage he once agreed to—not to mention in his own conscience—and for whom the idea of loving, monogamous devotion has mutated into something more like imprisonment.

Ellis has no trouble naming the emotions that color these deftly executed songs. “There’s a lot of anxiety and a lot of insecurity and guilt,” he says, “and sort of struggling with, ‘Should I feel guilt about things?’”

But that’s about as far as he’s willing to go. “I’m not sure if the characters are likable,” he offers with a small laugh. “I’m sure that’s up to the listener, and whatever they’re going through.”

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“I’m sure every writer puts themselves into their material somewhere or another,” offers Ellis, “but I’m not gonna discuss details of my marriage with anybody. And I’m definitely not going to, in my opinion, ruin the surprise of connecting with these songs in a way that’s meaningful to the listener. And it’s not really even to protect me. Like, I don’t give a shit. I don’t mind talking about my life to people that I know. I think the strength of these songs is that they can be kinda ambiguous. If you just listen to ‘em and connect with them in that way, I just think it’s a much better experience. I think if you listen to the songs on here, there’s not one side.”