Half And Half

Houston, Texas born, Nashville-based singer, songwriter and guitarist Robert Ellis looks like he should have been in The Doobie Brothers back in the '70s, sometimes sounds like LA songsmith Jackson Browne, but harks back musically to the golden days of George Jones and Conway Twitty country, with a goodly helping of their often wicked sense of humour. So a heartfelt folk tune like Cemetery can sit by the very un-PC No Fun on his second album, Photographs, without seeming wildly inconsistent.

“Thank you,” laughs Ellis, on the line from his home on the eve of a first Australian tour as the guest of Justin Townes Earle. “The album is probably half and half real experiences – the Cemetery song is kind of about a relationship, all real things that happened in real places – but some of the tunes are more of a character study and written from the point of view of somebody, who is not me. [No Fun] in particular is written from the point of view of the jealous boyfriend or husband who lets his jealousy get to the next level. Even a tune like that, that's not necessarily from my point of view; the reason I think it interested me to write it is because, I guess, growin' up in the South there are parts of me that have some of those feelings no matter how much you try to suppress them.”

Photographs is an album that is “half and half” in another sense too with half the songs written to be recorded acoustically, almost solo, and half with his band, The Boys – friends since high school – in mind; the latter more obviously plying the country thing while the former more folk singer-songwriter oriented. The album is also very much formatted like an old vinyl release, with A- and B-sides, all within the aesthetic from which Ellis draws. Not that writing songs is easy for Ellis.

“It's a lot of work,” he admits. “I'm not one of those people that churns out a song a day. I do write a lot but the majority of it is total shit! I'm sure there are some that would be much better songs if I finished writing them, but I'm definitely sort of a deliberator with things for a while, and kind of pick and choose what I wanna finish. You know, some of those songs, especially with the B-side, almost just wrote themselves because they're so steeped in tradition; songs like What's In It For Me?, that was one that I didn't really have to think all that much about, it kind of just came out and at the end of the day I was really happy with it.”

Ellis grew up listening to his parents' record collection – Johnny Cash to Buck Owens, Johnny Paycheck to George Jones – so he is very much steeped in that tradition. But for a moment he could have gone the other way. “I've played guitar since I was a kid,” he says, “and I've always been into bluegrass and country and folk music, but I went through periods where all I wanted to do was play like Van Halen or Stevie Ray Vaughan. I went through like an 'indie rock' phase – I grew up in the '90s so the cool thing was to listen to those sort of bands, like American Football and all the bands that were on [Champagne, Illinois-based indie] Polyvinyl Records. Then something happened when I was s17 or 18 where those bands didn't really appeal to me anymore, for whatever reason. I still listen to 'out there' music – I listen to a lot of modern classical and jazz.”

Robert Ellis will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 2 February - Theatre Ryal, Castlemaine VIC
Sunday 3 February - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Tuesday 5 February - The Basement, Sydney NSW
Wednesday 6 February - Coogee Diggers, Coogee NSW
Friday 8 February - Heritage Hotel, Bulli NSW
Saturday 9 February - The Milton Theatre, Milton NSW
Sunday 10 February - Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW
Wednesday 13 February - Lizotte's, Newcastle NSW
Friday 15 February - Capitol Theatre, Tamworth NSW
Saturday 16 February - Lismore Star Court Theatre, Lismore NSW
Sunday 17 February - Byron Community & Cultural Centre, Byron Bay NSW