These days, the only evidence of the artist who made his name in Houston with a pitch-perfect, vintage-country-and-western sound is his delicate croon—which still has a certain twang to it—and his leather-tooled guitar strap. After moving to Nashville in 2014 to record his third album, he cut his signature waist-length hair, trimmed his beard, and honed his sound to reflect influences ranging from traditional country to folk and pop.
Willie Nelson and George Jones are still present in his music, but on his latest album, there are also echoes of Randy Newman, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell. “I think it’s a continuation,” Ellis says of his new offering. “I think everything that I’ve done has been pretty different from the thing before it, so in that sense this is just the same.”
Recorded live to tape in just two days, Robert Ellis’s exquisite new album, Yesterday’s News, is as stripped-down as it gets, with the celebrated songwriter and producer’s delicate, reedy tenor accompanied only by nylon string guitar, upright bass, and the occasional piece of handheld percussion. The arrangements are harmonically sophisticated here, drawing on the open tunings and intricate fingerpicking of English songwriters like Nick Drake or Richard Thompson, and Ellis’s performances are similarly subtle and nuanced, tapping into the bittersweet longing of Chet Baker and the playful poignancy of Bill Evans and Jim Hall.
While that might seem surprising coming off 2019’s raucous Texas Piano Man, subverting expectations is nothing new for Ellis. Born and raised outside Houston, he gained early acclaim for his piercing introspection and absorbing narratives, but over the course of five solo albums, he flirted with everything from Paul Simon and John Prine to Elton John and Joni Mitchell in a series of sonic and visual transformations that ran the gamut from Redneck Steely Dan to Lone Star Liberace. NPR hailed his “musical daring and impeccable songcraft,” while Rolling Stone praised his “sharp eye for storytelling,” and the New York Times lauded his writing as an emotional “gut punch.”
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