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Robert Ellis somehow finds wide-eyed wonder in heartbreak. His downbeat themes come up against sonically ambitious and lushly arranged sounds on his self-titled, fourth album, which plays with country and Americana music tradition, not to mention the legacy of '70s singer-songwriters.
ABOUT ROBERT ELLIS
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.”
Yesterday’s News marks Ellis’s debut LP for Niles City Records, an outgrowth of the famed Niles City Sound studio he and longtime collaborator Josh Block run in Fort Worth, TX.
ABOUT TODD HEARON
No stranger to the Word Barn, Hearon is an award-winning poet, songwriter and dramatist whose two albums, Border Radio (2021) and Yodelady (2023), have garnered accolades from American Songwriter magazine and the 2024 International Acoustic Music Awards. Writes Chris Hislop in Seacoast Online, “Todd Hearon is proof that good folkin’ country singers still walk among us. Somewhere from the great beyond, Townes Van Zandt has happened on Todd's tunes . . . and felt his cheeks go flush with envy.” His third album signals a new musical departure, mixing his love of traditional roots music with more contemporary alt-country and Americana sounds. It was produced by the legendary Don Dixon and recorded in Mitch Easter’s iconic Fidelitorium Studio in North Carolina. Stay tuned for singles releasing this summer!