Robert Ellis
Texan singer-songwriter Robert Ellis embraces a raw minimalism that prizes patience and restraint above all else with his exquisite 7th album, Yesterday's News.
“I’ve spent my entire career trying to make records that I thought would be ‘exciting’ to other people,” Ellis reflects, “but the albums I’ve always been most drawn to are small and gentle and soft. The more I sat with these new songs, the more I realized that their stillness was their strength.”
Recorded live to tape in just two days, Yesterday’s News is as stripped-down as it gets, with Ellis’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. What emerges is a record that’s not quite folk and not quite jazz, a series of intimate, unhurried meditations on growth and maturity, hope and regret, desire and contentment, all delivered by an artist learning to let go and get quiet, to slow down and appreciate the tiny little miracles that make life worth living.