Live, songwriter and instrumentalist Robert Ellis zigs and zags between silly and poignant, gentle and effusive, bantering with the laugh of a cartoon villain or whisper-singing to room-hushing effect. I’ve always viewed him as presenting two grappling selves—gentle poet versus manic goofball—bound together with a simmering onstage charm. For my money, there is no contemporary “Americana” (whatever that means, exactly) songwriter so knowledgeable about musical tradition who is so equally willing to subvert it. I’m also hard-pressed to think of a solo performer so similarly good at piano and guitar, and that’s not an accusation I make lightly.
When a show is billed as “An Evening with…” a musician, I expect two things: seats and no opener. For Ellis’s appearance at Mercury Lounge, the venue stuck with standing room (plus the usual few booths) and had Tulsa musician Carl Carbonell open the show solo. Carbonell’s rambling, storytelling folk rang hyper-traditional in musical style with sprinkles of unexpected humor. “Termites don’t mean nothing in a cab that’s made of steel,” he sang in a song about a hypothetical trucking business where, in another timeline, bugs killed by an exterminator found purpose driving the long haul. His off-the-cuff banter was legitimately funny, if occasionally talked over by the crowd, and his twangy singing style was a proper match for listeners familiar with Ellis’s records.
Ellis took the stage around 10pm. The last time I saw him perform, years ago, he showed up as a character dubbed Texas Piano Man, after his album of the same name, performing at the piano with a backing band clad in all-white tuxedos. He opened at the Merc (wearing Adidas track pants and a Technicolor fleece) with the acoustic track “On the Run,” quieting the room almost instantly. It’s one of the many more subdued offerings on his most recent record Yesterday’s News, though for the rest of the night he did not seem particularly beholden to performing those songs. No plan in place, he opened the floor for requests, responding, “Yes, I’ll play that,” to every one. (He did not play every one, but he did play a lot of them.)
Ellis is an exceptionally skilled instrumentalist, and during acoustic guitar songs like “Drivin’” and “Elephant” he put that on full display. More than once, I saw some of the Tulsa musicians in the room toss their hands in the air and shake their heads at each other in frustration at how complicated and high-level his guitar playing is. These tracks, several years old now, were rendered new again by Ellis’s forceful, breathy tenor, a departure (to me, a welcome one) from the vocal affectation that marked his earlier albums.
Most of the crowd pleasers seemed to be his piano numbers, though, including “Passive Aggressive,” a love song, or so he said, full of memorable, abrupt instrumental and vocal stops. During “Topo Chico,” which is absolutely about Topo Chico and not in a metaphorical sense, he attempted a whistle run twice and, upon expressing his disappointment in himself, said with a laugh, “It’s a song about fucking bubble water. It doesn’t matter. It’s a jingle they did not ask for and also did not want.”
He played some real heartbreakers between the jokier tracks, too. “Gene” is a tender recollection of becoming a first-time father, while “Father” reads a tentative letter from a child to his estranged dad. He called “Father” his favorite song he’s ever written and beseeched the crowd to listen to the lyrics of that song, if they only really listened to one. “I just want you to listen,” the narrator pleads, “and then I'll leave it up to you what happens when I'm done.”
Ramping down the 90-minute set, Ellis asked about and then commiserated on local politics (he lives in Fort Worth), gave a brief tirade on the religious indoctrination of children and then played “Sing Along,” about that very thing. He closed with the piano track “Nobody Smokes Anymore,” which is about, again, exactly what it sounds like. The still-rowdy crowd whooped after his final piano flourish, played along with the song’s final lyric: “Such a drag that the good things always end.”
