Reflections on Robert Ellis's The Lights from the Chemical Plant

Robert Ellis first album Photographs (2011) was a revelation for me. There are a number of shades to the album. On the one hand, on the B-side you've got the sounds of a "Dim Lights, Big Smoke and Loud, Loud Music" kind of smokey honky tonk, the type of place where there used to be a mechanical bull but it's now rusty and broken because the bar, which serves Bud, PBRs and straight whiskey, couldn't pay the liability insurance on it. On the other hand, you've got the tender stories that begin when looking at old photographs. The album, appropriately titled, features old photographs of  Ellis's parents in their teenage days and inside you've got older photos, the kind that you could spend an afternoon looking at with grandma who has baked some cookies and made some watered down tea. 

I was immediately entranced by Photographs. Maybe it was the nostalgia of looking at old photos or imagining looking at old photos. Being his first commercially released album, Ellis gives us an introduction to himself and name-checks what one would assume are his influences in "Comin' Home" when he sings "I got Lefty, Willie, Hank, and Townes to keep me company, I'm headed back to Houston, headed back to see baby," referring to Lefty Frizzell, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt. One can hear the influence of all of those greats, but given Ellis's youth and the inherent tragedy in some of his songs, I can't help but think that we're hearing a twenty-first century Hank Williams. What a compliment that is, but Ellis is maybe that good; he's like that one-in-a-billion meteor that we got in the short-lived life of Hank. 

Like Hank, Ellis is older than his years. A voice that seems capable of contemplating, of making time-honored affiliations, Ellis connects images beautifully. Coming home, returning to one's roots, seems really important to Ellis, and Lights from the Chemical Plant  (2014) features a song entitled "Houston," the second longest song which features both excellent storytelling and great musicianship. Ellis seems really good at connecting images from the past and this tradition, which he lays out beautifully on Photographs, continues on Lights from the Chemical Plant. I don't know how old Ellis is (really young, though, apparently 22 at the time of Photographs, so 25 now by my basic arithmetic),  and I don't claim to know anything about him, other than what I've heard on his 2 albums. His Wikipedia entry said he recently relocated from Houston to Nashville, but he grew up real baptist in Lake Jackson, Texas, according to an interview I was able to find. On "Houston" he sings "From Houston I'm movin' tonight/I've got to pick up and wipe the slate clean/Oh, Houston I'm losin' the fight/You remind me of too many things." These feelings I've felt myself, too, and the rest of the song does a wonderful job of telling the story of breaking up with a former life, with a city, a place and a time. Reinventing yourself is the most American thing you can do, and we live in a strange, wonderful country where this is possible, and listening to Ellis's music, you know it's possible.

I don't know much about Houston. My only connection to Houston is driving through the city on a long road trip that began driving the Mississippi River Route, starting in Kansas and heading down to New Orleans by way of Memphis and Natchez and then returning to Kansas through Houston. We drove through Houston late at night. I knew it had bad traffic and I didn't even want to know what Houston traffic was like. All I remember was driving through the city listening to the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, one of the most important albums for me, and it was real late. The lights were kinda funny; there was a smokey quality to the air, the music was like a strange space voyage and Houston hit me hard ,though our encounter was brief. 

The other connection to Houston I have is from Wim Wenders' film Paris, Texas, one of my favorite films of all time and one that also deals with diving deep into memories. A lot of the film takes place in Houston, as does the climatic scene in which Travis, the main character, converses with an ex-love through the one-way mirror of a Houston striptease club. 

Ellis's music is like this. Coming back to a place,  to a time, speaking to someone through a one-way mirror. It's deep and dark and sad, but it's rooted and focused. When I first heard the title of his new album, The Lights from the Chemical Plant, it once again returned me to that road trip when we drove through Houston, but this time it recalled when we entered Texas through Louisiana and drove through Port Arthur, Texas, and we got lost driving through these old post-industrial chemical factories and oil refineries, and it was awful and strange--it was dusk and the town was a disaster and all these plants were spewing out horrible pollution, but there was something more there,  and it was my first real impression of Texas, and it was wild and I loved it in its wide-open way.  

The musicianship on both albums  is excellent. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the pedal steel guitar, as anybody who has ever loved old timey American music. Jerry Garcia, one of the most impressive practitioners of the pedal steel, famously said "I would love to play the pedal steel if I had another lifetime in which to play it," and yet he still left a wonderful lifetime of work on the instrument-- with his wonderful pedal steel playing with Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills and Nash, and New Riders of the Purple Sage albums. Will Van Horn is also outstanding on Lights from the Chemical Plant and Photographs. I particularly like the playing on "Steady as the Rising Sun" and "Pride" on the new album and "What's in it for me" on Photographs. "Steady as the Rising Sun" is one of the prettiest songs I've heard in a long time and it took a real mature band to make that song because it sounds like it could be from any era--initial impression is 1950s classic country, but there's more there that requires peeling through the onion layers. Another wonderful addition is Ellis's cover of Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years," a song that has always made me think of Lupe, my border collie mix who is still crazy after all these years. It's a wonderful rendition that reveals some new depth to and a different look at Ellis. 

While Photographs reveres the old timey classic country music that profoundly influenced him, clearly chronicling it, Lights from the Chemical Plant has a more contemporary feel and sets out a new direction for Ellis. The photographs inside the album are reminiscent of the photos on Magnolia Electric Co's Fading Trails and Ellis's music has more of the more somber tones that Jason Molina was able to achieve with Songs:Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. You can tell that there's a lot more to Ellis than just the Hank and Willie and Lefty and Townes, a whole lot more, and Ellis makes reference to this new direction in an interview I found that he gave when touring Photographs. He says, "...at this point, a lot of what we are doing is sometimes a little too far out from what may be expected as 'country.' I find that a lot more of the people who like what we doing are more open-minded, like the younger folks, and are people I would say that would not call themselves fans of country music." 

Here Ellis is at this strange crossroads of making American music but not wanting to be associated with a lot of the horrible commercial country music that seems so popular nowadays. He's smart, gifted and mature, takes time to obsess over the important details, recognizes where he came from, and should give a great new direction to American music. I can't recommend his work enough.