The Boys are Back In Town
Robert Ellis returns to delight a hometown crowd
Last night’s show by Robert Ellis (& the Boys) at Discovery Green almost didn’t happen. All day, Ellis and the park tweeted updates on the weather, finally deciding at 4 p.m. that the show would go on regardless of a little sprinkle. I’m glad they did, because by the time the 7 p.m. showtime rolled around, the sky was clear and the air was muggy and a large audience was assembled to see a Houston boy who made good come back for the first time since December of last year.
Ellis is now a Nashville resident, but during the show he did his best to convince the gathered crowd not to hold that against him. His band, including longtime collaborators Will Van Horn and Kelly Willis, all still live in the Houston area, and Ellis plucked at our heartstrings with a mournful tune called “Houston” that attempts to explain why he had to leave. It was a starkly personal song, describing not so much the city that we share but the savior that he found, and the ways that safety turned sour at the hands of his bad luck and bad decisions, until he finally had to get respite from the things of which all the familiar places reminded him. He mentioned that it’ll be on his forthcoming album (due out in February of 2014), and I’ll look forward to picking it up for that song alone — as someone who’s spent the last nine years here in Houston, picking at possible futures and running roughshod over good common sense, I’m definitely sympathetic to Ellis’ frustration with having to live alongside memories of the mistakes one’s made.
The show was a bit longer than many of the Discovery Green Thursday Concert Series entries, with Ellis promising that he’d play “a whole hour and a half, so let me know when it’s ten til half past…if anyone can figure that out.” The set was peppered with songs from his last album like “Photographs” and “Friends Like These”, new tunes like “Houston” and “Sing Along” that will be on his next album, and covers including Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years” and Rosanne Cash’s “Seven Year Ache”. Throughout it all, Van Horn’s mournful slide guitar matched Ellis’ twangy, regretful delivery in a manner so affecting that you could almost feel the whiskey shots slamming back in the audience.
In recent interviews about his work since moving to Nashville, Ellis has made much of his attempts to incorporate influences from outside the country and folk genres, and I picked up on some of that, especially during songs like closer “Sing Along” which began with a noise-laden romp through territories unnamed, each musician seeming to stomp in his own sonic circles like a pack of dogs turning circles before laying down to rest (much to the frustration of the small but enthusiastic dancing section of the crowd).
He may have moved on from his roots (saying at one point, when a member of the crowd shouted about the humidity, “I don’t know how you guys do it anymore”) but it’s clear that Robert Ellis will always have an appreciative home here in Houston. Between songs, as he discussed with the band what song should come next, audience members shouted out any number of songs from his small but excellent catalogue, and I saw many people quietly mouthing along as he picked his way through songs new and old.
Welcome back, Robert. We sure wish you didn’t have to leave, but in some ways it’s like you never did.
