HARD COPY TIME people: is James Ellis an honest man?
“How do you answer that?” asks the man himself, for some time now the top hat in Melbourne honky-tonk scene, peering uncertainly into the camera from his home where behind him sits an impressive long set of record shelves.
Well, generally yes or no. Ok, let’s put it this way Mr Ellis. On your new record, The Party Might Be Over – and album whose livewire, bar-dancing, if I had a hat I’d throw it in the air, take your partner by the hand, pleasures are so effective as to make a lie of the album title right from the start – you offer a song called Don’t Drink All By Yourself If You Can’t Be Drunk Alone, which suggests a familiarity with the demon drink. You go on to sing that “there’s too much water in this whiskey, too much hope in this wine”. But here’s the thing, there’s a rumour you don’t actually touch the stuff.
“Well … not at the minute,” he smiles. “It’s a strange experience singing that song right now when I’m drinking [alcohol-free beer] Heaps Normal at the bar. But I think there’s a reason for that, and I also say ‘not at the minute’, and ‘how long does that minute go for?’. Most of the songs, including that one, were written during 2020 lockdown …”
When no one was staying sober.
“Yeah, and that’s it exactly. And there was a lot of drinking by yourself, by myself, and there was a lot of that reflection on what’s good about this, what am I getting out of this? Like a lot of people, after a few months of heavy drinking at the start of 2020, a lot of people went sober for the next few months, and that’s what happened with me.”
Is this a bit like footy players who swear off the booze during the season to focus and stay fit and legal on and off the field?
“To be honest, that is a huge part of it,” he says. “I gave up drinking while playing a long time ago. It was twofold: my experience playing, I felt, was diminished if I was drinking; and two, watching other bands play while they were affected by whatever, you kind of walk away often, and I would say very often, just disappointed in the performance when you know that the performer is having a much better time than you are as an audience member. Don’t you feel cheated by that?”
The thrill of getting blasted before a show and swinging about absolutely certain you were doing The Best. Show. Ever! waned as he figured it was “kinda insignificant compared to people out there listening and hearing the right notes and hearing the right lyrics and everything being in time”. And let’s face it, playing long sets, multiple sets, several nights a week, filled with your own songs and a bunch of classic numbers – which, given this is country and Ellis the songwriter takes this stuff seriously, are packed with lyrics – when you’re no longer some cocky 20-year-old, requires a bit of, um, focus.
The honesty question isn’t quite settled though. It’s probably true that, as he sings, he sleeps late in the morning, but when Ellis announces as he does with the opening track, I don’t dance waltzes, can we believe him?
“Look, I love two-stepping. I love country dancing, and I think it’s an incredibly important part of this music that I love to play, honky-tonk,” says Ellis, who in fact is about to head over to Austin, Texas for a whole lot of (two-step) dancing at honky tonks. “A lot of people have this association between country dancing and waltzes and then make this assumption that dancing is waltzing, just like everyone thinks that country music is Johnny Cash – I disagree with both of these things quite strongly.”
Which must have made an awkward moment when just before he started the recording of this album, the producer, Nashville-based Micah Hulscher, said “James we’re making this country dance record but you don’t have a waltz on it. Do you want to go and write a waltz?” Still, Ellis took it as a challenge and “I kind of wrote the anti-dance song for the waltz”. It went down a treat even if it hasn’t changed his mind.
“I don’t love dancing waltzes,” he says firmly. Definitively. “My dancing world is 98 percent two-stepping and 2 per cent waltzing.”
This drinking/dancing contretemps were the least of the issues around making The Party Might Be Over though, an album whose origin story feels too ridiculous to be real.
It was recorded in late 2020 by musicians in Nashville – and not just any musicians, but some of the best in a town overflowing with high-quality players – while locked down Ellis watched on from Melbourne, where he would then record his vocals more than a year later. And then release it a further year on.
Over three days in November of that year Ellis would turn on his iPad at 3am and, from another iPad at the back of the control room, watch for the next eight or nine hours as the tracks came together under Hulscher’s guidance. Proper remote working.
Rather than bemoan the complications forced on him by Covid, Ellis reckons this album could not really have happened without it. For a start all those in-demand musicians (the likes of Fats Kaplin, Chris Scruggs, Brett Resnick and Craig Smith) would have been on the road or working on somebody else’s album, and Ellis and his regular band, The Jealous Guys, would likely have been playing hundred or more gigs.
What is most surprising about the record – given the playing was always going to be of high quality, Ellis is a good songwriter, and technology makes pretty much any sonic thing possible – is how the record sounds so energised and cohesive. There is more zest and brightness in this “disjointed” recording than on his previous “regular” albums, projecting a real sense of being in a packed room listening to loud honky-tonk. Something Ellis concedes.
“I totally agree. I could hear the magic when I was dialling in at 3am four years ago just through the iPad speakers. It was unbelievable,” says Ellis. “I remember finishing up on those calls at midday, 1pm, my time, and having to just go outside and walk around half an hour because I was just so excited about what I was hearing.”
And not a drop of alcohol was needed for that high.
READ MORE
James Ellis – The Party Might Be Over is out now via MGM
Comments