Earlier this year, on Valentine’s Day no less, Robert Ellis released the best album of his career. Texas Piano Man is filled with high-octane, country-tinged piano rock and some of Ellis’ strongest and most exciting songwriting to date, so when his tour swung its way through Brooklyn on Tuesday night (4/2) there was an unmistakable excitement in the air. The stage at Rough Trade was decked out for the occasion; a banner with a drawing of Ellis’ face hung in the back, a longhorn skull sat at the base of the piano, and beneath an enormous illuminated arrow pointing center stage sat a sign that read “Robert Ellis is the Texas Piano Man”. The sign did not lie. Ellis took the stage, dressed in a bright white tux with coattails and a cowboy hat, every bit the Texas piano man, his band all in black, sat at his piano and sang out, “I’m fucking crazy, you know that it’s true.”
It’s the same line that opens the new album, and from there, things did get truly crazy. He came swinging with a bursting-at-the-seems romp on “There You Are” and the slinking, poppy “When You’re Away”, his band settling quickly into a steady but powerful energy as Ellis threw himself into the songs. I couldn’t count how many times throughout the night the sheer force of the music seemed to lift him from his low-sitting stool to bang out piano chords hunched over the keys, sweat pouring from his brow every time he lifted up his hat. It reached an electric fever pitch by the time he arrived on “Passive Aggressive”, a standout from TPM, as Ellis hit his instrument with such intensity you almost thought it might fall apart, his band carrying him in and out of a jazzy, off-kilter jam with aplomb.
Where Americana music has long made use of sonic sparseness, this go around saw Ellis and his accompanying musicians, namely guitarist Kelly Doyle, conjured up a massive sound that felt more indebted to the piano stars of the ‘70s, the prog-pop inclinations of The Who, or even contemporary Broadway musicals than to any acoustic guitar-wielding songwriter of yore. The band stayed tight as can be through the show, meeting each sudden change up or beat switch with glee and giving the show an almost symphonic grandiosity that was immensely fun to see stuffed into the smaller confines of Rough Trade.
While the new sound was tailor-made for Ellis’ new material, of which he played nearly all, it also sent some older songs in interesting directions. With Ellis at the piano instead of the guitar, songs like “Good Intentions” and “Couples Skate” were given new dimension and space for the band to flex their muscle, with a piano feature in the former morphing into a brief jam, and Doyle leading the band into a blistering finale on the latter. They also solidly nailed covers of both country standard “Amarillo by Morning” and Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right” – dedicated to all the Texans and New Yorkers respectively.
Ellis closed out the night with the rock’n’rolling “Nobody Smokes Anymore”, taking a moment to bemoan how much less fun things have gotten and encouraging everyone to loosen themselves and each other up a bit. After all, as he sings in the song, “the last years of your life are so shitty anyways.”
Photos by Eric Townsend
