Tyler Ellis Releases New Album HARDWARESTORE – OUT June 12th
Award-winning singer-songwriter and brilliant storyteller Tyler Ellis releases his ninth album to date, Hardwarestore, on June 12th, and celebrates it with a record release party/concert on June 18th at Hugh’s Room in his hometown of Toronto.
Hardwarestore burnishes Ellis’s well-deserved reputation as an authentic chronicler of working people’s lives. He captures and dignifies their daily struggles – and his own – with the heart of a lion, the soul of a poet, and the skill of a lifelong singer-songwriter. The folks in these songs work at blue-collar jobs, have a drink or three from time to time, listen to country music, sit on the porch and pick guitars together. Ellis finds the universal truth in their lives – and his own – as they sometimes find love and sometimes lose it, sympathize with each other’s plight, feel the passage of time, celebrate small victories, struggle with big hardships.
Working with his voice and acoustic guitar, and minimal but perfectly apropos backing instruments and voices, he hews closely to folk, country, and blues traditions, almost whispering his compelling truths in our ears.
Among the standouts on Hardwarestore is “Union Song,” which channels the spirit of the late, great Woody Guthrie, in a heartfelt anthem of unity in the face of division, with a small but powerful choir of voices emphasizing the point. As Ellis sings, “I got my brothers and my brothers got me, I got my sisters and my sisters got me,” he champions the idea that “there are no others, there’s just us,” people of “every shade and every hue.” Another gem is “Late in the Evening,” a song about “drinking my feelings away,” but looking deeper at the despair that fuels the addiction, and the inner struggle with the effect that hard feelings can have, without a helping hand. “For Your Tears” showcases Ellis’s expertise as a songwriter, providing deep empathy for trauma in three short verses, with lyrics so universally applicable he needn’t even name the source of the pain, and so concise that he does it with three short verses, in less than two minutes.
Elsewhere, “On Everybody’s Mind,” Ellis looks at how time slips away, often without notice; on ”Work Friends,” he celebrates the way everyday solidarity can make the drudgery of labour easier to bear; on “Serendipitous,” he rejoices in the possibility of finding true love in an unexpected place; on “Hardwarestore,” he revels in heading down there to copy his front-door key, so his beloved can move in, and the couple can live together.
With Hardwarestore, Ellis once again stakes his claim as a poet laureate of working people, and a songsmith of exceptional skill. Long may he continue to catalogue their day-to-day lives – and his own.