Tyler Ellis is among those rare musicians who manage to be serious and unburdensome at the same time. His new single “Union Song” – the first from the upcoming ninth (!) album Hardwarestore, due out in June – sounds like a smart and tired person decided not to be angry, but to sing.
And it works.
“Union Song” is a song about the world calming down, at least for a minute. So I hit play, notebook in hand, ready to take notes. The first seconds of “Union Song” – guitar, voice, and a homely, cozy atmosphere. Nothing extra. Ellis sings quietly, without pressure, not trying to convince anyone of anything. And here I made a mistake: I relaxed.
Because when the choir came in – the notebook flew somewhere to the side. It’s hard to explain rationally, but I’ll try. The choir appears not as decoration, but as collective breathing – suddenly there are more people in the room. This turn hits more precisely than any crescendo. Goosebumps down the spine from the surge of emotion. The song changed the temperature in the room without touching the thermostat. The track rests on minimalism – and that’s enough: everything unnecessary has been deliberately removed. The guitar holds the space, the voice fills it, the choir lends a shoulder. Exactly lends a shoulder – it doesn’t press, doesn’t elevate, doesn’t dramatize.
The spirit of Woody Guthrie is easy to catch – he wrote about people who were tired but did not give up. Ellis is about the same, only the action is moved into our “hellish late capitalism,” where the word “we” is more and more often pronounced with an apologetic intonation. Ellis sings: “I got my brothers and my brothers got me, I got my sisters and my sisters got me,” – a simple, but precise phrase. Ellis himself explains the idea like this: “it’s not only about unions and protests, but about people in general – about working side by side for the common good.”
Photo by Myke Massei
I don’t know what the rest of “Hardwarestore “will be like – Ellis’s ninth album comes out in June, and I should say, the title is intriguing. And if the first single is a tuning fork, then the tuning promises to be precise.
Sometimes one song is enough for the world to calm down for a minute.
This one manages it.
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