Chuck Ellis

It’s like hearing your secrets set to music, sung more beautifully than it ever felt carrying them hidden and alone – an effect of Chuck Ellis’ concerts, the blistering openness and intimacy. One of the miracles of his début album “Champagne” and the follow up album, “Brainbox,” is that the very same improbable intimacy is somehow wafting through the speakers, like a door you’ve left open to another year past but unforgotten. It makes no sense, and it’s why we started thinking music was important to us in the first place. Why it even exists.

Trying to pinpoint the native North Carolinian’s particular set of talents has become something of a spectator sport to those who have seen him play – a group of people growing larger by the day. Is it his golden-smooth vocal chords? The melodies delicate to the point of breaking yet still so strong we find ourselves singing to them days afterwards? We check off the list: R&B, electro-pop driven, solid songwriting in the traditional American vein, an able and increasingly experienced frontman. There’s quite a lot to add up. Is it the flexibility of the experience, the durability of those songs, knowing that at any given show the band may range in size from Chuck alone up to a ten-peice band complete with string section, but still the bare-knuckled, sweet-hearted honesty will be the same? Or not the same. Maybe better with each listening. You walk out of those shows having gotten more than you gave.

He’s taken his time, building up his act, his war-chest of solid tunes, his relationships with the community and its artists, the respect of co-laborers in music and industry. He’s worked gradually and persistently, making the current highs feel to us like only the beginning of a long, fruitful career.

Picking out one element doesn’t lead us to the searing-hot soul of Chuck Ellis’ music any more than diagnosing the drive-train gets us to the grocery store, which is something of the magic of it, if we can think of it in so bewilderingly simple a word: magic. Terribly lived-in and, sometimes under an artist’s and performer’s steady and unfailingly patient gaze, opening up suddenly before us in poignant and heart-steadying beauty, comforting and mysterious the way the confessional has become. An old, comfortable friend, and something still distant beneath all that familiarity. Something listening for another song.

@chuckxellis