After a pair of solid releases that established Robert Ellis as an eccentric singer/songwriter with a traditional country foothold, his new self-titled LP is as definitive and weirdly beautiful a statement of defiance as you’d expect from a guy whose primary touchstones are Paul Simon and Randy Newman, as opposed to Townes Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker. Perhaps that’s why the two best tracks on a uniformly great record—the structurally sophisticated yet effortless opener “Perfect Strangers” and the brooding, soulful “California”—are keyboard-based. Already an acknowledged ace on guitar at 27, Ellis has been reacquainting himself with the keys over the last few years. Ellis will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new feature on him.
Ellis: A little more than a year ago, Jonny Fritz turned me on to this Les Blank documentary about the making of Werner Herzog’s epic film Fitzcarraldo. The film chronicles the second part of production for a movie that nearly didn’t get made. Herzog and a small team are deep in the Amazon jungle for four years faced with nearly every possible obstacle you can imagine.
When I find myself overwhelmed with life, Burden of Dreams helps me put everything into perspective. I’ve never had arrows shot at me. I’ve never had to move a riverboat over a fucking mountain. My problems mostly seem pretty trivial in comparison to what Herzog and crew were facing there in the jungle. The film also serves as a reminder that most things worth doing tend to have a certain degree of difficulty attached to them. There’s one scene I go back to over and over where Herzog is completely beaten down by the project and goes on this amazing rant about the jungle.
“Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It’s just, nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and … growing and … just rotting away. Of course, there’s a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they—they sing. They just screech in pain. It’s an unfinished country. It’s still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It’s the only land where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at what’s around us there, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle … Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel. A cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.”
His dogged determination to finish what most people would say is an impossible task is inspiring and also frightening to identify with. In this case, the project got finished. Would a different outcome have seen Herzog look like a madman rather than a genius? Should we scale back our ideas to only those that seem within reach? When do we know it’s time to pull up stakes and move on to the next, more feasible project? I guess the moral of this story for me is summed up in this quote from Herzog about the possibility of not finishing the film.
“If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams, and I don’t want to live like that.”
I don’t want to live like that.
