Electric guitar ace Tinsley Ellis feared he would lose his chops during the pandemic. Constant practice led to his new — and, surprisingly, solo acoustic — album.
BY GARY GRAFF
TINSLEY ELLIS KNOWS he’s “always been a pretty high-voltage electric” guitar player, at least since he was recording with the Heartfixers back in the early ’80s, and certainly during the 36 years since he signed with Alligator Records as a solo act. But the idea of a solo acoustic album — which he released in February as Naked Truth — has been in Ellis’s head for almost all that time.
“I’ve been threatening to do it for almost 30 years,” he says from his home in his native Atlanta, where Ellis recorded the 12-track collection of originals and covers using his 1969 Martin D-35 and a 1937 National O Series steel guitar, which he plays with a brass slide. “On a couple of occasions, I had asked [Alligator founder] Bruce Iglauer what he thought of the idea of me doing an acoustic album. He goes, ‘Well, those kinds of things work much better when the artist is famous.’
“I said, ‘Everythingworks better when the artist is famous,” Ellis adds with a laugh. “So I finally just did it on my own.”
As with many creative endeavors of the past few years, the pandemic was the impetus. “I was so afraid of losing my chops that I turned my studio into my day job,” Ellis explains. “I went downstairs and began writing and recording every morning, starting at six or seven, with a cup of coffee, of course. The studio became my new instrument.
“I did a lot of these acoustic songs, and I would collect them in a file, and I started looking at that file going, Y’know what? I’ve got more than enough songs for an interesting acoustic album! I think the allure was just to do something different.” Ellis also notes that a great many of his electric songs over the years were written on acoustic guitar in hotel rooms while on tour. The big difference this time was keeping them acoustic rather than translating them into electric trio, or larger, settings.
The acoustic sound, Ellis explains, is what really snared him during his woodshedding. “I had two totally different sounds, acoustically,” he says. The Martin was a high school graduation gift from his father. “When I told him I wanted an acoustic guitar, he was thrilled with the possibility of getting me an instrument that wouldn’t deafen the family, like my Les Paul and Twin Reverb I played all the time,” Ellis recalls. When the
