The newest release from Dennis Ellsworth is an even split of nostalgia and gratitude. Accompanied by an Easter egg-filled animated video from Aidan Searle, “Bound By Love” finds Ellsworth at his most polished as he reminisces on the simple charms of life.
“This is a condensed musical history of my life,” says Ellsworth. “It stretches from the 1970s up to today, and uses my photographic memory to tie things together, reflecting on how time spent driving in my mother’s car as a kid shaped a lot of my musical life.”
Using those memories, Ellsworth paints a picture for us, sharing a vignette of experiences decade-by-decade, name-dropping a soundtrack-within-a-song as he goes. The Dead Milkmen’s Big Lizard in My Backyard (1985), The Beatie Boy’s License to Ill (1986), U2’s Joshua Tree (1987), Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Mother’s Milk (1989) all form a sort of shared shorthand for Ellsworth’s formative years before he embarks on tales of misadventures, all told through the eyes of what is presumably Ellsworth personified as a wayward cat in the music video.
“I am bound by love, I don’t want it any other way. Baby, I can’t get enough. I don’t know any different,” sings Ellsworth on the song’s chorus, seemingly as a recognition of his own good fortune but also an admission of the limitations of his singular perspective. It’s a catchy way to remind us to find contentment in what we have.
The new video comes from Ellsworth’s full-length album, Grass Is Always Greener on the Other Side—the second installment in his larger Bound By Love Series. Featuring 32 new songs across 3 albums and 3 EPs, the series eschews the standard modus operandi of the music industry’s broken business model in favour of the approach that Bandcamp has adopted to streamline artist-to-listener connections thanks to challenges presented by the pandemic.
Ellsworth will be releasing the full-length albums exclusively to Bandcamp in CD, LP, and digital formats while the sampler EPs will available via streaming services.
Dennis Ellsworth | WEB | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM
Photograph: David Sheppard