Tinsley Ellis – Labor Of Love
Alligator Records | Released January 30, 2026
Four decades into a career built on electric fire and roadhouse sweat, Tinsley Ellis has stripped everything down to the grain. Labor Of Love marks his second all-acoustic album and the first where every song came from his own pen. Following last year’s Blues Music Award-nominated Naked Truth, Ellis goes even further into the raw territory where the blues began, armed with nothing but Martin guitars, a 1937 National Steel, and a mandolin he’s finally decided to use on record.
This is hill country blues filtered through a lifetime of roadwork, and Ellis doesn’t hide his sources. “Hoodoo Woman” opens with the feral stomp of R.L. Burnside, all throbbing rhythm and grit. “Long Time” locks into John Lee Hooker’s hypnotic groove, while “To A Hammer” channels Skip James’s haunting darkness. On “Sunnyland,” Ellis picks up that National Steel and howls in pure Son House fashion, proving he’s absorbed these lessons bone-deep.
The album took a detour through Bentonia, Mississippi during recording. Ellis spent time at Jimmy “Duck” Holmes’s Blue Front Café, soaking up the atmosphere where Skip James once walked. That ghostly tuning and backroads feel seeped straight into the sessions, adding another layer of authenticity to songs that were already steeped in Delta mud and Piedmont dust.
The mandolin makes its first appearance in Ellis’s recorded catalog, and he deploys it strategically. On “Sad Sad Song,” it adds a melancholy prettiness that contrasts beautifully with lyrics about heartbreak, creating that bittersweet tension where the melody lifts while the words cut. “Too Broke” gets an almost banjo-like attack on the mandolin, turning financial hardship into front-porch celebration with the album’s best bit of gallows humor: “If you don’t want to worry, stay broke all the time.”
Ellis’s fingerpicking and slide work carry most of the weight here, and the production wisely keeps everything spare. “The Trouble With Love” showcases his delicate touch on a six-string Martin, while “Low Land Of Sorrow” finds him slipping and sliding on that National, singing about hurricanes and flooding with the weariness of someone who’s seen the water rise before. The gospel influences surface on “I’d Rather Be Saved” and the closing “Lay My Burden Down,” both delivered with the directness of field hollers and church pews.
What makes Labor Of Love work is Ellis’s refusal to treat this as an exercise in nostalgia. These are modern stories about floods, fire, voodoo, and the prayers people whisper when nobody’s listening, told with the hard-earned wisdom of tens of thousands of highway miles. His vocals carry a warmth and range that sometimes gets overshadowed by his electric guitar reputation, but here they’re front and center, sweet when they need to be, raw when the moment demands it.
The stripped-down format also reveals something about Ellis’s songwriting that a full band might obscure. These thirteen originals hold up on their own structural integrity, no flash or filler to hide behind. Producer Tony Terrebonne’s mixing gives the album a spacious stereo field that rewards headphone listening, letting Ellis’s guitar work breathe and resonate in ways that feel almost three-dimensional.
Ellis shrugs off praise with the modesty of a lifer, saying simply that playing this music is a labor of love. That devotion shows in every note. After forty years of grinding it out, he’s not reinventing himself—he’s burning down to the essence. This might be the purest signal Tinsley Ellis has ever sent.
