Press release –
Award-winning singer-songwriter and brilliant storyteller Tyler Ellis releases his ninth album to date, Hardwarestore, on June 12th, and celebrates it with a record release party/concert on June 18th at Hugh’s Room in his hometown of Toronto. Hardwarestore is available on all major platforms.
Hardwarestore burnishes Ellis’s well-deserved reputation as an authentic chronicler of working people’s lives. He captures and dignifies their daily struggles – and his own – with the heart of a lion, the soul of a poet, and the skill of a lifelong singer-songwriter. The folks in these songs work at blue-collar jobs, have a drink or three from time to time, listen to country music, sit on the porch and pick guitars together. Ellis finds the universal truth in their lives – and his own – as they sometimes find love and sometimes lose it, sympathize with each other’s plight, feel the passage of time, celebrate small victories, struggle with big hardships.
Working with his voice and acoustic guitar, and minimal but perfectly apropos backing instruments and voices, he hews closely to folk, country, and blues traditions, almost whispering his compelling truths in our ears.
Among the standouts on Hardwarestore is “Union Song,” which channels the spirit of the late, great Woody Guthrie, in a heartfelt anthem of unity in the face of division, with a small but powerful choir of voices emphasizing the point. As Ellis sings, “I got my brothers and my brothers got me, I got my sisters and my sisters got me,” he champions the idea that “there are no others, there’s just us,” people of “every shade and every hue.” Another gem is “Late in the Evening,” a song about “drinking my feelings away,” but looking deeper at the despair that fuels the addiction, and the inner struggle with the effect that hard feelings can have, without a helping hand. “For Your Tears” showcases Ellis’s expertise as a songwriter, providing deep empathy for trauma in three short verses, with lyrics so universally applicable he needn’t even name the source of the pain, and so concise that he does it with three short verses, in less than two minutes.
Elsewhere, “On Everybody’s Mind,” Ellis looks at how time slips away, often without notice; on ”Work Friends,” he celebrates the way everyday solidarity can make the drudgery of labour easier to bear; on “Serendipitous,” he rejoices in the possibility of finding true love in an unexpected place; on “Hardwarestore,” he revels in heading down there to copy his front-door key, so his beloved can move in, and the couple can live together.
With Hardwarestore, Ellis once again stakes his claim as a poet laureate of working people, and a songsmith of exceptional skill. Long may he continue to catalogue their day-to-day lives – and his own.
Tyler Ellis has worn two musical hats for a long time. On the one hand, he’s a celebrated, award-winning singer-songwriter; on the other, an award- winning music teacher. So, his wry, thoughtful songs about love and life in The Great White North comfortably rub shoulders with his songs about the seasons, Venn diagrams, and counting to 10.
With his teaching career on the back burner (though he now periodically drops in on music programs in elementary schools around Toronto, as the go-to “Music Supply Teacher”), Ellis has been busy releasing critically acclaimed music. In 2024, it was his album Greater-Than, a set of mostly unreleased songs recorded live at The Free Times Café in Toronto. In 2025, Down by the Don — with cameos by Julian Taylor and Bill McBirnie – featured two songs nominated for the Canadian Folk Music Awards Song of the Year “100 Proof” and “Love Letters.” Now, in 2026, he’ll release Hardwarestore.
Over the years, Ellis has shared a lot of music with a lot of people. Whether writing ditties for CBC Kids (a “days of the week” song); co-writing with The Julian Taylor Band; talking about music education on CBC Ideas (“Ballad of the Tin Ears”); presenting university lectures on the joy of singing (“Bad Singer/Good Singer” with author Tim Falconer); hosting the long-running Riverboat Monday Open Stage, currently at Noonan’s pub on The Danforth in Toronto; performing shows, both solo and with his band The Eddy Line; his many years of conducting a 75-plus-member junior elementary school choir; or, just working on his craft, for Ellis it’s always just music as usual.
AWARDS
- JUNO Award 2024 Contemporary Roots Album of the Year nomination for Julian Taylor’s Beyond the Reservoir which closes with Tyler’s song “100 Proof”
- Canadian Folk Music Award 2023 Single of the Year nomination for Julian Taylor’s release of “100 Proof.”
- The song “Weighing Down” by Julian Taylor, and with a minor co-write by Ellis, was nominated for the 2024 Folk Music Ontario (now Folk Canada) Song of the Year.
- The song “Love Letters,” (co-written with Julian Taylor), from the 2025 album Down by the Don was nominated by International Folk Music Awards for Song of the Year and was track two on Julian Taylor’s JUNO-nominated Pathways.
- Folk Music Ontario Songs from the Heart Award 2019 for “Gone” co-written w/ The Julian Taylor Band
- Toronto Star Readers’ Choice Music Instructor Diamond Award 2019
