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Short version
Ellis Undercover created her stage name due to her career in the correctional system and juvenile justice, where she teaches music and writes songs with inmates. One of her first co-writes outside of the system was with Wade Forster, with whom she created the outstanding ‘October’. She has also released singles of her own, including ‘Wildfire’.
Long version
The first I heard of Ellis Undercover, who lives in the Central West of New South Wales, was the song ‘October’ from Wade Forster’s latest album, The Aftermath. The song is a standout on an already brilliant album, and it was written by the pair at the CMAA Academy of Country Music earlier this year, then – as Ellis tells me in this interview – recorded within a month.
Ellis grew up on the music of David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash, started writing songs at twelve and gigging at fourteen, with a lot of Taylor Swift in her set. Several years ago she supported Fanny Lumsden in Dubbo when Lumsden’s tour came through the area – and she has quite a story to tell about that!
After leaving school Ellis studied Music Industry in Sydney then worked in event management, wanting a career she could take back to the country and still be close to music if she wanted to quit. She moved home after the pandemic and got straight back into gigging.
‘I loved events but I loved to be on the stage way more,’ she says.
Then she embarked on a new career when she was approached about teaching music in a correctional centre. There was a fair degree of trepidation about it, but, she says:
‘It’s the best job I’ve ever had – I love it so much. I can’t even think about doing something that doesn’t help other people any more.’
Forster was one of the first people she’d written with outside of a prison environment, as her job involves writing songs with inmates in correctional centres and juvenile justice. Ellis’s stage name is a consequence of her work in corrections, as her students can’t legally know her name; it’s a variant of Miss Elle, the name her students know her by: ‘Elle is Undercover’.
Initially Ellis didn’t think she’d write country music songs – she was resisting the genre until the genre itself changed.
‘I write stories that are country, I write about things that happen in the country, I’m very country in my personality and my nature, and I write everything on acoustic guitar. If the song has four chords it’s done, in my opinion,’ she says with a laugh, ‘so I think I should have been there the whole time.’
But she also thought, I don’t drive a tractor – I can’t be a country artist. I don’t own a pair of boots. ‘It didn’t feel like I was in the box enough until the box expanded.’
Now she has a country single, ‘Wildfire’, as well as ‘Love to Hate You Baby’ with Red Williams. ‘Wildfire’ is, she says, ‘about women in our industry and any male-dominated industry being told what to do, what to wear, how to act and just saying no, I don’t really care, and going their own way.’
Ellis is an impressive, intelligent artist with the musicality to match her lyric ability, and it will be wonderful to have new songs on the EP she’s working towards.
Ellis Undercover will be appearing at Tamworth Country Music Festival in January and Howlin’ Country Rock n Rodeo in Newcastle on 13 February.
Listen to Ellis Undercover on Apple Music
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