Country music newbie Lindsay Ell might just call up the folks at this week’s Cologuard Classic golf tournament and see if there’s room on the pro-am roster for a very rusty amateur who can play a mean guitar.
But she has a warning: It’s been a few years since she swung a club. She can’t guarantee that anyone or anything in her path would be safe.
“I played golf with my dad and my brother when I was younger, but I haven’t actually play played in years,” she explained during a phone interview from California last week. “I’ve done like Top Golf for a few charity events, but if I do play golf, look out guys, it’s going to be quite the experience. Broken windows, I might take out some tree branches. Anything is fair game.”
On second thought, the Canadian country singer might want to stick to the stage she knows best.
She joins country star Lee Brice and Brice’s younger brother Lewis on the marquee for the Cologuard Classic Military Appreciation Concert on Saturday, Feb. 29, at Omni Tucson National Resort in Marana. The Cologuard Classic tournament began Sunday, Feb. 23, and runs through Sunday, March 1, featuring 78 golfers competing for a $1.7 million purse; the winner gets $255,000 and 255 Charles Schwab Cup points.
“I love Lee. He has such a good sense of humor. He’s so fun to be around. And he obviously is so talented. He has one of those voices that just has to amaze you. It’s like pretty incredible,” she said.
Ell, 30, comes to the Old Pueblo months after releasing her fast-rising heart-breaking ballad “I Don’t Love You” off her as yet unnamed sophomore album that’s due out this summer.
“I’m so excited about it. This new music, I really feel like I’ve even gone a little deeper,” she said. “I’m ready to share this music. I can’t wait for people to hear it.”
Technically, the record will be her third. Her 2017 debut “The Project” is her first album to be released, but the first album she recorded was a back-to-front cover of John Mayer’s Grammy-winning 2006 album “Continuum.”
The idea to record “Continuum” was her producer Kristian Bush’s. Bush, one-half of the country duo Sugarland, suggested that Ell would gain a lot of confidence if she took her favorite album — Mayer’s — and broke it down beat by beat, instrument by instrument, and recorded the full work, playing all the instruments herself and recording the vocals.
And he gave her two weeks.
“At the time I was like, because I’m kind of a studio nerd, ‘OK, this is so easy. I don’t know why you’re doing this Kristian Bush, but whatever, I’ll do this for you,’” she recalled thinking. “So I hop into it sort of eyes wide open and thinking that it’s going to be so easy. It ended up being such a revelation and a breakthrough for me. It was so much more complicated than I thought it would be.”
Two weeks later, she turned over the recording to Bush, who had one additional thought; remove the drums throughout. The drums, it turns out, was one of Ell’s hurdles — the only instrument she didn’t play.
“I’m so happy now that he made that call because it’s a little bit different. It’s not the same record recorded in a different way. It’s got a completely different vibe to it and you listen to the lyrics more,” said Ell, a self-professed guitar nerd whose chops have earned her comparisons to fellow Nashville guitar whizzes Brad Paisley and Keith Urban. “It sounds a lot more vulnerable and raw.”
Ell sent a copy of the album to Mayer, who took her backstage months later when he was playing a Nashville show and gushed how much he like the record. If time permits in her live show Saturday, Ell will slip in a cut or two off “The Continuum Project,” which was released in 2018 as her de facto second album.
“It’s my dream to one day do the full record front to back live,” she said.
Saturday’s concert starts after the last putt drops.
