Timothy Halloran
Songwriter, singer, and founder of The Ellis Court.
It feels pretty weird to write about yourself in the third person, so I won’t do that. I’m a songwriter and singer originally from the U.S., but I’ve been living in Berlin since 2020. I started The Ellis Court project after moving here.
Using conventional music industry definitions, The Ellis Court is a “solo project,” except that I think such a thing doesn’t really exist. Every musician collaborates with other people to get music out into the world—usually lots of other people. And collaboration is what really drives The Ellis Court as a musical project. That’s also one of the reasons why I started this blog: to share the stories of all the folks that I get to be creative with.
I first started writing songs in the early ’90s in Los Angeles. I lived in a tiny one-room bungalow in a vintage courtyard apartment complex that was called (yes, you guessed it) Ellis Court. But my first band didn’t happen until the late ’90s in San Francisco, when I was inspired by queer punk groups like Team Dresch and Pansy Division to start a pop-punk trio with two of my closest friends. We recorded some 4-track demos, put out a short album on cassette tape, and played a bunch of live shows around town. I think our peak was getting to open for Imperial Teen at Bottom of The Hill.
A few years later I had moved to Brooklyn and started a new band called Spink. We found some early success (more on that here), but we only lasted for about a year. And after that I moved to Seattle for a while and just made music at home while earning a living at various design and marketing jobs.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, my partner and I were both working remotely from home, so we decided to move that home to Europe. We settled in Berlin, and living here made me really want to make music with other people again. So one summer I wrote a ton of new songs and then reached out to local indie pop producer Lukas Kurz to help me produce some of them. Lukas introduced me to a bunch of other Berlin-based musicians to help us make The Ellis Court’s first EP, What More.
I write all the stories for this blog (at least for now), so if you have any questions or ideas, let me know!
