Bearing Torches’ Jon Ellison on going from the pulpit to the stage and his rock-corrupted soul

Bearing Torches is a brand-new band out of Kansas City, but it certainly doesn’t sound that way. On the band’s songs, lead singer Jon Ellison pushes his powerful, jagged-edged vocals to soaring heights, aided by the good company of driving guitar riffs and enthralling crescendos. There’s something endearing and nostalgic about tracks like “Headlights” and “Radio Man,” in which Ellison sounds every inch like the seen-better-days rock stars who undoubtedly inspired him. 

But there’s quite a bit more to Bearing Torches than tribute chords and Bon Jovi-like swagger. Listening to the group’s demos, you would never guess that the 29-year-old Ellison didn’t hear his first rock song until he was 16, or that his past life included a long stint as a minister. Raised in a small town outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, as part of a strict sect of Baptists, Ellison never quite imagined that he’d get as far as being the ringleader in a rock-and roll-band, playing late shows at boozy clubs. 

Ahead of the band’s first show tonight at the Riot Room, we chatted with Ellison about how the band got together and how rock music sent him down the devil’s path. 

The Pitch: Give me a little background on the band. 

Ellison: It’s a pretty new project for all of us. My little brother moved out from North Carolina in the middle of last year to start Bearing Torches with my wife, Jennifer, and myself, and we found a couple local people to play music with. We have an accordion player named Ash Caywood, a bass player named Chase Ihde and a keyboard player named Brent Jameson. I started writing material in late 2012, and it’s kind of moved well beyond the singer-songwriter stuff. We wanted to build it out into a full band sound, and tonight will be our very first show as Bearing Torches.

How long have you all been playing together?

We started playing together as a three-piece – just me, my wife on drums and my brother on lead guitar – in early June 2013… so going on eight months now. Ash Caywood joined in July, and Brent is a new addition as of this year. We really just started kind of hashing it out as a full band pretty recently.

This is my first band project. I was in the Navy, and we tried very unsuccessfully to put together a music project there, but everyone kept getting deployed. [Laughs.] When we got here [to Kansas City, two years ago], we convinced my little brother to leave college and take a chance on this music project with us.

The tracks I’ve heard don’t sound like a band’s first time at the rodeo.

Well, Joseph and I grew up performing together. I’m the oldest of five kids, and we were all home-schooled, and mom’s whole idea was that we were gonna be like the Partridge Family Band. Me and my twin sister were the first ones, raised on the guitar and piano, and we initially sang, and then every child after that followed. Mom gave them each an instrument. Joseph was originally a trumpet player. It’s funny – this band has caused kind of a rift in the family as Joseph and I have decided to go off together.

Why? Does your entire family want in on the project now? Is everyone calling you up offering to play the tambourine?

[Laughs.] Well, we were raised very religiously, and the religious aspect of them now is still very anti-rock music. They’re like, “What is this devil music? I can’t believe we trained them in Gospel music for all these years, and this is what they’re doing!”

I didn’t hear my first rock song until I was 16 years old. We lived a very sheltered life – anything that wasn’t in 4/4 or 3/4 time, we couldn’t listen to it. So this [rock band] has been quite the shock for our family. I mean, I was a minister from the age of 11. That was my childhood, traveling around church camps and ministering from the pulpit. We were part of a sect of the Baptist religion called Independent Baptist. It’s very letter-of-the-law, biblical stuff. You read King James Version 16 of the Bible – the first version of the Bible that was translated to English – and you try to live that as word-for-word as possible. It’s very kind of hellfire and brimstone.

That’s insane. How did you find rock music in that kind of atmosphere?

When you lived the way we did, chores would last forever. A lot of what we did was centered around work. We had a 4-acre lot that I would start mowing on a Wednesday afternoon with a push mower, and it would take me three days. And there was this kid who was really rebellious and had gotten kicked out of the public school and sent to our little religious school, and he sort of opened those doors. So I’m 16 years old, mowing the lawn with my headphones, and I’ve got preaching tapes in the cassette player – in case my parents look at it – and I’ve got it tuned to the rock station on the radio.

I remember listening to that and feeling more alive than I’d ever felt in my life. I remember how I started trying to make my own lyrics to Pearl Jam songs. And I just thought, at the time, that rock music was the only thing that really tells it like it is, and that the things I have to get up and speak about – I don’t really have a heart for them.

That must have been quite the transition for you, going from one path of life to the one you’ve found now.

There’s a lot of duality in a personality that grows up the way that I did, and I’ve gotten to a point where I can recognize that. I was raised to be a poised and polished person. I grew up in seminary and being a preacher, so for years, how I relate to people has been sort of bottled up. Writing music has been my way to relate to the world. I’m naturally a really shy person. A lot of times, I have to retreat inside my own head and construct what I want to say about the world. In a huge way, this music is an enormous release for me, to be able to say what I’ve always wanted to say about people or the world.

I think a lot of what you find is what you swing the hammer doing, and in a lot of ways, that defines who you are as a person. Music was a huge window into my life, discovering that there was a bigger world out there, and I’ve always been attracted to that rock archetype – Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan – people who try to sort a lot of heavy work. They feel like that’s their life’s work, to swing the hammer on music. I’ve done a lot of different things and had a lot of different versions of myself, but they were all kind of leading back to this idea. It’s finding a version of myself that I’ve always been waiting to build.

Bearing Torches is at the Riot Room tonight, opening up for the Yawpers. Details here. 

To listen to Bearing Torches online, go here.