You can take the boy out of Houston, but...well, this is part of how Robert Ellis has found himself spending his time after moving to New York City a little more than a month ago.

"There's actually a weird little honky-tonk scene in Brooklyn," says the singer-songwriter who relocated from Houston to Nashville in mid-2012 after his group, Robert Ellis & the Boys, won a fiercely loyal Bayou City following with their "Whiskey Wednesday" classic-country nights at Mango's and Fitzgerald's.

As Ellis tells it, Brooklyn's honky-tonk scene includes three bars -- Skinny Dennis, the Levee and Lucky Dog -- that offer sanctuary to Lone Star exiles, from a Willie Nelson painting to a Western swing band on Wednesday nights that Ellis says isn't half-bad. Although he notes his friend B.E. Godfrey, another Houston musician who recently relocated to NYC, makes fun of him for figuratively sticking close to home, Ellis says his Texas upbringing gives him certain advantages in the Big Apple.

"A lot of people dance, which has been really nice because girls like to dance and I don't think a lot of folks up there are into that," he says. "It's fun to grab some New York girl and make her two-step. There's a lot of improvised two-stepping going on -- people who don't know quite what it is, you know?"

Ellis, who returns to play this weekend's Untapped Houston festival at Discovery Green, sounds like he's having a ball in New York. It's rare for a night to go by without friends inviting him out to a concert, he says, naming Conor Oberst, Dawes and Old Crow Medicine Show as highlights in the short time he's been there. But he vows the city has also jump-started his writing process, and all he has to do is hop on the East River ferry or the closest subway train.

"I don't even pay attention to where it's going most of the time," Ellis admits. "I just get on and ride it until I get off and, you know, work on songs."

Ellis figures he's been writing so much because he's been practicing a technique he heard of a while back, which suggests alternating between intense focus on the task at hand and either relaxation or distracting activities (doing the dishes, say) at about five-minute intervals. That way, he explains, the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain are able to enter into a sort of dialogue with one another. Ellis says he's found walking to be especially good for that.

"As I'm walking, maybe in five minutes I'll think of something and sit down and write again," he says. "It's cool to have all this stimulus that's maybe unrelated coming at you, and to to be thinking about something that's maybe not entirely different. It's been really healthy and exciting, because I didn't write much in June or July, but in August I was writing tons."

Ellis has spent most of this year on the road behind his sophomore album for partially Houston-based New West Records, The Lights From the Chemical Plant. The constant touring can be disorienting, he admits, but it can also lead to encounters like when he was soundchecking in London and a friend of his showed up to apologize for missing his gig that night because Hayes Carll was also in town.

"I was like, 'Hayes Carll's playing?'" Ellis recounts. "She was like, 'Yeah, he's a five-minute walk away. So me and her walked over and surprised him at his sound check. I thought that was a really hilarious little coincidence."

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