Album by album
Blake Mills
The pick of the virtuoso’s own records, and those he’s produced for others
“C
REATIVITY is messy,” says Blake Mills, as he picks at a guitar in his Los Angeles home. “It’s like a dream –if you try and transcribe what happens in a dream you’ll sound like a crazy person… but they make total sense while you’re in them.”
The guitarist, singer and producer has built up an impressive body of work over the past decade and a half, both with his own records and in his collaborations. His openness to wild ideas, liberated by his considerable prowess on guitar, has so far led to gigs with Jackson Browne, sessions with Bob Dylan and production for Laura Marling, Alabama Shakes and others.
“My first time in a proper studio was at Sound City with producer Tony Berg,” he marvels. “And now Tony and I lease Sound City together.” It was at the complex’s Studio A that Mills and bassist Pino Palladino crafted their new album, Notes With Attachments, a post-everything collage of jazzy, hazy instrumentals. His zest for experimentation always to the fore, the guitarist is especially thrilled about the record.
“When you don’t have a vocal you can do some interesting things with arrangements and production,” he says. “You can have a level of detail on a bass guitar that would otherwise distract from a singer, all this finger noise and things that usually would crowd a voice. With that gone, you really start to hear people’s personalities in their performances.”
TOM
PINNOCK
Blake Mills, 2020: making sense of dreamlike creative states
KOURTNEY KYUNG SMITH
Mills (second left) reunited with the other former members of Simon Dawes (now morphed into Dawes) at the Grammy Museum, LA, October 2016
Alabama Shakes in 2015: aiming for something “more exploratory”
Laura Marling, 2017: “such a confident instrumentalist”
EMMA McINTYRE/WIREIMAGE
“I was afacilitator”: Mills with Pino Palladino, 2021
Perfume Genius, 2020: “I get alot of cinematic inspiration from him”
MIKE PISCITELLI
SIMON DAWES CARNIVORE
RECORD COLLECTION, 2006
Mills’ first release, in the band that became Dawes after his departure
This was a really fun, wonderful experience. Of course, I cannot stand to listen to it now and probably haven’t been able to since it came out – like most records I’m part of – but I do have a lot of fond memories of being in a band now, years later… all the time spent in an Econoline van driving around the country with myfriends, eating horrible food and just loving it. I was that guy in the band who had all these ideas –I mean, everybody else had ideas too, but I was the one who would get into conversation with the drummer right away… “I had an idea what you could play, and the bass part…” I was probably so annoying to be in a band with. It was surely apparent to some people, but maybe not to me, that my destiny was more in production. Along with a bunch of other guitars, I was playing a Les Paul that Dickey Betts gave to me. WhenI was in high school, one of the local bands I played with was Dickey’s son Duane’s. I got the guitar as a graduation present –I think my dad might have had a lot to do with it. I opened up the case, it smelt like a saloon, and there was this incredible instrument inside.