Blake Mills has been a first-call guitarist, producer and songwriter for more than a decade — everyone from John Legend to Bob Dylan to Norah Jones has sought him out. Accordingly, it can sometimes feel like he's cracked the code for good.
"For somebody like me, who deals in music every day, sometimes it can feel like it loses its mystery and its luster," he tells GRAMMY.com over Zoom, the day his latest album, Jelly Road, was released.
But his whirlwind last few years have kicked up the magic anew — specifically, his performances with Joni Mitchell. After being sidelined by a brain aneurysm, the titanic singer/songwriter has miraculously returned to the stage, which Mills calls "pretty astounding."
"On a human level, that's pretty astounding," Mills says. Because a study in Mitchell's return is a study in life, music and consciousness — watching her neurons establish new pathways, and her singular musical language flow through her fingers once again.
Jelly Road is charged with this sense of mystery and awe. Throughout, its melodies come at you from consistently unexpected places; its production is commensurately comforting and alien.
The songs themselves feel unearthly, gravity-defying, logic-breaking: what is the Jelly Road, and why does it weigh heavily in the narrator's memory? Who's the eccentric character in "A Fez," pondering a rainbow of the titular headgear? Knowing's not the point; knowing would break the spell.
Even as Mills recalls his unforgettable experiences with Mitchell — as well as working with Bob Dylan on Rough and Rowdy Ways, and working on the soundtrack to "Daisy Jones and the Six" — it's easy to sense that the deeper he spelunks into music, the more mysterious it gets.
"There is something macro going on with what we do, and we don't even know how powerful it is and how powerful it can be for people," Mills recalls thinking, in the context of Mitchell. "It's a good reminder."
Read on for an in-depth interview with Mills about walking the Jelly Road, the indispensable contributions of collaborator Chris Weisman and his detour into music for TV.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
How would you summarize the arc of your life and career since your last solo album, Mutable Set?
If I had the world's largest bingo card, I never would've imagined putting some of the things that have happened on it.
I can't remember if, when we spoke last, the Rough and Rowdy Ways sessions had happened yet? And then, more recently, getting to work with Joni Mitchell, and working on the "Daisy Jones" TV show and meeting Chris [Weisman] and developing that relationship.
It's weird to encapsulate two or three years with the effect that the pandemic has had on time and even my memory. I struggle a little bit to create a story through it all, but I'm definitely really grateful that I had the television show to work on for so long.
That might sound like a backhanded compliment or statement, because it was a really long time and a lot of work, but it was during a period where a lot of my colleagues were searching fervently for something to work on. Things were scary and slowed down.
That leads us to here, and the record that just came out today, and the shows that I've been doing over the last month. It's just been one of the most fruitful collaborative relationships I've probably had in my life, in my career.
Jelly Road feels like a tilt from Mutable Set. What was the germ of the concept behind it?
I like that you mentioned that it is a deviation from Mutable Set. I think from [2021's Pino Palladino co-led album] Notes With Attachments as well; there's a language that's starting to form over those two records in particular.
But beyond that, I don't necessarily make records with a lot of a mission statement. Other than having songs written, you're kind of going out on the lake with a fishing pole. You know there's fish there. You don't know how long it's going to take for you to catch one. You might have a day where for some reason you don't catch anything. That's what it's like to go into the studio when I'm making most things. Certainly solo records.
I think at a certain point, we just start to look at what we've gathered, and understand what the record is — what the personality of the record is. And that could be pretty deep into the process.
Did the language of the Bob sessions or tunes seep in there?
I think one of the things that I learned from working on that record was, I got to observe how it seems to me like he envisions the singer in the song. It's almost like an actor. The qualities of the music, and everything going on, are aspects of a scene.
That really changed, or added a perspective for me in the studio. When I'm producing myself or somebody else, to look at it through that angle. Instead of just as the singer, or writer, of the song, to look at it like it's a performance on camera.
Then, you have to form your own opinions about what's most effective.
Regarding Jelly Road: I've always been drawn to your tunes as much, or more than, the stuff you get the most ink for — guitar, production. Do you try to write from a place of mystery? Obscurity? A cloudy place?
Well, before coffee, everything is coming from a cloudy place for me. As a writer, I feel like it's an ephemeral medium. My favorite stuff, it's pretty mysterious for me where it comes from. My least favorite stuff, it feels a little more mappable. Direct experiences that I've had in my life.
When I say "least favorite," it doesn't necessarily mean that I don't like the song, but the electrical charge that I get when I think about it. Or, if I'm playing it, it feels smaller.
A lot of the stuff on Jelly Road feels like it's written from a place just beyond my reach of total comprehension. Not to say I don't know what the songs are all about, but that what they're about has more to do with feelings than events sometimes.
It seems like you're playing with tropes, or formats, of what songs are. You ask, "What can make a song unsingable?" The last song is called "Without an Ending." In its specificity, "Press My Luck" feels like a wink; it feels like a big personal moment, but I question whether it is.
In "Press My Luck," there's a little bit of a slice-of-life perspective, where it might feel like a big jump to go from the day-to-day personal to something that's a little bit more universal.
But really, when you think about what day-to-day life is, it's inundated with information about the world. It comes at you in a moment where, just prior, you might be thinking about something happening in your own life, or your own head.
I think that jump is actually pretty familiar for people psychologically. It might stand out in a situation where you're listening to a song, or looking at a painting, or reading something, and really trying to understand something about the artist or the work.
Then, it might be like, Well, this is interesting. It makes this big leap here. But I think in everyday life, it's probably a pretty mundane thing for our brains to do.
That's a fairly meta conception. I know you worked on Randy Newman's Dark Matter. At the time, you said, "There's movie music, and then there's movie-music."
He's a master at the meta form now, and that record is a really good example of it.
I've never done anything that's even remotely close to that, but it's comfortable for me to dabble with one foot in something that's a little more mysterious to me and just write about it with a little bit of wonder. Then, maybe write things that I've got a little bit of a firmer grasp on — or I think I have a little firmer grasp on, only to be proven wrong about it years later.
I've got to play that song again, thinking, Oh, man. I was such an idiot when I was 24 and writing this song. I've been writing songs and putting them on records since I was 20 — 19, maybe, even. Or younger, if you count Simon Dawes.
The things that you aspire to stylistically at that age — if you're still aspiring to them when you're in your 30s, I don't know. I don't even want to go there, but it's definitely not where I am today. So, there's also that to deal with.
Hopefully, these songs, and everything I'm doing now, is a natural evolution from some things that I've done before.
Some tunes have a freewheeling quality, like you're digging through your bag of tricks in real time. Does that bely something else? Do you fussily labor in the studio? Or do you kind of charge ahead?
Chris Weisman noted something about being in [the studio with me], because it was his first time around me in an environment like that. He was surprised by how unceremonial a lot of aspects of recording are. Because he's a big fan of — in particular — Mutable Set and Notes With Attachments.
I think to his ear, the mental image of what's going on in those records is a lot of tweaking and precision. I guess in reality, there are some things — like vocals or guitar solos or stuff like that — that happen very quickly and without a lot of fuss.
Then, there's other things. I might be sitting at the computer for a long time. That could be something like the bass performance. Or what instrument will live on the bottom end, if it's not a bass.
I guess I will say: yes, I do tweak, but it's maybe not on the things that people might [think]. If they're making a hierarchy of what's important on an album, it might not be on the things at the top of that pyramid.
What did you learn from working on "Daisy Jones & the Six"? It seems like during the pandemic, when work was uncertain, that could have been a meditative outlet.
It was not a meditative experience. It was an intense amount of work. When all was said and done, I think it was 30 songs or something.
It's tricky. It's not my typical process, writing on assignment like that and creating a fictionalized version of a band that I would've listened to from the '70s, and working with the actors to try to get the vocal performances to come to life.
It was just all new, and it was intense. I think I knew from asking colleagues, "What's it like working in film, working in TV, on music? Everybody — even the people who have successful careers at it — get a little flash of death in their eyes. It's intense work.
I never felt like it was a place where I could go to turn off the trauma of what was going on in the world around it. But what I was referring to earlier was in many ways more from a creative standpoint — to have something to work on, to have a goal.
Yeah, I think that's what I meant. To have a goal.
Yeah, through that time. Also, an economic standpoint: the studio is so expensive to keep going to have something that utilizes the recording studio.
Because for all of those songs, I had to make pretty fleshed out demos. There's a lot of ears that are going on those songs to say yes or no: "We like this." Or maybe, "Take another crack at it."
Those ears are not used to listening to iPhone recordings of a voice and a guitar or a piano. They kind of need to hear the whole thing. So the gamble on each one — the dice roll on each one — was a pretty elaborate recording.
I think maybe to the thing you were illustrating, I did have a place to go in terms of my own studio. I did shut out a lot of the chaos outside when I was in there working on that stuff.
That sounds terrifying to me. Building this mansion of toothpicks knowing that somebody might knock it down once it's completed.
Yeah. All I could do at the end of the day — and what my job ultimately was — was to make something that pleases me. Try to represent myself and my tastes as something that the show could lean on.
I also want to say that to the credit of Amazon and [Reese Witherspoon-founded media company] Hello Sunshine, I think that the amount of freedom that I experienced creatively is unusual in that world. It did not turn into the thing that I was most afraid of, which was that I was essentially collaborating with a studio on music.
The studio was very deferential to its music team in terms of what is accurate and believable for that time — what is impressive. If we're trying to tell the story that this band was one of the biggest bands and best bands in their time and in their community, what does that mean? What can they do that's so special?
They really did go with us on that. They also did not flinch when I said, "OK, I'll take the gig, but I want to work with anybody in the world that I choose. And the first person I'm going to call is Chris Weisman." They were not afraid, and I think that is unusual.
I want to ask about working with Joni. Even today, I think we've only scratched the surface of her artistry and language; it's fathoms deep. What did you learn working with her?
I would say that my time so far has revealed something more interesting to me than the proximity to what she's been capable of as an artist. And that is actually witnessing somebody's recovery from something that frankly should have wiped them out.
She's somebody who has learned how to walk in her life one, two… I think three times. Let's see. Once when she was a baby. She had polio; she had to relearn how to walk. And then, she had this aneurysm and had to relearn how to walk and talk and sing and now play guitar.
It's these things that are returning to somebody in this time at this age [79]. She's regaining these abilities almost a decade after having an aneurysm. A lot of people, after a brain injury — if it doesn't come back in the first two years, I don't think it usually comes back.
So, on a human level, that's pretty astounding. And then, you tie in the stuff that you're referring to: her language that is unique.
If you just look at the guitar side of it — which is very fun for me, by the way, to be this close to — her right-hand technique on guitar is so unusual and unique and her own. And it's improvisatory. Every time she plays a song, she plays it in a different way.
There's no book to refer back to, to say, "Well, this is how you do Joni Mitchell." When she had her aneurysm and couldn't play, really, that language left the world. Even though she was still alive, a lot of the things that only she can do as a musician left the planet.
Somehow, we're all lucky enough to wake up and enjoy the reality that some of these things have returned to us, for who knows how long.
She is also — by her own words, it seems — at the happiest point in her life. A lot of the negativity of being a woman in the entertainment industry and everything else has been wiped away and has not returned.
I'm so grateful that the time in which my path has crossed hers has been at this moment in her life, because it's really incredible and inspiring. I realize how extremely lucky I am to get to be there for it.
Let's end it on Jelly Road. When you listen back, what moments, or Easter eggs, are you drawn to?
I'm in New York. Right before midnight last night, I took a walk to get a slice, but really what I was doing was listening to the record one more time before it came out. Just to have one last spin to myself. That was the first time I'd listened to it in a minute.
The perspective was a little fresher than it's been. I'm trying to think of moments that stood out. I really enjoy hearing Chris's Venova gestures on the song "Jelly Road."
The Venova is the thing that kind of sounds like a straight soprano saxophone on that song. It's this little plastic recorder that has a saxophone mouthpiece on it. It's molded to have some characteristics physically of a saxophone, so it's like a toy version of a straight sax.
Chris, during the pandemic, discovered this instrument and decided, "I'm going to be one of the probably 12 people in the world who have one of these and play it, but I'm going to try to be the best at it in the world."
It's like being a professional and riding a children's bicycle with training wheels on it or something. Being able to do ridiculous BMX tricks, and he did it.
I think he might be the best Venova-ist on the planet at the moment, but we're putting the instrument on the map and just going to sit back and watch prices skyrocket.
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