Blake Mills – Jelly Road – Vinyl Record

Description

Blake Mills – Jelly Road – Vinyl Record

Blake Mills makes familiar instruments feel newly strange on Jelly Road. Released in 2023, the album grew from his collaboration with Vermont musician Chris Weisman, who co-wrote and co-produced the record. Together they create songs that can feel intimate and unsettled at the same time. Mills’s quiet singing stays close to the listener, while guitars and other textures bend the space around it. The music has roots in the singer-songwriter tradition, but its unusual colors and shifting shapes make it difficult to reduce to a single genre. It is an album for listeners interested in the way a song can change as its sound changes.

Mills’s reputation as a guitarist and producer is useful background, yet Jelly Road gives those abilities a specific purpose. The playing serves the atmosphere of the songs, allowing a strange tone or an unexpected phrase to express something a more conventional arrangement might smooth away. “Skeleton Is Walking” is a strong introduction to the scale of that imagination, with space for an extended instrumental presence inside a song-based album. Elsewhere, the guitar can sound fragile, blurred or almost unfamiliar. Those sounds are part of the writing itself: they affect how the melodies feel and how much weight a quiet vocal line can carry.

Weisman’s involvement makes this a particularly collaborative entry in Mills’s catalog. Rather than treating the record as a display of one musician’s instrumental command, the pair pursue musical ideas that leave room for surprise. “Suchlike Horses,” “Highway Bright” and the title track establish a world where recognizable song structures coexist with odd turns of harmony and texture. Joseph Lorge’s recording and mixing work helps give that world definition. Small details remain audible even when the arrangements feel hazy or unstable. The record asks for attentive listening, but its warmth comes from the human scale of the singing and the curiosity that runs through the performances. The partnership had also produced music for Daisy Jones & The Six and its fictional band’s album Aurora. Jelly Road carries the collaboration into the pair’s own material, free to follow smaller, stranger ideas than a television soundtrack might require.

The credits bring several distinctive musicians into that setting, including Wendy Melvoin, Sam Gendel and Meg Duffy. Melvoin also lends her name to one of the album’s twelve tracks, while Cass McCombs shares a writing credit on “A Fez.” These connections place Jelly Road within a community of musicians who move easily between songcraft and experimentation. The later stretch, including “There Is No Now,” “Press My Luck” and “Without An Ending,” continues the album’s interest in sounds that feel both close and elusive. Across the sequence, Mills and Weisman keep the songs open enough to accommodate unusual ideas without losing the sense of a personal voice behind them.

This New Deal and Verve vinyl edition contains the complete twelve-track album. Jelly Road follows the quieter investigations of Mills’s earlier work while giving his partnership with Weisman room to develop its own identity. Listeners drawn to intricate guitar music will find plenty to follow, but the album’s appeal also lies in its patience and emotional ambiguity. The performances leave space for uncertainty, for a melody to settle gradually and for an instrumental detail to change the meaning of a passage. It is a thoughtful addition to Mills’s catalog, bringing his gifts as a songwriter, player and studio collaborator together in music that rewards time and close attention.

Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic

Track Listing

Suchlike Horses
Highway Bright
Jelly Road
Skeleton Is Walking
Unsingable
Wendy Melvoin
The Light Is Long
Breakthrough Moon
There Is No Now
Press My Luck
A Fez
Without An Ending