Thoughts on Blake Mills' Jelly Road
I listened to American producer/guitarist Blake Mills’ new collaborative album with Chris Weisman, Jelly Road, at least 5 times as I drove from Regina, Saskatchewan to Edmonton, Alberta into a shroud of wildfire smoke on July 13, 2023 overloaded with a carload of possessions that I was taking back from my childhood home.
On first listen, the guitar interplay on album opener “Suchlike Horses” held space for me to very belatedly contend with the emotional weight of what I had been doing over the past week: urgently sorting through personal ephemera dating from my childhood. Relentlessly culling, recycling, trashing, boxing, and labelling in preparation for the house to be placed on the market soon and for my father to move close to 900 km northwest to start a new life chapter after the loss of his life partner, my mother, in 2020. Sitting in the newly-renovated kitchen right before embarking on the long drive, with morning light streaming through an ornamental window, the opening 1:50 of “Suchlike Horses” made my eyes well up with tears as I marvelled at the music’s sheer prettiness and how it may have been the last moments alone that I would spend in the house at the table that I often sat at late into the evenings with my mother listening to music together.
The songs on Mills’ fifth LP often work like this. They are, on the surface, about something—mortality, a fleeting single moment, songwriting itself, a breakup, a man that simply loved wearing different coloured fezs until the end of his life—but they also, as a result of staggeringly deep musicianship showcased across the album, seem to resist interpretation and instead open up musical space for pure feeling on the listener’s part. I felt this way when advance single “Skeleton is Walking” was released on June 1, and the countless times that I have listened to it since then. The song was about … something, but its mesmerizing, melancholic rhythm guitar figure and Mills’ absolutely mind-shattering electric guitar solo also made me feel something profound, even inexpressible.
For Mills fans, Jelly Road is very much a continuation of the songwriting mode that he exhibited on 2020’s Mutable Set, a record that I would credit with getting me through probably about a month of 2020 by itself. We have Mills’ poetic, cryptic lyrics supported by meticulously produced performances from an all-star cast of LA instrumentalists including Sam Gendel, Abe Rounds, Larry Goldings, King Tuff’s Kyle Thomas, and Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy.
The main difference on the new LP, however, is the addition of contributions from Chris Weisman, a jazz multi-instrumentalist and lo-fi pop songwriter born in New Hampshire but based in Brattleboro, VT1 and completely unknown to me (and likely many others) prior to this album. A couple of months ago, I wrote about Robert Ellis and the concept of the songwriters’ songwriter: an idiosyncratic, cult musical figure who counts among their (unjustly-small) fandom acclaimed and popular songwriters, but that, themselves, seems destined to remain obscure, having an impact on mainstream popular culture only by proxy. Weisman’s specific combination of unfathomable creative fecundity and largely willful obscurity takes this concept to perhaps what we could say is its logical endpoint. Weisman has 50 separate albums listed on Discogs from 2008 to 2023, the majority of which have been self-released on his Bandcamp. On Spotify, only 2 of Weisman’s records are represented—presumably, records released on labels?—where he has 2,126 monthly listeners. In comparison, Robert Ellis, who I had claimed was a quintessential songwriters’ songwriter has 199,512 monthly listeners. Blake Mills, who first cold-called Weisman to collaborate when he was tasked with creating songs for a fictional band loosely based on Fleetwood Mac for the series Daisy Jones & the Six, has 293,960.
Understandably, in press that Mills and Weisman have done for Jelly Road, Weisman has been consistently more than a bit starstruck at the newfound creative and professional opportunities presented to him by working with Mills. In conversation with Pablo Held on his wonderful longform music interview podcast, Pablo Held Investigates, Weisman even admitted to envisioning a future where his music was only appreciated more widely after his death. (In the same podcast interview, he also gushes about getting to sing for Ringo Starr’s birthday bash as part of a band featuring Mills and King Tuff’s Kyle Thomas, a turn of events that is, no doubt, entirely surreal for him.)
Though Mills and Weisman have been protectively a bit opaque about which artist contributed exactly what to this ostensible Blake Mills solo LP, what Weisman's sensibility contributes to Mills’ work is a beautiful jazzy inflection that loosens up a bit of Mills’ more austere, technicianlike qualities evinced in Mutable Set's more buttoned up moments.
Take, for example, Weisman’s accents on “The Light is Long,” which he plays on a Yamaha Venova, a low-cost starter wind instrument that is like a cross between a recorder and saxophone. According to Mills, Weisman took up the Venova during the pandemic, devoting himself to the whimsical project of trying to become “the best at it in the world.” This anecdote perfectly illustrates what I am coming to understand is the Weismanian sensibility: being deeply serious about one’s musical craft in unexpected, even unserious, contexts, but not in a way that is pretentious or alienating.2
Weisman flexes his understated musical chops again on the short track, “There is No Now,” a song that begins simply with Mills on plucked acoustic guitar and vocals before blossoming out into a trippy little jazz nugget. Weisman helms the keys for the song’s beautiful bridge, as Mills croons, “There is no doubt / That you're allowed /To paint your faint reflections / On the passing clouds.”
Elsewhere, according to the Pablo Held Investigates’ interview with Mills and Weisman mentioned above, Weisman contributed lyrics, such as on album highlight, “Unsingable,” a song about no longer playing one’s older songs.
Jelly Road is an album of considerable musical risk and reward for both parties. Mills could easily churn out records like his 2010 debut or even 2014’s lovely Heigh Ho to consistent acclaim and adulation from rockist Boomer critics and deep-pocketed fans for the rest of his career, but instead he pushes forward, exploring new musical territory on each new release these days. For Weisman, Jelly Road has been about relaxing some of his self-sabotaging Gen X artistic tendencies and allowing his music to be discovered by a wider audience, including myself. I am grateful that each artist took a risk, and we get to reap the rewards in a sublimely deep listening experience, cruising down the Jelly Road.
Population: 12,184 as of 2020.
Weisman released an instrumental album prominently featuring his Venova playing, Sherbet and Stars, in September 2020.