Grammy-winning producer, composer, guitarist, and songwriter Blake Mills’ solo album, Jelly Road, is out now on New Deal/Verve. The new record is co-written and co-produced by Chris Weisman.
Mills learned of Weisman through a friend while making the acclaimed album Notes With Attachments with bassist Pino Palladino. Mills reached out and the two quickly began collaborating on material via email, starting with songs for Amazon Prime’s lauded limited series Daisy Jones and the Six, for which Mills worked as the Executive Music Producer and chief songwriter, writing and producing all the original songs from the show and its accompanying record Aurora, while working closely with the singer and guitarist Weisman, among others.
Together, the pair wrote the entirety of Jelly Road, which was recorded and co-mixed by engineer and frequent Mills collaborator Joseph Lorge (Bob Dylan, Phoebe Bridgers, Feist).
The duo is coming off a run of sold-out dates around Mills’ performance with Joni Mitchell at Washington’s The Gorge Amphitheater. The Blake Mills Featuring Chris Weisman Tour took them to select cities on the West Coast, where they played music from Jelly Road as well as select songs from throughout their varied careers.
Grammy Award winner and two-time Grammy Award Producer of the Year nominee, Blake Mills has released four acclaimed solo albums and produced, played and recorded with artists such as Fiona Apple, Alabama Shakes, Phoebe Bridgers, Perfume Genius, Moses Sumney, Bob Dylan, Laura Marling, Cass McCombs,Jay-Z, Weyes Blood, and Randy Newman, among others.
Most recently, Mills contributed to Feist’s latest album, Multitudes, which was released this spring. His album Mutable Set, released in 2020, was praised by Pitchfork as “a hushed collection that floats through the subconscious like a tender dream” and earned their Best New Music title.
Chris Weisman is a songwriter living in Brattleboro, Vermont. His dozens of homespun, self-released solo albums are a kaleidoscope of vaulting melodies, wild poetry, overload harmony, melting bridges, and jazz solos. He is the author of Nonmusical Patterns and their Musical Uses (for Guitar in Standard Tuning), the inventor of Inverted Tuning, and an active member of Intangible Shirt Company: an extemporizing crush of New England Transcendentalist hippie types.
