Mutable Set Blake Mills

• 1 Never Forever 04:53
• 2 May Later 05:19
• 3 Eat My Dust 02:02
• 4 Money Is The One True God 06:56
• 5 Summer All Over 04:55
• 6 Vanishing Twin 06:17
• 7 My Dear One 05:33
• 8 Farsickness 02:52
• 9 Mirror Box 04:59
• 10 Window Facing A Window 04:59
• 11 Off Grid 02:46
• Total Runtime 51:31

Info for Mutable Set

For his fourth studio album Mutable Set, the hugely in-demand Blake Mills buddied up with his friend and fellow songwriter Cass McCombs. The result is about as diverse a set as could be imagined while still contained within the singer-songwriter paradigm - narrative storytelling bristling with optimism to abstract, impressionistic and decidedly downcast reflections.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Mills has borne witness to climate change firsthand as annual rains slowed and wildfires grew in scope and intensity. Shortly after a rare storm during California’s seven year drought, Mills wrote “Summer All Over,” which NPR Music described as a “a sobering, tender ballad…teeter[ing] at the threshold of hope and despair.”

Mutable Set is Mills’ fourth studio album, crafted as a soundtrack to the emotional dissonance of modern life. The record reflects the push and pull of opposing forces: harmony and eerie tension, symphonious crescendos against moments of near silence, melodic yet unresolving chord progressions. The sonically warm album holds Mills’ guitar finger picking, gentle piano playing and relaxed tenor at its center.

Recorded at the iconic Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, Mutable Set features Mills joined by Aaron Embry on keys (Elliot Smith, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros), Sam Gendel on saxophone (Vampire Weekend, Moses Sumney), Rob Moose on strings (Alabama Shakes, Bon Iver) Abe Rounds (Meshell Ndegocello, Andrew Bird) on drums and Pino Palladino (The Who, D’Angelo) on bass.

Mills is widely sought after as a producer, co-writer and session musician, collaborating with such diverse artists as Fiona Apple, Alabama Shakes, John Legend, Sara Bareilles, Jay-Z, Laura Marling, Phoebe Bridgers, Randy Newman and Perfume Genius, among others. He was nominated for “Producer of the Year” at the GRAMMY Awards in both 2015 and 2017, and his producing on Alabama Shakes’ Sound & Color won the “Best Alternative Music Album” GRAMMY Award in 2015.

“Over the past eight years, Mills has tried to rethink the governing principles that shape listeners’ understanding of traditional recording and instrumentation.” (Pitchfork)

Blake Mills, vocals, guitar

Blake Mills
When asked what he’s been doing lately, Blake Mills says he’s been “listening, writing, playing, and watching my social life wither away like the ice caps.”

Since quietly making his debut album, Break Mirrors, which critics hailed as one of the best albums of 2010, Mills has been consistently busy. He’s producing the highly anticipated sophomore album for The Alabama Shakes, and has worked as a producer with a wide variety of others as well, including ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, Sara Watkins, Conor Oberst, Sky Ferreira, and Fiona Apple, with whom he toured extensively in 2013 and 2014. As a session player and sideman he has worked with Beck, Cass McCombs, Jackson Brown, Lucinda Williams, Moses Sumney and Neil Diamond, among others. Rick Rubin and T Bone Burnett frequently call upon his services as a guitarist, and equally enamored is Eric Clapton who recently told Rolling Stone magazine “Blake Mills is the last guitarist I heard that I thought was phenomenal.” Though perhaps his most significant endeavor has been creating the highly anticipated second solo album, HEIGH HO, due September 2014.

“The goals for Heigh Ho were songs, sonics, and capturing performance,” Mills said. “I love my first album and how it sounds, but since making Break Mirrors I feel like I’ve heard a lot of records that strike me as overtly ‘lo-fi’ or reverb-saturated; so I was interested in finding a combination of sounds that I hadn’t heard used together before. So I was very fortunate to be able to call on this group of people to help me map some new terrain.”

To that end, Mills asked several of his musical heroes − including Jim Keltner, Don Was, Jon Brion, Benmont Tench, Rob Moose, Mike Elizondo, and Fiona Apple (who duets on the slow-burning “Seven” and timeless sounding “Don’t Tell Our Friends About Me”) − to collaborate on what would become HEIGH HO.

“Different songs feature slightly different bands,” said Mills. “These guys are world class musicians, and also some world class record producers. That combination produced something rare; a wide open way of playing that consitantly delivers the spirit of a song. It reflects the spontaneity, maturity, and tastefulness of my all-time favorite records.”

“Blake arranged the music the way that Cézanne would’ve filled a canvas,” Don Was notes of his experience playing in Blake’s band. “He’s a mind-blowingly great artist with the type of deep vision that is the hallmark of true genius. It’s so inspiring for musicians to play with a cat like that! If he asked us to play in orange, we wanted to give him a shade that burned so brightly as to blind the unsuspecting.”

Recorded at the legendary Ocean Way studios in a room built for Frank Sinatra and used by everyone from Bob Dylan to Ray Charles, Mills created an album that references a range of genres without really belonging to any. “Sometimes it’s just necessary to make music that is without genre,” he says. “Fiona Apple once said that music can be categorized either as honest or dishonest. That honesty is what draws me in. It’s what I always hope is guiding me through my own work.”

Lyrically inspired by “situational awareness, an under casted weakness for clarity, and the impossible dream of being understood,” HEIGH HO opens with “If I’m Unworthy,” a stark, heartfelt track that takes on the weight of love with humbling grace and concludes with “Curable Disease”.

“When I first started writing what was to become this record, I was trying to be a little less personal – more topical, or character-based. But I can’t do that very well. Nothing I wrote felt real to me. That inability has really forced me to try and find a way to write about my own experiences without feeling self absorbed.” (Source: www.bbgunpress.com)

This album contains no booklet.