In 2019, Blake Mills and Chris Weisman were tasked with recording new music that sounded like it was 50 years old. They basically wrote an album’s worth of songs as a made-up band for the television adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Daisy Jones & the Six, inspired loosely by the soft-rock drama of Fleetwood Mac. Energized by their introduction, the two continued working on new music that sounds like Jelly Road, with rich layers of guitars, vintage keyboards, and an assortment of woodwinds. In these 12 songs, they wrap surreal imagery in otherworldly melodies that feel blissful, seamless, and eerily suspended out of time.
Jelly Road feels of a piece with Notes With Attachments, Mills’ 2021 album with bassist Pino Palladino, another spirited collaboration between studio heads. Mills has used his solo output to develop his reflective songwriting and immersive production style; as a producer and accompanist with Bob Dylan, John Legend, Phoebe Bridgers, and plenty more, he’s become a formidable presence who nonetheless functions as support for somebody else’s project. Mills’ two album-length alliances have allowed him to bring both practices to the fore, and in contrast to the spiky jazz slant of Notes With Attachments, Jelly Road is smooth and satisfying from start to finish. The opening guitar tumbles of “Suchlike Horses” are a tantalizing introduction, rippling outward into a pool of wavering synth lines that sounds like a wayward trombone.
Weisman sketched out some of the shapes of Jelly Road on an iPad mini, emailing fragments to Mills late at night on borrowed Wi-Fi while he stood outside a local library branch in his hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont. Keeping a lower profile as a jazz-forward improviser, Weisman has admitted that he’s “always done only what the fuck I want to do, and skipped the stuff that irritated me” with regards his own work. In the same 10-year span that Mills has established himself as an in-demand producer, guitarist, and songwriter, Weisman has self-released more than 30 records of electroacoustic adventures, which range from longform deliberations to pocket-size petit fours.
Weisman told Fretboard Journal that he wanted to encourage Mills’ virtuosity as a guitar player, which manifests in the meaty guitar solo at the end of “Skeleton Is Walking.” It returns in “Breakthrough Moon,” which has a solo passage that settles in like a layer of strong incense amid a loose layer of percussion. There’s a quicksilver streak of sleaze to Mills’ twists and turns, outlining the sort of seedy lounge scene that might play host to the creatures of Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.”