Chris Mills was twenty-one and a student at Northwestern University when he released a 7” single in 1995 titled Plays And Sings. The title truly reflects the naiveté of what he was doing. There was nothing to over-intellectualize about nor any hidden meaning behind what he was trying to accomplish. Just as the title reads, Mills was simply playing and singing; he was doing what he felt was an innate: creating.The now 30-year-old native of Collinsville, IL has relocated from Chicago to Brooklyn, but not before making a name for himself in the Chicago music scene with songs that hinted to a level of maturity beyond his youthfulness. “I just made up all kinds of songs, like Neil Young as filtered through a fifteen-year-old kid, not very good, but I was trying,” says Mills thinking back to his beginnings. The change of surroundings is a testament to Mills’ need to grow, not only as a musician but a person as well. “I’d been in Chicago for a long time. So, I thought it was time to see what it was like on the outside,” says Mills. His last album, 2002’s The Silver Line, was a departure from his more folk-pop orientated songs into a new arena of sounds, much in the same vein as Wilco’s “Summerteeth.” Mills is taking chances, running his own record label, Powerless Pop Recorders, and pushing himself to explore the many possibilities that lay before him. A longtime fan, friend, and fellow singer-songwriter, John Wesley Harding, originally from Hastings, East Sussex in England, currently calls Brooklyn home, and recognizes the large step Mills has taken. “He’s very much part of the Chicago scene, and to me, to transport to Brooklyn is a difficult thing to do,” says Harding. “It just isn’t the same kind of local thing in New York as Chicago.”
The boy became a man.
The 1996 Nobody’s Favorite EP came on the heels of his 7” single. Impressed with his voice and taste in country covers while opening for his band at the Beat Kitchen, Glenn Kotche made a new musical friend before last call. Now as the drummer for Wilco, Kotche, then three years Mills’ senior, backed up Mills at various parties and shows before working with Mills on his EP. “We recorded Nobody’s Favorite in my apartment on Argyle in Uptown,” says Kotche. “We called it Argyle Manor.” Even as a young singer-songwriter, Mills had always felt his job was to be a writer, to get the words in his head onto paper and through a guitar. “I always felt compelled to write,” says Mills. He begins to laugh and says, “Self-importance, I think, was a motivator; the mistake that I had something to say that you might want to listen to.” For Kotche, the recording experience at his apartment is still very fresh in his mind. “I remember him just being completely excited and tweaked,” says Kotche. “It was almost like he couldn’t believe he was actually making a record of his song.”
There seemed to be no turning back. After Nobody’s Favorite came 1998’s Every Night Fight For Your Life and 2000’s Kiss It Goodbye. As the pop music critic for the Chicago Sun Times, Jim DeRogatis summed up those releases when he said, “All of them were good, but not great.” Mills was thrown into the alt-country pile, quite the easy thing to do for any music critic at that time that couldn’t easily categorize artists that married the pedal steel guitar with the drunken thrash-pop sensibilities of the Replacements. “I never really paid that much attention to it,” says Mills about the music labels. “I understood it cause I had an affinity in that direction. It probably applies to some of what I do or to some aspects of what I do.”“Writers need help in a lot of ways; so, they have terms like that, for better or for worse. So, it never really bothered me. It never really informed what I did. Hopefully things that I did might have helped expand the definition of whatever label they put on it.”
A follow-up to The Silver Line is currently in the works. “It’s almost all written. We’ve sort of figured out how we’re going to do it,” says Mills. “It’s going to be different. It’ll be difficult to pigeonhole it as alt-country if it goes the way that we want to do it.”
Worrying about how people will classify Mills’ music is one thing, but seeking the advice of others is a whole other story. “He’s always been good at asking people advice, and stuff, and then ignoring it entirely,” jokes Harding. “But it’s good just to ask it.” When word of this reaches Mills he breaks out laughing but acknowledges the truth behind the observation. “I think in a weird way it’s how I know I’m sure I want to do something,” says Mills. “If Wes tells me it’s a bad idea, if Dave (Nagler), my arranger, tells me it’s a bad idea or whatever, or tells me to do it a certain way and I still want to do it the other way, then that must be the way to do it.”
“I don’t know why that is--it’s like a litmus test of what I’m really committed to doing something.”
What Mills doesn’t need advice about is connecting with people through music. As a teacher with the Music Together (www.mtparkslope.com) children’s program in Brooklyn—much like the Wiggleworms program at the Old Town School of Folk Music here in Chicago—Mills is reminded why he continues to pursue the path he has chosen. “I’m not going to know everybody that buys my records,” says Mills. “But in some way I’m connecting to them and we share a similar insight into things that are important to people in general, emotionally and whatever.”
“I need to have an affect on people. Music is an equalizer. It’s something that everybody has. It’s something that everybody can do.”
It’s that need and drive that keeps Mills looking forward. For him, it’s just as natural as breathing.
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