An Acoustic Night with Blake Mills and Chris Weisman

One of the loveliest nights I’ve had in a while begins with walking past a release party for the tenth issue of The Drift in Public Records’ courtyard garden—an arts-and-culture crowd of young rich Brooklynites, and fancy couples in sandals and linen. The evening is warm and entry is exclusive. Passing through the long veranda to the concert hall the sounds of happy minglers float through the slatted wall. By the end of the night I’m over there seeing and not just hearing the night’s glitter and feeling like I’m finally living Joni Mitchell’s “People’s Parties,” the kind that seduces Annie Hall and repulses Alvy Singer in their fictional 1970s California.

I get both sides. Listening to Blake Mills, who is from Malibu, play his eclectic folk music live with Chris Weisman invokes in me a similar ambivalence. Part of me is embarrassed by the “good vibes” feeling; but the other part recognizes something undeniably pretty that naturally emerges from an Edenic land.

Both formidably talented, Mills and Weisman complement each others’ kinds of success: Blake Mills’ four solo albums have earned him good grades on Pitchfork and a Wikipedia page. And speaking of Joni Mitchell, he accompanied her last month for her first stage appearance in twenty years at a Washington State amphitheater. Oppositely, Chris Weisman has quietly released nearly fifty albums on Bandcamp in just four years, recluse king of lo-fi who avoids the trappings of Big Music. The two came together in 2019 to compose a ‘70s-style soundtrack for Prime’s Daisy Jones & the Six. Their remarkable chemistry and shared passion for instrumental excellence kept them collaborating. This special night is the release show for Mills’ new album Jelly Road which Weisman worked on, a harmonious fusion of folk, indie rock, and avant-garde elements. Perhaps to do both artists justice, they play a double set together punctuated by an intermission.

The label is in attendance somewhere among the diversely aged, bourgeois crowd inside the venue. Some of the front rows sit cross-legged on the floor as if for show-and-tell. Standing room is tight. I’m one of the lucky ones pressed up against the bar with something to lean on. Despite summer’s pervading sweatiness, the whole place smells of clean black pepper and expensive beer. I’ve been to Public Records before—usually filled with fog, strobes, and house music. Never did its low-ceiling Eamesian ambience pair so well with its guests as these. Mills with his beard and long hair and Weisman in John Denver bob parted down the middle look right at home. Even the walls of perforated yellow wood match their guitars, the star instruments of the show.

They start off with the hushed, quietly urgent “Vanishing Twin” from Mutable Set. Together their plucking weaves something spiderweb-like, delicate, precise, minimalist but magnified 100x, and just a preview of an acoustic instrument’s capabilities in their hands. Their next song “There is No Now” is more morning music, harmonics like the onomatopoeia of blinking and waking up. Occasionally they conjure an organ pad sending sonic beams of light across the set. You might think the high guitar solo at the end of “Vanishing Twin” was a flute. I’m barely able to tell it’s Mills’ doing as he flutters his fingers on its low neck. Public Records’ speakers are loud and crisp, and the satisfaction of listening to Mills and Weisman play is akin to having a chiropractic adjustment.

Especially impressive about their performance is the syncing of fingerpicking without drums or other accompaniment. Mills and Weisman must make their own time out of guitar notes, negative space, and measured syncopation between the two of them. There are a couple mistakes here and there but they always find each other again. In “Breakthrough Moon,” once the vocal part has been exhausted, the guitarists keep going, jazzily improvising off each other and changing rhythm while the beat somehow remains folded inside. Percussion is created through sensitive plucking dynamics and tempered use of low strings.

By the middle of the concert I have assumed Weisman’s role is totally silent—then Mills graciously advertises him as one of his favorite songwriters and cedes the spotlight. Weisman sings “Golden Day,” his own song with a surprising bossa nova feel in its chord progression and his soft, monotone vocalization. For an interlude he puffs his lips and makes his mouth an instrument more like a harmonica than whistling. He sings again later with Mills but not on his own. I’m grateful to have seen this elusive artist play one of his songs at all.

Then there’s the intermission. The only other concert I’ve been to where a band opened for itself is Mapache, another group from LA recalling the 1970s. Coincidence? Of course not. My theory is musicians drawn to this era are the kind of people who feel no rush. In “May Later,” Mills sings,

I went to ask the mountain, “Is now a good time?”

The mountain let out a great yawn, and it gave this brief reply:

The mountain said, “Not yet—not yet, may later. Be lazy now.”
I may have never heard anything so quintessentially California. His nature worship, a power he sees as benevolent makes a suggestion moreso than a command—and what’s more—to do nothing. At the risk of putting myself squarely in a specific generational moment, there’s something about this music and its ethos that is shared with the beloved video game Animal Crossing. A new tune Mills sings from Jelly Road, “Unsingable,” sounds a lot like a 3 AM hourly song in New Leaf. It’s twinkly, soothing, unthreatening. A world without time or death. I’ve been to California in the spring, its fruiting trees spilling apricots and lemons into the street. At the concert, after hearing this line, I take its advice and go sit on a bench in the hallway for the second set. I make a friend from the party next door. We share a glass of wine, and sit and soak it all in.

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