When Chris Mills entered downtown’s Wall to Wall studio in January, he had a lot to do and not much time to do it. He’d hired 16 musicians to help make his fourth album, the orch-pop opus The Wall to Wall Sessions, and was planning to have it finished–entirely recorded and mixed–in just three days. Cost considerations were part of the reason, but he also wanted to thumb his nose at modern recording methods, which he says prize technical precision over the spirit of the performance. “If you listen to old Atlantic R & B from the 50s, even the early Elvis records, they just sound good,” Mills says. “It’s only a couple mikes and a couple guys in a room–a really rudimentary recording setup. The vocals distort and overdrive and everything–and that’s the take they keep. Whereas today, somebody would go into Pro Tools and redraw the shape of a wave form to take the distortion out. I just wanted to go in the complete opposite direction from that.”
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By the fall of 2004 Mills had a batch of new songs and was itching to record again. But he’d begun to move away from the charmingly melancholy–if occasionally mopey–alt-country of his previous records; he was studying songwriters like George Gershwin and Cole Porter, and thinking of ways to integrate their styles with the aesthetic of modern bands he enjoyed like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Flaming Lips. The new material seemed to demand a more orchestral sound, but because Mills was planning to finance the record himself he didn’t have the money for hours of recording, multitracking, and mixing. He also didn’t have the inclination, given his experience making The Silver Line.
After seeing Wall to Wall’s 850-square-foot main room during a visit last September, Mills was sold on recording the new album back in Chicago. He gathered up the core members of his old backing band, the City That Works–drummer Gerald Dowd, bassist Ryan Hembrey, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, and multi-instrumentalist Dave Max Crawford–and began soliciting local brass and string players, percussionists, and vocalists. In advance of the three-day session, Mills put together what he calls “a sort of fake version of the record with cheap MIDI samples” with New York-based arranger David Nagler and sent the demos to the players.
In the meantime he applied to perform at the CMJ Music Marathon, and the disc fell into the hands of Peter D’Angelo, a talent booker for the fest and co-owner of a Brooklyn label, Ernest Jenning Record Co. D’Angelo flipped over the record, and in May he and Mills struck a deal to put out the album in October as a joint release with Powerless Pop. “We were ready to take the plunge and try something bigger,” D’Angelo says. “Chris seemed like the perfect artist to do that with.”
Chris Mills & the City That Works Orchestra, Lesser Birds of Paradise
