Low-Key Superproducer Blake Mills on Working With Dylan, Joni, and His New Album Jelly Road – Warungku Terkini

It’s not a record of first takes, like, “This is going to be the take, so you better get your shit right.” So what that signified to me was it’s OK to be wrong, and he was on the path to finding it as well. There’s a lot of stuff that you have to just be present for, and you either have the right sensibilities for it or you have to know what the right sensibilities are and adopt them pretty quickly.

It’s not only a Bob Dylan album, but a great Bob Dylan album. What more could you ask for?

Not much more. I have had plenty of dreams of working with him, and what ended up actually happening exceeded all of that. The dream might just be, when you’re listening to Time Out of Mind, thinking, Wow, wouldn’t it be incredible to be in that room or in that band? You place yourself inside the music. But that paled in comparison to how intimate of an experience working on that record ended up being—the proximity that I actually had to that music, to the band, and to him. There was no outline going in, or even day to day. There was a certain process for that record, but there was almost an expectation that it was going to change. You’re always ready for the winds to shift just by working with somebody that’s that mercurial.

I don’t want to get too deep into what I did on that record, or the credits thing, because I’m not totally clear on why the credits are what they are. It was never communicated, there was never a conversation about it.

How are you credited?

I’m credited as an “additional musician.”

But it’s generally understood you did more than that credit would suggest, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s probably evident, and I can appreciate the value in not getting into specifics—but I know what they were. And anyway, it’s mind boggling to me that I got to experience what I got to experience. I get to take that.

Does the exact credit matter to you?

No. What matters to me more than anything is whether that credit is emblematic of what he thought of the experience, and if there’s something unsaid in that. Because it was something like six weeks and then it was over. We finished around the first week of March 2020, so it was a strange time, everything shifted. And just the whole experience, with the credit at the end of it, is also, like, so Bob Dylan, that part of me was like, OK! [laughs]

Have you been in contact since then?

No.

Did working on Rough and Rowdy Ways change how you approach your career at all?

It was such a high for me that I no longer had a sense of trying to shape some kind of a narrative with the things I’m involved in. I felt like I no longer had to prove that to myself or anybody else. There’s no such thing as a cool factor anymore, like it’s actually all total bullshit. Nothing is cool, you know? [laughs] So the options just got really wide. I started working with people that I had a connection to, like Jack Johnson and Marcus Mumford. And I wasn’t scared of what I would be bringing to a TV show like Daisy Jones & the Six.

Daisy Jones wasn’t the first TV or movie project you’ve been offered, so why did you specifically pick that one to do?

Because it was about songwriting, and there was an understanding that the people working on the show didn’t consider themselves music people, so they were going to be very deferential. That made me feel comfortable because, as somebody who did not have a lot of TV experience, I trusted them to not over-exercise a feeling of wanting control about things that were going to get in the way of getting to the point where we can actually talk about a finished song idea and make some adjustments. So I felt accepted, and they knew what they were getting.