Blake Mills Is in It for the Girls

Blake Millsis a really good guitar player — Eric Clapton calls him “phenomenal.” He’s 28, barely, and he’s already worked with Jackson Browne, Norah Jones, and Fiona Apple. Mills started playing the guitar seriously as a 10-year-old kid in Malibu. He tells Kurt Andersen that he was won over by Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video on MTV. “The image of Kurt [Cobain] with his guitar really low, I just remember being totally transfixed,” he recalls, “The seduction of the guitar as an icon — I fell for it.”

Mills started writing songs at 14 and in high school formed a band with his best friend, Taylor Goldsmith (of the band Dawes). “I was pretty enamored with a girl we went to school with and she was a massive Ben Folds fan,” Mills confides. So Mills and Goldsmith took a cue from Folds and wrote songs for piano and guitar in an effort to impress her. Mills confesses that girls were “the first reason to write songs and it’s still kind of the reason to write songs.”

Mills just released his second solo album, Heigh Ho, and it’s not what you might expect from a hotshot guitarist; it’s full of nice riffs, but sparing with its virtuosic solos. “That kind of music is embarrassing to me,” Mills explains. Instead, the guitar parts are simple and understated, and it marries a low-fi, indie feel to a classic-rock sound.

A fan of Randy Newman, Mills tries to bring a sense of humor into his songwriting, but not at the expense of honesty. “Some of the most devastating lines I’ve ever heard have had humor in them,” he tells Kurt. “Nobody wants to hang out with that guy at the bar or the party if they don’t have a certain sense of humor about what they’re doing.”

Bonus Track: “Three Weeks in Havana” (live in Studio 360)

Video: “Don’t Tell OurFriends About Me” (live in Studio 360)