One of the Roamin’ Kind
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“I think it informed who I am now,” Mills says, “the fact of not being centered anywhere, of getting places and having them be really strange, and then by the time they eventually became comfortable, immediately leaving.” When Mills was 12 his family settled in downstate Collinsville, a town of about 20,000 some ten miles east of Saint Louis, but he could never shake the feeling that he was a visitor. “Everyone had grown up there their whole lives, and I was coming in late in the game. It struck me as really bizarre, because you’d have kids talking about how they were gonna write papers on white power, and to call somebody a fag was like the worst insult in the world. Everybody worked hard to put food on the table and to have a nice home for their kids, but at the same time there were a lot of people being raised with ideas that I found really scary.”
By the time he graduated from high school, in 1992, he’d picked up the guitar and was writing songs. Down the road in Belleville, Uncle Tupelo had released a triad of albums that would eventually alter the pop landscape, but his big inspiration was New York, Lou Reed’s brutal valentine to his chosen city. After enrolling at Northwestern University, Mills began looking for solo gigs in Chicago, bypassing coffeehouses for the rock clubs where his favorite bands played. He and a friend launched a country music program on WNUR, and Mills fell in with the local alt-country crowd, selling CDs and T-shirts for Bloodshot Records so he could get into their 21-and-over shows. It was the perfect clique for him, a group of people who’d pulled up stakes and come to Chicago–perversely enough, to play roots music.
Of course, the main thing that needs to be dealt with is paying one’s bills, and when he’s not on the road Mills does white-collar migrant labor for a temp agency. “It’s a drag,” he says, laughing. “It’s a soul killer. But it’s necessary.” In the last year, between backing Timms and doing his own shows, he was able to live off music for about six months. This summer he’s doing the Starbucks circuit around town with just his guitar, and on Saturday he’ll play a record-release show at Schubas with Varagona on backup vocals, Gerald Dowd on drums, David Nagler on bass, Steve Dorocke on pedal steel, Andrew Bird on violin, and Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello. Saturday afternoon he’s doing an in-store at Laurie’s Planet of Sound, Sunday afternoon he’ll appear at the Taste of Lincoln Avenue street fair, and by Tuesday he’ll be in Minneapolis, on the road again. “I make more now than I used to,” he says. “I still don’t make a living wage by any stretch. But it gets better. It’s all about staying in the game and keeping it going.”
