24/04/26 Mildred is a band from Oakland, CA of four equal parts. They don’t have a lead singer, no one person writes the songs. The songs that make up their debut album Fenceline come together as a group with their genesis sprouting from any one of their members each time. This isn’t a case of Henry (vocals, guitar), Jack (vocals, guitar), Matt (vocals, bass, woodwinds) or Will (drums, production) sauntering in and slapping their latest offering down on the table to be fleshed out as they see it in their mind though. Mildred have a quieter, sweeter process. The songs are often wrestled from the lead writer by the other three, a lyric might have been mumbled absentmindedly for a few days before one of the other three grabs at it, forcing the lead writer to focus on something great they had come up with without really noticing. If you ask any Mildred member what their favourite part of Fenceline is, it will never be something they wrote. If you pin them down and ask them what their favourite part of something they did write was, it will always be something somebody else added to it. This is what makes Mildred - in many ways a classic four piece - so special. This wonderfully easy bond between four friends just hanging out and writing songs is so palpable it’s intoxicating. Summed up neatly by Clash Magazine saying, “imagine if Pavement went Americana and you’d be close”, Mildred make music that is pure and poetic, gently addictive and never overwrought. They describe the creation of the band as being born from “deciding that playing/talking about/thinking about music together is fun and something we want to structure our lives around as best we can”. Mildred is a vehicle for these four people to continue to spend time in each other’s company, encouraging whatever phrase one of them might have been humming to be explored as fully as possible, nurtured into something tangible. Most bands are formed so they can get out of whatever diy space they start out playing in, Mildred was formed so they can spend more time there. The space in question for Mildred is a house. The Ward St. house in Berkeley to be exact, already a landmark in Mildred lore. When Fenceline began taking shape Henry, Jack, Matt, and occasionally Will were living there together; Matt hunkered in an “extra-legal” room in the attic where he bathed on his knees and Henry and Will would have to stoop to visit. Jack and Henry shared a wall in adjacent shoeboxes on the middle floor, Henry staring directly out at an old walnut tree they nicknamed Walter. Will was away studying in the desert but would stay whenever he was in town. While living on Ward St. they would write songs in the porous space between the kitchen and the living room after dinner, before they even knew they were a band. A drum set, guitars, and Matt’s woodwinds were always strewn about. After that they would go up to the roof - beautifully painted by Jack for the cover of Fenceline -, Jones the cat often creeping up the stairs curiously behind, and talk the songs over some more, or just continue hanging out, talking about whatever. (The Mildred core belief system goes as follows: “talking about the weather is a legitimate and profound form of human discourse and exchange. So is talking about grocery stores and produce prices. Front lawns are too tidy, let them grow. Free associating is one of life's great pleasures. We believe in the reality of pathetic fallacy. The crunch wrap supreme is the pinnacle of modernity.”).
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