Mildred

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 Fenceline come together as a group with their genesis
 sprouting from any one of their members - Henry Easton Koehler
 (vocals, guitar), Jack Schrott (vocals, guitar), Matt Palmquist (vocals,
 bass, woodwinds) or Will Fortna (drums, production) - each time. 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. 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 timeless four piece - so
 special. This wonderfully easy bond between four friends just hanging
 out and writing songs is so palpable its 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.
 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. 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.”).
 
 This is what makes the songs on Fenceline hang together, naturally,
 as roommates do. These four people are very different in many ways.
 Jack is a PHD student, often working underground, studying the atom
 beyond any conceivable point. Will is an environmental lawyer. Matt is
 an architect, a job he took up properly after a year in a Benedictine
 monastery. Henry works in affordable housing, helps his dad grow
 beans, and plays a lot of basketball. The lyrics for their songs are
 written largely alone and often draw from their own individual lives
 and experiences but there’s a shared something there. “It makes
 sense when common threads emerge” they say, “because we do
 things together a lot as friends: cook, laze about on a weekend, listen
 to an album, go walkabout, read, go see movies etc. People will tell
 us after seeing us live that we’re, “like... a real band.” There’s maybe
 a shared rhythm and camaraderie in our lives that comes through in
 the music.”
 
 That shared something takes many forms: flaming pinecones floating
 down the river, scattered papers and dog-eared books, exhausting
 party conversation and Irish goodbyes, leaves the colour of UPS
 trucks. Songs often take place across whole days: long days working
 at Henry’s aunt and uncle’s farm, an afternoon down in San Francisco
 on the day the sailors come in and booze all day in their cracker-jack
 uniforms, one of those youthful afternoons that seemed to stretch
 forever. Others stem from a shared love of a good reference;
 breadcrumbs dropped from old favourite books, songs and poems, or
 Matt’s favourite little red book on architecture, waiting to be found by
 those who love to go over lyrics with a fine-toothed comb. Strikingly
 literal or intriguingly oblique, Mildred have a remarkable way with
 lyrics that lodge themselves in your head softly but with such
 determination that they begin to feel like shimmering memories from
 your own life. Fenceline is a collection of songs that you want to hold
 close and delve into, and yet play to everyone you know.
 
 Mildred were eventually turfed out of Ward St. and the songs were
 fleshed out in Matt’s new abode - the garage of a handsome but
 fragile 97-year-old ex-lawyer/taxi driver who likes to chat about
 baseball - and for recording, the band took a week off work and
 decamped to Luke Temple’s studio in Echo Park, LA, having all been
 carried through the pandemic by his 2019 album Both-And.
 
 There was one exception to this recording setup. While in Bristol with
 a free afternoon, Mildred took ‘Fish Sticks’ to a friend, Jack Ogborne
 aka Bingo Fury (The Cindys, Naima Bock), to give it another go in his
 studio in the basement of a centuries-old pub across the street from
 what used to be a prison, with a secret passageway connecting the
 two. It’s not easy to tell that ‘Fish Sticks’ has a very different recording
 setup as it settles so comfortably in with the rest of Fenceline; but the
 change of scenery gave it new life and a final product - an endlessly
 repayable distillation of the Mildred sound with a central guitar line for
 the ages and irresistible harmonies - that they all liked so much it
 became the lead single.