John Mills played in bands his entire life, dating back to eighth grade at Trinity Episcopal School in Southside RVA.
John Mills played in bands his entire life, dating back to eighth grade at Trinity Episcopal School in Southside RVA.
After he finished school, he moved to Brooklyn, and continued playing in bands. It was around this time he started the band Recipe for Sunblock, while working for an ad agency. The band’s Songs Through Screen Doors EP received moderate success, getting favorable reviews and airplay on over 100 radio stations across the country.
“It started as a recording project… my friends [from the band NOBA] heard what I’d been writing… and we spent a few months recording together. We played some house parties, and basically decided to do more. We sent the EP to college radio, without a label or anything,” Mills said, thinking back to his past band experience. “My main goal was to get it played on KEXP in Seattle and it got played there, so that was enough for me.”
It was around this time, just as Recipe began picking up momentum, that Mills made the decision with his wife to move back to Richmond.
“I got married, and we had a baby pretty quickly after that, and moved back here,” Mills said. “It was a bit frustrating because I was at my job back here and I’d get my radio report about the plays, knowing that I couldn’t go on tour, couldn’t play any shows… We had just had a baby…when that happens, your whole life changes.”
With the founding of his new band, Handsome Professor, and the recording of the new Long Showers EP, Mills seems poised to get back on track where he left off ten years ago.
“We played a show at the Camel last year… It got us out of the basement and made us decide we should start doing this again,” Mills said. “We’re old, but we’re not dead, so we might as well keep doing it.”
According to Mills, in its two year existence, Handsome Professor has written more than a few songs, most of which Mills demoed at home using Garage Band, but the band didn’t seriously consider recording until recently.
Mills said that the band has been seeking to play more shows around town, but without having a recording to show, it’s sometimes difficult to make that happen.
“People want to hear the music, that’s why we got some of the stuff down, and recorded it at Black Iris,” he said.
Mills, who owns his own marketing agency, Release the Hounds, said he traded his skills in digital brand strategy in exchange for studio time.
Rich Stein, who works at Black Iris Gallery, tracked and produced the three-song EP a month and a half ago. Prior to recording, Stein and the band got together to listen to songs that “we thought sounded great…a mishmash of old [Rolling] Stones records…Deathcab [for Cutie’s] Photo Album…an Alabama Shakes tune…and we talked about them to make sure that when we started recording we were closely aligned to what we were both expecting.”
According to Mills, the band got in and out of the studio, partly in an effort to avoid abusing Black Iris’s hospitality, but also because it allowed them to focus their energy and play the songs the best they could without overdoing it. He said it also prevented the band from second guessing everything they did.
“I think sometimes those constraints can help you get to the core of what the song is about,” he said. “Rich was really good, my thinking was, he does this for a living, this is his thing, so I didn’t over direct how he produced it… We wanted to play the songs for him and see how he heard them… I mean, we think they’re cool songs, but they could be total shit…he just really got where we were going.”
Now that the Long Showers EP is complete, the band hopes to book some shows in the coming months. Scheduling has been difficult as band members all work full time, and often have to travel for work.
“Now that we have this under our belts, we’re gonna try to get out there more and start playing, because that’s what we love to do… We play parties and stuff like that but playing out at a club is different,” Mills said. “We had so much fun at the Camel, we’re kind of looking forward to doing that again.”
When Mills moved back to Richmond from Brooklyn ten years ago, newly married and recently a father, he felt there wasn’t much of a local music scene anymore, the way there had been when he left in the late nineties.
This has changed, he said.
“There are so many cool bands right now,” Mills said. “Claire Morgan, Snowy Owls… I feel like it’s just an awesome time to plug back in and try to share shows with these guys doing this really cool music.”
