Mike Mills
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- This article is about Mike Mills, the R.E.M. bassist. Other similar sounding articles include the Irish journalist Michael Mills and Mike Mills (director).
| Mike Mills | |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Michael Edward Mills |
| Born | 17 December 1958 Orange County, California |
| Genre(s) | Alternative rock |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, songwriter, producer |
| Instrument(s) | Bass, vocals, guitar, piano, accordion |
| Years active | 1980–present |
| Associated acts | R.E.M., Hindu Love Gods, The Backbeat Band Automatic Baby |
Michael Edward Mills (born December 17, 1958 in Orange County, California) is the bass player of the band R.E.M. Though known primarily as a bassist, piano player and background singer, his musical repertoire includes many other keyboard, guitar, string, wind and percussion instruments. He also contributes to much of the band's songwriting.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
As a young boy, he moved with his family to Macon, Georgia and attended Mount de Sales in the early '70s. Mills' father Frank was a singer whose appearances included The Ed Sullivan Show, while his mother Adora was a piano teacher, which helped him develop a love of music at an early age. He met and formed a band with drummer friend Bill Berry in high school. They met Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, and Joe Thomas, a musical influence from the University of Georgia, after starting at the University of Georgia in Athens.
[edit] R.E.M.
Mills, Berry, Buck, and Stipe decided to drop out of college and focus on their band, now named R.E.M. The band quickly developed a following and were soon signed to I.R.S. Records.
He is responsible for the songwriting of many of R.E.M.'s songs, including "Nightswimming", "Find the River", "At My Most Beautiful", "Why Not Smile", "Let Me In", "Wendell Gee", "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville", "Beat a Drum", "Be Mine" and "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?". In addition to providing backing melodies, he has also sung lead vocals on "Texarkana", "Near Wild Heaven", The Clique cover "Superman" and The Troggs cover, "Love Is All Around".
Mills was arrested for indecent exposure in Athens in the early 1980s, known in R.E.M. lore as "the water tower incident".
Mills is also known for his collection of Nudie suits that he often wears on stage, and were first seen in the 1994 video for "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" and then regularly on the subsequent 1995 Monster Tour.
R.E.M.'s 2004 album Around the Sun was heavily shaped by Mills' piano and keyboard parts, and he had many prominent vocal parts on the 2008 album Accelerate.
Commenting on the inscrutable nature of his early harmony vocals, Mills contended that he had either forgotten his parts or would just improvise something that sounded good.[citation needed]
[edit] Other work
Mills co-produced (along with Mitch Easter) Hermitage, the 1987 album by the Virginia-based band Waxing Poetics.
The three instrumentalists from R.E.M. all performed on Nikki Sudden's 1991 album The Jewel Thief, including the single "I Belong to You".
In late 2003, Mills briefly joined the "Tell Us the Truth" tour, an anti-war, anti-Bush administration collaboration with Tom Morello (guitarist for Audioslave and Rage Against the Machine, who, like Mills, did a solo acoustic set), Jill Sobule, Steve Earle, Janeane Garofalo, Billy Bragg, and others.
In March 1999, Mills defeated over one thousand other entrants in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's annual "Final Four Fiasco" contest by correctly picking the final four teams in the 1999 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament.
Mills played piano on Mudville's 2007 album Iris Nova.
Mills also recorded a brief piano part for the song "Soma" from The Smashing Pumpkins' 1993 album Siamese Dream, which was recorded in Georgia.
[edit] Personal life
Mills has one son, Julian, born in 1989. Mills introduced Julian during a show at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Denver, Colorado, in 1999. Julian was present at R.E.M.'s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 12, 2007, at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel as well as the Georgia Music Hall of Fame induction in 2006.
Mills' father, Frank, died on September 25, 2001, at the age of 65. A singer whose appearances included The Ed Sullivan Show, he had recently retired to Lake Oconee in Greene County, reported Online Athens at the time. In addition to singing, Mr. Mills had been a pilot for the U.S. Marine Corps. He was laid to rest four days later at the First Methodist Church of Greensboro, Georgia.
