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.