Workshop with Blake Mills (January '26)

In January 2026, Blake Mills led a four-week School of Song workshop on songwriting, guitar, production, and creative process. Throughout the workshop, Blake talks about music-making as something exploratory, a practice of following curiosity, and building a personal musical language. Drawing from his work as a songwriter, guitarist, producer, and collaborator, the lectures move between practical demonstrations, listening exercises, production breakdowns, and broader conversations about what keeps a creative practice alive over time.

Class 1: Fictional Characters as Creative Liberation focuses on using fictional prompts and invented perspectives to break out of familiar creative habits. Blake explores how writing through characters can interrupt self-consciousness and allow songs to emerge that might otherwise be over-edited or second-guessed. Using examples from his own work, the class examines how limitations, role-playing, and close listening can all become useful songwriting tools. Blake breaks down instrumentation, harmony, and the emotional effect of small production choices, showing how reference points from other artists can help open unexpected pathways into your own writing.

Class 2: Shapeshifting: Reimagining the Guitar explores the guitar as a flexible musical language rather than a fixed tradition. Beginning with Blake’s own frustrations around technical competition and repetition in guitar culture, the lecture focuses on finding inspiration through alternate tunings, fingerpicking, kora music, open tunings, and unconventional physical approaches to the instrument. Through step-by-step demonstrations of his own songs and exercises, Blake shows how simple melodic ideas can gradually evolve through bass movement, inner voices, reharmonization, improvisation, and feel.

Class 3: What Are You Listening For: Demos, Vocal Production, & Muting focuses on demos, production, arrangement, and creative subtraction. Blake breaks down what a producer is actually listening for when hearing a song for the first time: what immediately draws your attention, what interrupts the emotional center of the song, and how arrangements can either support or flatten a performance. Using examples from his own production work, the class explores the ways songs often become clearer once certain parts are removed. 

Class 4: Music as Research reframes songwriting and artistic development through the ideas of curiosity and letting go. Blake discusses treating music-making as an ongoing cycle of study and transformation: becoming fascinated by certain artists or techniques, absorbing them deeply, gradually reshaping those influences into your own language, then releasing the work before you fully feel ready. The class focuses on sustaining a creative practice through curiosity, experimentation, and treating music-making as an ongoing research process.

This course also includes 3 songwriting prompts based on the lecture content of Classes 1-3, plus bonus resources gathered by Blake, including guitar demonstrations with tabs and chord charts to play along with, and fretboard diagrams on how to play the guitar like a kora.

Testimonials from January 2026 Students:

"I have been playing guitar for nearly 50 years, pretty much every day. I don't know how it happened, but somehow in taking the Blake Mills workshop I feel my relationship to the guitar has been reborn. Truly an unexpected, astonishing and wonderful experience. This is to say nothing about what I have learned about songwriting, which has been a joy as well."