Credit: Far Out / Focus Features

“That’s what excites me”: the two best songs of the 1960s, according to Mike Mills

Mon 5 May 2025 13:30, UK

In the music industry, Mike Mills might be one of those names that is felt but never seen. As someone who prevails in the film space with his award-winning debut, Beginners, and other masterpieces like C’mon C’mon, Mills’ stories are brushed with inexplicable sentimentality, appealing to the more basic humanistic tendencies in all of us. In music, Mills has also made an impact with several legendary names, from Yoko Ono to Sonic Youth.

However, that’s not to say the two worlds don’t often collide. For Mills, film soundtracks are an integral part of the whole, as evidenced by the many collaborations he was worked on for some of his more career-defining projects, like 20th Century Women and Roger Neill’s score that comprised Talking Heads, The Clash, David Bowie, the Buzzcocks, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and more.

In many ways, and particularly for 20th Century Women, music was a conduit for bringing the individual stories of the characters to life in ways that felt natural, relatable, and entirely real. As is often the case with Mills’ work, the stories rely heavily on emotional appeal, and authenticity is the key bridge to achieving this where words and language falter. As he once said: “I’m cinematising real people, and you can never get them right or show all of their dimensions.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise, therefore, that this cinematic and tender attention to detail also lingers in his music videos and graphic designs for musical artists. When it comes to his own musical tastes, many of his cherished favourites also contain the quintessential layering of basic yet nuanced human emotions he knows and loves, particularly when they spotlight delicacy in a way that’s unmistakably human.

One of these choices, which he named for KCRW’s Guest DJ Project in 2012, was The Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’. Explaining his endearment to the track, Mills praised its sonic beauty and ability to navigate “well-observed” everyday life in a way that appears “lyrical and huge”. Similar to his own interests, the song also seemed to Mills like a “collage” and “two songs put into one”.

He explained: “[There’s] this amazing symphonic transition that they shouldn’t be able to pull off, and magically, all of a sudden, you’re in a different tempo and this utterly different energy. Heterogeneous things, things that are more than their parts and the parts that really shouldn’t be together. That’s what excites me.”

His other choice written during the same decade was The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Sticking With You’, one of their more tender compositions boasting what Mills described as a “weird impossible combination of showmanship of this very catchy melodic, almost child-like tune with very psychologically subversive strange content.” For Mills, Lou Reed’s most endearing aspect was how he was “aware of the audience”—something he mirrors differently in his own work, which allowed him to create art that was “psychologically ahead of its time”.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that many of Mills’ videos and films search for greater meaning with intricate nuance without compromising on basic human connection with audiences. While some of his projects might seem layered with intense, oftentimes conflicting meaning, that’s only because he makes it possible by understanding the basic appeal of art and how it infiltrates our lives in inexplicable ways.