Chris Mills’ Wall to Wall Sessions opens in a most peculiar and evocative way. Without the comforting accompaniment of additional instrumentation, the singer-songwriter sets the stage for everything that will follow. “Oh, I dreamed I was Richard Pryor / Running on fire down the sunset strip,” he sings. His dream, as you’ll soon notice, isn’t an isolated nighttime episode.

The full-length album is Mills’ fourth, released in conjunction with Brooklyn indie Ernest Jenning Record Co, and Mills’ own Powerless Pop Recorders. After No Depression called 2002’s The Silver Line “an elegant, ambitious and mature rock record never burdened by an ounce of the pretension those weighty words suggest,” Mills set out to do something even more ambitious.

“I wanted to see if I could take things a little bit farther and make something a little larger sonically, perhaps even something grand,” he recalls. “Something like the Phil Spector sound I’ve always loved, but combined with the imagery of bands like Neutral Milk Hotel or the Flaming Lips.”

But this is more than just the lovechild of Phil Spector and Wayne Coyne. It’s a sonic masterpiece — an intelligently crafted orchestral pop ode with heartfelt lyrics and intricate melodies. The record’s tone ranges from subtly ironic in “Chris Mills is Living the Dream” to straightforward earnestness in “Dancing on the Head of a Pin.” There’s childlike exuberance too, in “The World Some Sad Hour” and “Escape from New York.”

Chris vision involved employing a 17-piece band (featuring avant-jazz legend Fred Lonberg-Holm, Kelly Hogan and Nora O'Connor's vocal contributions, and musicians from Giant Sand, Sea And Cake, Head Of Femur and many more) and taking up residence at Chicago’s Wall to Wall Studios. This, of course, produced some issues right off the bat. It’s never easy to get seventeen people all in one place, and once you add a blizzard into the mix, it gets even harder. So as it turned out, the band could only manage two formal rehearsals before the sessions were to begin. And yet, in just two and a half days, the record miraculously came together. The songs were performed live — putting to use the studio’s orchestra pit and 30-foot ceilings—and simultaneously recorded and mixed to a 2-track tape machine. There were no overdubs, and no more than five takes were done for any one song. It was the simplest and oldest method for making a record, and to everyone’s surprise (including the engineer who almost walked out on day one because he didn’t think it could work), it was the one that worked best.

“None of us had ever done a record like this before, where what we played was directly represented by what was on the tape — no chance to go back and fuss over this or tweak that with the computer,” he notes. “That’s what I really love about this record. It is as it was, just a band, a large band, all playing together in one room. Moving together and feeding off each other. We made a record in a way that most records haven’t been made for forty years.”

While it’s certainly easy to get swept up in the recording process behind Wall to Wall Sessions, it’s that dream we mentioned earlier that will stick with you. You know, the one about Richard Pryor?