A lifetime of music with Frank Mills

“Every year I come out of retirement for a tour,” says internationally renowned pop pianist Frank Mills, 73, with a hearty chuckle.

Home to Mills is a farm-estate in Vermont during the summer and a winter retreat in the Bahamas where he goes boating daily.

“I didn’t do it (tour) for eight years, but Rita MacNeil convinced me to go on the road for a Christmas tour in 2011 and it revived that old feeling of being on the road.”

Mills is on a 16-stop western Canadian tour to promote a new album he affectionately calls After the Dancer, popular recordings from over a 40-year career that have not been heard in a while.

On a more personal level, the tour is an opportunity for Mills to share anecdotes about growing up in a house filled with music, and the struggle and humour of breaking into a competitive business. The tour stops at the Arden Theatre Nov. 13.

Mills shot to international fame in 1978 when Polydor released two songs as singles. The A-side was a lush, romantic ballad titled The Poet and Me while the B-side was a quaint little piano number called Music Box Dancer.

Music Box Dancer fired the imagination of listeners and hit No. 1 in 26 countries. In an unpredictable rarity, it even shot to No. 1 in Japan three times in one year – first performed by Mills, next by a Japanese act and finally by a Chinese group. Since then Mills has recorded nearly 30 albums.

During his first retirement Mills decided to start downsizing his Vermont home.

“I was cutting wood, chasing cows, mending fences. At my age it gets me out of the house to do gardening, but the work was a bit much.”

Diagnosed as diabetic, Mills went the extra mile and got rid of his maple sugar shack and the taplines.

“Keeping them going was like offering an alcoholic a job in a bar.”

While downsizing, the multi-award winning composer discovered 70 boxes filled with tapes that were his life’s work. He made the decision to create After the Dancer, a compilation of his 13 most important tracks.

“They are not only digitally recorded, mixed and remasterd, but they are high technical performances of the best works I did.”

One of the cuts is Classical Rock, an ode to Mason Williams three-minute Classical Gas, a tune that inspired him to adopt Williams’ style.

“It was one of the pieces after Music Box Dancer that I thought was what I wanted to do. It was the best of rock music, the best of an orchestration.”

The eclectic album’s instrumentals range from A Song for Haruka, a simple little melody that pays tribute to a woman’s beauty to Storm Warning, a tune written after hurricane David hit the Bahamas.

“We had run out of food. All we had were avocados from the avocado tree in the backyard and champagne. We went through the hurricane eating avocadoes and drinking champagne. It sounds idyllic, but I’ve only done it once.”

After all these years, Mills still gets a kick out of meeting fans on tours.

“I still get emails every week. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be enjoying life as much.”