SPILL FEATURE: CATCHING CLUES OF WHAT I’M HERE FOR – A CONVERSATION WITH AMY MILLAN

CATCHING CLUES OF WHAT I’M HERE FOR

A CONVERSATION WITH AMY MILLAN

Amy Millan has performed countless times over the years with Stars and Broken Social Scene, but it’s hard to believe it’s been 16 years since she released an album of solo material. She returns with I Went To Find You, out May 30 via Last Gang Records, a collaborative solo album born of a serendipitous encounter.

In 2023, Millan stepped in for Feist to sing a duet with Hayden at the Dream Serenade benefit concert at Massey Hall. Composer and producer Jay McCarrol (Blackberry, Nirvanna the Band the Show) was singing backup vocals. When Millan and McCarrol were rehearsing the song backstage together, Millan describes experiencing a shocking visceral reaction. The delight she felt in their musical connection was similar to how she’d felt singing with her father, who she tragically lost to a car accident just before her fifth birthday. Millan’s best friend, Metric’s Emily Haines, urged her to reach out to McCarrol about potentially working together on an album, and the rest took care of itself. As Millan began creating songs with McCarrol, she slowly started to realise that an unconscious desire to sustain that feeling of musical connection had informed her lifelong devotion to music.

In the creation of I Went To Find You, “it was important to analyse everything that got me to where I am today,” Millan says. “I’d written so much about loss [in former solo albums] and put so much importance on some of these very short relationships I’d had, and the feelings [conveyed through the music] didn’t really match the experience. So, I went a little bit deeper into where that feeling of loss was really coming from.” Finally being able to pinpoint that knowledge enabled her to access a world of past pain, she says, and be able to articulate it without hiding in metaphors.

PURCHASE I WENT TO FIND YOU VIA BANDCAMP

“I’m really proud of the album,” Millan continues. “It’s my first time putting out a solo record as a collaborator.” She had been feeling stuck, as if she and the guitar had been in a relationship for 30 years that had grown stagnant, she jokes. “It’s not you [the guitar]; it’s me.” McCarrol’s experience and excitement in writing music provided Millan with inspiration for a new direction in which her music could go. “It’s just us wanting to share the beautiful work we made.”

Who was it that she went out to find? The album title has a rainbow of meanings, Millan says. “The core of it, the light beam that makes the rainbow, is definitely my dad. And it’s impossible to process that kind of loss when you’re that young, so I really think it took until this record, and this time in my life, to fully process it for the first time… I realised I had made my life an arrow to get back that feeling.” The colours beyond the light beam, she says, often represent the important people she has found throughout her life, such as “Emily Haines on the first day of school, all the deep friendships that I have made, and the children that I made with my person [Evan Cranley of Stars] … so many different things.”

Millan and Cranley were joined by Jay McCarrol and engineer Jace Lasek (Wolf Parade, Patrick Watson, Barr Brothers) to record the album at Lost River Studio in Quebec’s Laurentian forest. The experience of being immersed in nature, in two opposite climates (summer and winter), directly contributed to the ambiance of the music. “Lost River Diamonds,” an instrumental tune that closes the album, captures the sound of the band walking through the forest. “There were wind chimes all over; you felt like you were in Narnia without the danger,” Millan says.

This quartet of musicians was specially curated by Millan. “Jay primarily writes scores for movies, so there’s something incredibly cinematic about the way he creates music,” she says. “Jace has this unbelievable sonic paving in his guitar-playing and playfulness with making different sounds. Evan can make an instrument out of anything — he was, at one point, playing the drums with a bunch of branches that he collected. He also plays so many different instruments. Within the four of us, we had a 10-piece band.”

I Went To Find You is a collection of “gentle songs for a difficult time,” Millan says. It features Millan’s lead vocals and lyrics backed by McCarrol’s additional vocals, and instruments such as baritone guitar, keys, drum loops, saxophone, violin, ukulele, trombone, and cello. The opening track, “Untethered”, touches on friendship, and was partly inspired by Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew. “Don Valley” explores complicated connections formed through turmoil, with a Toronto backdrop.

“Wire Walks”, the first single released, explores pain followed by self-acceptance, and features a nod to Stars’ “Ageless Beauty” in the lyric “I lied when I said time would catch your head.” “When I’m walking on a wire / Slightly bent without an anchor / Could I come down without a fall / Catching clues of what I’m here for?” Millan questions.

“No longer being an ingenue,” she quips, “there is experience that I bring with me, and I have 20 years of touring the world, and playing in two extraordinary bands, and learning craft.” She has a deeper understanding of why we make the decisions we do and how to get where we are. “When you’re young, you think, ‘What will happen?’ ‘What will be my life?’ And then you make a life, but there’s still so much life to be had, hopefully, so it’s about embracing the idea that anything can still happen.”

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Photo Credits: Tess Roby