If you’ve been listening to her work in Stars, you know Amy Millan’s knack for giving iconic vocal performances that take up residence in your brain. Stars‘ classic “Personal”, a two-sided account of a missed personal ad collection, hinges around her delivering the plaintive gut punch of a lyric, “Sorry to be heavy / But heavy is the cost.”
This time out, she wastes no time in providing another line that will live rent-free in your head. The standout line in the opening track on her latest full-length, I Went to Find You, is “The love you make is equal to the goodbyes you’ll have to say.”
While I Went to Find You is a reflective collection of songs that wrestle with middle age, it is neither a wallow nor a eulogy for lost time. It’s a gentle, poignant record that will likely evoke a cathartic tear or two. When you are feeling untethered, Millan’s words and music will ground you again. It’s been 15 years since her solo release, and there’s a short answer and a long answer as to why that is the case.
“Well, the easiest answer is that I have a 14-year-old, and I also have another kid who just turned eight,” Millan says. “When I became a parent, I felt like I needed to make space for their thoughts and needs. Some research shows that postpartum takes about eight years to get through. All of a sudden, I had time to think about my place in the world again.
“For the longest time, you’re just focused on keeping them alive. At seven, it feels like they could probably survive. My younger child can get dressed and make a waffle now. Also, I turned cincuenta. I like to say my age in Spanish because it sounds so heavy in English. I had a lot of feelings about becoming a young old person,” she laughs.
“In Stars and Broken Social Scene and my own work, I have always tried to tell the truth,” she continues. “It’s hard to keep doing it in a youth-obsessed culture as you age. Joni Mitchell said she doesn’t believe in writer’s block. She said if you have it, you’re not telling yourself the truth. That really helped me come to terms with not really being honest about what I was feeling.”
“When you’re young, you wonder what’s going to happen. Will I get married, have kids, make it in music? Now, I have two kids. I have toured the world. I have been in successful bands. I have a solid long-term relationship. So now what? It’s terrifying. I loved the last 25 years of my life, but I need the next 25 to be different. I’m not sure how yet, though, and that can be unsettling,” she shares.
She continues, “There was a song called ‘That Girl’ on the last Stars release that foretold this record. It was about aging, and the song ‘Pretenders’ is about us as a band. The themes were starting to bubble up. For this record, I had to go deep into my past to think about how it made me who I am now.”
I Went to Find You is inspired in part by Millan reflecting on her childhood, specifically her relationship with her father, who was killed when she was five. In the press materials, she recalls that one of her most treasured memories is the time the two spent singing together. She is reckoning with her past and present to find the way forward.
“There is a world I have created in my homelife that I didn’t have. Evan [Cranley, Millan’s partner in life and in Stars] is such a great father, and mostly what I have come to through the feelings of not having my own father in my life growing up. My son is the same age as my brother was when my father was killed. I remember my father’s relationship with me more than my brother’s relationship. It’s been enjoyable to relive my childhood through my kids,” she reflects. “My friend Reema likes to say, ‘Everyone talks about generational trauma, but what about generational talent, the traits that are passed onto the next generation?'”
I Went to Find You came about through a series of fortunate occurrences. Millan’s primary collaborator on the record is Jay McCarrol, an award-winning producer known for his work on the film Blackberry. Millan met McCarrol several years ago but reconnected with him at the Dream Serenade, a benefit for a school for children with exceptionalities. Canadian folk singer Hayden’s daughter went there, and he hosts the event.
“Hayden always wanted Stars to play, but we usually couldn’t do it because of our holiday shows. I wanted a break from Stars. I said yes to it so we could finish up there and take our break. Hayden covered Feist at the show and asked me to sing on the song because I have covered Leslie’s parts for years in Broken Social Scene on tour. He told me I would be singing with Jay, who is the bassist in Hayden’s band. Jay was going to do backups. We met once, several years ago, at a festival, and unbeknownst to me, he orchestrated this collaboration. He was so nice when we met up, saying all these lovely things. Compliments from a younger man… yes please,” she laughs.
Advice from a trusted friend encouraged her to reach out. “Emily Haines from Metric called me the day after the benefit, and I told her about the show. She encouraged me to contact Jay and ask him to work with me on the record. The final Stars show for a while set me up to begin working on my record. It was like finding a four-leaf clover,” she explains.
To start the collaboration, Millan and Cranley had written part of “Make Way for Waves”. It was sitting on a hard drive of unused Stars songs, so she sent it to McCarrol. In short order, he sent Millan a completed song.
“It was so exciting because I had no idea what to expect,” Millan explains. “When I heard that left turn the song takes, I was floored. I couldn’t believe how good it was. I listened to it over and over again for hours. We hardly knew each other. We had only spent part of the night singing together. He told me later that if I gave him notes on the song, he was going to bail. When I responded with no notes, that made him decide to be all in on the project. ‘Make Way for Waves’ was the only thing we collaborated on music-wise. Jay had a lot of unused music, so he sent me a lot of stuff to work with, and then he also started writing. ‘Borderline’ was written just for me.”
Millan relished the opportunity to write with a smaller team of collaborators. “With Stars, I always have Torq [Campbell, lead singer] in mind, thinking about which parts he will sing and which ones are for me. In this case, it was just me and Jay. It went so well that we already have songs in the tank for the next one, too,” she said. I recorded with Jace Lasek, who is in the Besnard Lakes. He has an incredible attitude and great instincts. I didn’t realize he was running Lost River studio, where we recorded. The three of us went to the studio, and I decided I needed one more person – someone who could play a lot of instruments and make good food, so I asked Evan.
“I wasn’t sure if he would want to do it,” she continues. “Luckily, he said yes. He can play anything and make an instrument out of anything. We would work, Evan would cook, and then we’d work again until around midnight for a few days. That is how I got to know Jay even more. I had a feeling that we would hit it off, and now we are so close. It all worked out,” she said.
Amy Millan knew she wanted this experience to be different from her last time recording a solo album. “Having experience is helpful. I was anxious while I was making my first two records, and I didn’t want to feel that again. When I got stuck, I would remind myself that I’m lucky to have this struggle. I’m very privileged to get to do what I do, and I wanted to enjoy the time creating.
“My label supported the making of the record. All the lights were green. I didn’t want to bring old stories into this process, but I didn’t know Jay, so there was a little stranger danger there, even though we worked on the record remotely,” Millan says. “It’s hard to make space for growth, but I succeeded in not bringing the old tension and fear of making another solo record.”
There are songs on the record that are symbolic of that journey. “Make Way for Waves” touches on those subjects.
“I was trying to face why I had so much fear. My friend Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene went back to our school and talked to the students about making a life in art. He took out a board and wrote ‘fear’. He told the students this is what will get in your way the most. ‘Borderline’ expresses the growing pains of going from being an old young person to a young old person, and also acknowledges the people I have lost and the people I will lose. The love you make is equal to the goodbyes you’ll have to say.”
After pouring effort and energy into I Went to Find You, Millan is excited to share it and is trying to be optimistic about reaching current and new fans. “I’m living in the wonder of the question mark right now. I want people to hear it, but I don’t have any control over that. I have no idea how it will find people. I was worried about that, but then Kevin [Drew] said, ‘We don’t know how any of that works. All you can hope for is that someone will hear it and put down the knife,'” she says.
For those who do find I Went to Find You, it is likely they will relate on some level, or perhaps even find a point of entry into their own self-inquiries. “The great help of music is that it opens us up to things we aren’t even sure we are feeling or cannot express. When Jay asked what kind of record I wanted to make, I said ‘gentle songs for a loud world,’ which was right, but now I think it’s more ‘gentle songs for a dangerous world,'” Amy Millan says.
“There’s a lot of fear in the world right now. I hope people take 28 minutes to listen to it and use that time to be gentle. It’s important to take some time to reset your nervous system. Go near a body of water and put on your headphones. It’s a light record. Listen to it outside and notice the beauty. Art makes sense of the chaos.”
