One For The Weekend: Amy Millan

Watch the animated clip for Amy Millan's "Make Way For Waves" off her new album I Went To Find You out May 30.

Here's the scoop on Amy Millan's new album... 

The first solo album from Amy Millan in over 15 years, I Went To Find You emerged from the kind of once-in-a-lifetime serendipity that alters our experience of the world. 

After crossing paths with award-winning musician/composer Jay McCarrol in fall 2023, the Montreal-based singer/songwriter felt a sense of musical communion reminiscent of the elation she’d first accessed in singing with her father as a little girl—a connection severed when her dad was killed in a car accident just before her fifth birthday. As she began creating songs with McCarrol, Millan slowly realized that an unconscious desire to sustain that feeling had informed her lifelong devotion to music and her many cherished collaborations over the years, including her work in beloved indie-pop band Stars and a satellite member of iconic collective Broken Social Scene. 

 “I so clearly remember being a kid and putting on my pajamas and being so excited for nighttime, because that’s when my dad and I would sing together,” Millan says. “Ever since then I’ve tried to make my life an arrow back to that feeling, but I didn’t fully understand that until now.” 

 In selecting a title for her third solo effort, she chose to honour that sense of revelation and self-discovery. “A lot of this record had me looking into my past for clues on who I have become and why,” says Millan, who names longtime musician-friends like Feist, Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew and Charles Spearin, Metric’s James Shaw, Stars’ Chris Seligman, and her husband and Stars bandmate Evan Cranley among the musical kin who’ve profoundly enriched her life. “The ‘you’ of the title is the people I found, the people I went looking for after they’d gone—and the ‘you' is the person you become when all these components align.”

Amy Millan's much-anticipated new album "I Went To Find You" is being released on May 30th via Last Gang Records. You can pre-order a copy on hot pink vinyl right here. She'll be launching the album in Toronto with a show at Longboat Hall on June 14th at 8 pm. Get tickets via dice.fm right here. Watch Gaia Alari's animated clip for "Make Way For Waves" following Amy's preview below.   
 

Stars celebrate 20 years of Set Yourself On Fire @ The Concert Hall, Friday

Join Torquil, Amy and the whole Stars crew in a 20th anniversary reprise of Set Yourself On Fire tonight. Get tickets right here.

Jenny Whiteley celebrates 20 years of Hopetown @ Moonshine Café, May 4

Jenny will be joined by Joey Wright, Amy Millan & pals at Oakville's Moonshine Café at 8 pm.

Here's the scoop on Hopetown...

Hopetown is a collection of songs that may seem more traditional in content at first glance: lost love, prison misery, a “where’s he at?” lament. Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll hear that The Halls Of Folsom is about not wanting to leave prison, and that No Reason Blues is about anxiety and the need to worry about something. There are some great country songs here too…I Never Knew (written with Hearbreak Hill’s Chris Quinn and Dottie Cormier) and I Know How To Say Goodbye (co-written with Colin Linden) tug at the heartstrings, while more the ethereal Circus is In Town and the evocative Hallelujah Haircut (a co-write with Fred Eaglesmith) take the album down some winding dirt roads and into an eccentric small town of the mind. Just when you think your ride is over, the haunting and beautiful a Capella Day to Day rounds out the album, leaving the taste of love and honey in your mouth, as the claw hammer banjo echoes through the hills. 

The title Hopetown comes from a village outside of Kingston: “We were driving home from doing a music program at a camp for developmentally challenged adults, which had been a fantastic experience, and we missed our turn and ended up in Hopetown. The name on the road sign just jumped out at me. A few years ago, I would have used it sarcastically, that was just my sense of humour, but now I really feel uplifted by the title. It reflects my life more than the work in some ways…don’t worry, there are still lots of broken hearts and murder and even a prison song on the album, for all of my fans out there!” 

You can get a copy of Jenny Whiteley's Hopetown album via Bandcamp right here. 

Stars return with new album From Capelton Hill out May 27th

Amy Millan and her Stars crew have just shared the songs "Snowy Owl" and "Pretenders" off their long-awaited new album, From Capelton Hill. Have a listen below.

Here's the scoop...

Montreal’s Stars today return with the announcement of their first new album in five years, From Capelton Hill, set for release on May 27th, via Last Gang Records/MNRK. The album’s two lead singles showcase the band of Torquil Campbell, Amy Millan, Evan Cranley, Chris McCarron, Patty McGee, and Chris Seligman, at their very best. Triumphant and romantic, “Pretenders” embraces a Thelma and Louise-level commitment to seeing things through, and was written by Millan as a “love letter” to Campbell and her memories of the band’s origins. “Snowy Owl,” the album’s tender, acoustic closer, finds Millan and Campbell swapping verses and once again taking the role of two characters that try to stay together but instead keep destroying one another. Campbell says the track is the epilogue to their stories: “I don’t know what comes after,” he says. “I just make records about other people and in the end, they turn out to be about me.”

The band also announced a headlining West Coast summer tour in support of the record that kicks off with a show in Vancouver, Canada on June 4th. So far, Toronto dates have yet to be announced. From Capelton Hill is now available for pre-order right here.

Stars – From Capelton Hill

From Capelton Hill, Stars’ ninth album and follow-up to 2017’s acclaimed There Is No Love In Fluorescent Light, was composed between Seligman and Cranley over the first half of 2020. After a first attempt to assemble the record remotely with mixed results, the band convened in Montreal to record with Marcus Paquin and Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes) at Studio MixArts, Lasek’s Breakglass Studio, and the band’s own space, Zoomer. McGee says once they finally gathered in a room together, everything clicked—first as friends, then as a working band. From Capelton Hill is ultimately about a group of people who have spent more than 20 years together, and who have now started to face the awful, necessary calculus each human eventually must do: when will all of this end? 

The album’s title reflects this ephemeralness. Located in the rolling green foothills around North Hatley, Quebec, Capelton Hill is a place that somehow still exists outside the grasp of algorithms and internet surveillance. But even its inhabitants and those who know about it won’t know it forever; their times will end, and their knowledge of and relationship to Capelton Hill will end as well. This includes the members of Stars, whose connections to North Hatley trace back to when Campbell’s grandfather built homes in the area in the late 1800’s. “I guess what From Capelton Hill means to me is from memory, from the past, from a place that seems permanent but isn’t, and I think that that sense of impermanence is a big part of what’s in the record: realizing that things don’t last forever, and that even the things that I thought would be there forever aren’t going to be,” Campbell explains. “Capelton Hill is a place where things in my mind, in my life, they’ve never changed. And yet it will go.”

Musically, From Capelton Hill feels like walking into Stars’ familiar teenage bedroom. Campbell says it cuts to the band’s founding principles: it is brimming with gothic, dazzling ‘80s and ‘90s Britpop arrangements, but rendered with intimacy and warmth rather than with cold, digital remove. A wealth of horn and string arrangements unfold across the record in true Stars fashion, dreamy and macabre. More than ever, From Capelton Hill feels like a direct channeling of Stars’ decades-long pursuit: “This band has always been us trying to navigate what it means to be inside a life that is going to end,” says Millan. “And we’re getting closer.”

These hard-won revelations aren’t solely the stuff of creeping dread; whether by nature or necessity, they’re also coloured on the record with a peaceful acceptance, like watching a world-ending tidal wave cresting and marveling at its magnitude. “What I love about the album,” Millan reflects, “is that we’re chasing the truth of the matter rather than chasing a hook. We’re just telling the truth.”

Check out "Snowy Owl" and "Pretenders" below. 

Stars @ Nathan Phillips Square, Wednesday

Amy Millan, Torqil Campbell and Stars will be on stage tonight at 8:15 pm followed by Café Tacvba at 9:45 pm. 

Happy Birthday Amy Millan!