AMY MILLAN
I Went To Find You out 5/30/25
(Last Gang Records)
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 as co-founder of 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 night time, 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 honor 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 peopleI went looking for after they’d gone—and the ‘you' is the person you become when all these components align.”
I Went To Find You began taking shape soon after she and McCarrol first linked up at Dream Serenade(an annual fundraiser hosted by singer/songwriter Hayden at Toronto’s Massey Hall). At the suggestion ofMcCarrol (who won a Canadian Screen Award for composing the score to the critically acclaimed 2023 film BlackBerry), Millan stepped in for Feist and joined Hayden for a duet on his bittersweet and breezy“On a Beach,” with McCarrol singing backup. “Before the show Jay and I went backstage and sang the song together, and I had this visceral reaction that almost felt like my body going into shock,” she recalls.“I realized I’d spent so long trying to find that vocal harmony that puts me back into a place of bliss and safety.”
After returning to Montreal, Millan got a call from her best friend and Metric front woman Emily Haines, who urged her to reach out to McCarrol about potentially working together on the long-awaited follow-up to her 2009 sophomore solo LP Masters of the Burial. McCarrol, a devoted fan of Millan’s, asked her to send over some song ideas—a turn of events that quickly paved the way for the making of I Went To Find You’s centerpiece, the quietly majestic “Make way for waves.” “I sent Jay the first verse and a couple weeks later he sent a demo back, and I was blown away by how beautiful it was,” says Millan. “There’s something so cinematic about the way he writes and so much drama in his music, and it created such avast canvas for me to lay my feelings out and use my voice in new ways.”
Over the next two months, Millan and McCarrol continued their remote collaboration and soon arrived at an album’s worth of material sculpted from a gorgeously detailed sonic palette—an element Millan likens to “that feeling when it’s high noon in the summertime and you’re by the water, and the surface picks up all that light and makes it look like diamonds.”Produced by McCarrol, engineered by Jace Lasek (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Wolf Parade), mixed in part by Peter Katis (The National, Interpol), and recorded at Lost River (an idyllic studio deep in the Laurentian forest), I Went To Find You is a consummate vessel for Millan’s delicate yet powerful vocal work, and merges its luminous sound with her most candid songwriting to date. “When I look back at all the songs I’ve ever written, there’s a lot of moments where I’m expressing sadness about a lost love when really there’s a much greater loss at the core,” says Millan. “This record felt like the first time I was able to address that loss without clouding it all in lyrics about boys and whiskey.”
Made with a close-knit lineup of musicians including Cranley—with McCarrol and Lasek also contributing on a number of instruments—I Went To Find You explores such complex and intimate themes as the salvation of longstanding friendship (on the album-opening “Untethered,” partly inspired by Drew),the narrowly escaped consequences of certain reckless behavior in her youth (“The overpass”), and the precarious kinship formed from shared trauma (“Don valley”). And on lead single “Wire walks,” Millan delivers an ineffably lovely reflection on emotional damage and eventual self-acceptance, ornamenting the brightly textured track with lilting grooves, lush violin lines, and Cranley’s tender performance ontrombone. “There’s a lyric in ‘Ageless Beauty’ that says ‘Time will hold its promise,’ meaning that time will come and fix everything so you end up totally healed,” says Millan, referring to a song from Stars’ 2004 album Set Yourself on Fire. “But after two decades of singing that lyric I realized, ‘Or, maybe it won’t.’Maybe instead of trying to dodge the wound so you can turn into some better version of yourself, you should just lean into who you really are and who you’ve always been.”
As Millan reveals, much of I Went To Find You arose from an attempt at “contending with a mountain of a past and the forking river of the future.” “Everybody’s got their goals they set for themselves, but then once you reach them and feel a little more settled in life there’s that question of, ‘Now what?’” she says.“Meeting Jay was such a welcomed, unanticipated swerve in my creative world. I never expected to have the great luck of yet again experiencing such a profound musical connection with someone new. This brought me deep comfort—thinking that maybe the future is still a big unknown with open doors and opportunities I still get to dream up. So many of these songs are about being a woman moving through the world and trying to analyze all those feelings, and maybe in some way they’ll help others to move through their own lives too.”
