Amy Millan - April 16

Acclaimed for her evocative lyrics and distinctive vocals, Canadian singer, songwriter, guitarist Amy Millan has been making music for over 25 years. Best known as a member of the indie rock bands Stars and Broken Social Scene, Amy has also released three solo albums. 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 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.” “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 Emily Haines and 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.” 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. 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.