AMY MILLAN SHARES NEW SINGLE “THE OVERPASS”
Amy Millan today shared her graceful, reflective new single “The overpass,” the third and final early preview of her forthcoming solo album I Went To Find You. “When I was 22, my first boyfriend’s mom died. It was a shock, it happened fast. The night of her funeral, a group of us went over the Bloor viaduct in Toronto and a couple of us got on the ledge and walked across what could have been a deathly end. There was no protection from falling off and below is a hundred feet directly onto the highway. It was famous for suicides in Toronto until they finally put up protective wiring a few years ago,” she explains of the song’s thematic origins. “That night still haunts me with the thought of what an idiot I was. As weird as aging is, being in my 20s was a stupid time. Kissing all my friends to figure out which one was the one. It was all very unruly and I felt mostly lost. Turning 30 was the best thing that ever happened to me. I never believe people when they say ‘oh the good old days’ so my sardonic sarcastic feeling on that notion finally made it into a lyric.”
The song’s cinematic video, directed by Sara Melvin, has an equally personal backstory. “‘The overpass’ song brought me back to a sepia Toronto. My niece and the daughter of one of my closest friends, Jenny Whiteley, who was my roommate in my 20s, have the faces of that time,” Millan says. “What is a day in the life of 20-year-old friends who have everything ahead of them and an open sky of question marks? The grey hover of a Toronto that springs eternal hope. There are little Easter eggs of my past throughout the video. A little love vignette for baby Amy and the city that made her.”
Co-written and produced by Jay McCarrol (award-winning musician/composer known for the critically acclaimed 2023 film BlackBerry and 2025 SXSW standout Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie), engineered by Jace Lasek (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Wolf Parade), mixed in part by Peter Katis (The National, Interpol), recorded at Lost River (an idyllic studio deep in the Laurentian forest), I Went To Find You is now available for pre-order. Additional pre-releases singles “Wire walks” and “Make way for waves” have seen praise and support from Paste (“Wire walks” in ‘Best Songs of February’ - “a SOTY frontrunner”), KCRW (“Wire walks” - ‘Today’s Top Tune’), Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, The Needle Drop, Exclaim!, and more.
ORDER AMY MILLAN – I WENT TO FIND YOU ON HOT PINK VINYL
Millan has also announced a fall headline tour in support of the album beginning this October. The run will include stops at New York City’s Mercury Lounge (10/3) and Los Angeles’ The Echo (10/28); a current itinerary is below.
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 McCarrol in fall 2023, the Montreal-based Millan 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. “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 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 Evan Cranley (who is also her husband) 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.”
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 of McCarrol, who would also sing backup, Millan stepped in for Feist and joined Hayden for a duet. “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 Millan returned home and reached out to McCarrol about potentially collaborating at the urging of her best friend, Metric frontwoman Emily Haines, the two soon began work on the long-awaited follow-up to her 2009 sophomore solo LP Masters of the Burial. Over the next two months, they continued their remote collaboration and soon arrived at an album’s worth of material. The result, 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.”
Amy Millan live:
06/14 - Toronto, ON - Longboat Hall
10/2 - Boston, MA - Middle East
10/3 - New York, NY - Mercury Lounge
10/4 - Washington, DC - Pearl Street
10/5 - Philadelphia, PA - Milkboy
10/15 - Montreal, QC - Sala Rossa
10/17 - Ottawa, ON - St John's Baptist Church
10/19 - Lake County, BC - Creekside Theatre
10/20 - Vancouver, BC - Fox Theatre
10/23 - Seattle, WA - Madame Lou's
10/24 - Portland, OR - Mission Theater
10/26 - San Francisco, CA - Cafe du Nord
10/28 - Los Angeles, CA - The Echo