Amy Millan signs to Last Gang, announces new album
Amy Millan– of Stars and Broken Social Scene– has announced her first solo album in over 15 years, I Went To Find You, will be released on May 30, 2025, via Last Gang Records.
She has also shared a first preview of the album in lead single “Wire walks,” a brightly textured, lilting track that highlights her unmistakable, singular voice.
“Getting older is a trip. You assume you’re gonna grow out of feeling like you might fall down a hole any minute, but for me the feeling continues to hover,” Millan explains of the song, which is accompanied by a gorgeous video produced by AOK and made by Luca Tarantini (Andy Shauf, Tanya Tagaq) and Jonah Armitage. “I reference Stars’ ‘Ageless Beauty’ here with the lyric ‘I lied when I said that time would catch your head.’ I thought when I was younger time would mend all wounds, but I was wrong, it does not. Turns out they stick around! So what I have learned with my sage years is to stop trying to dodge and outrun the hard feelings. Embrace the difficult bits, the footprint that made me what I am. When outrunning isn’t working, I might need to lean into what I’ve always been.”
Of the video, she adds: “I wanted to create a dreamscape, a world that doesn’t exist. Wires and ghosts that come alive. Crystal visions and whimsical characters that dance in melting corridors. Luca helped make that vintage vision come to life with new technologies and movements with the song itself.”
Co-written and produced by award-winning musician/composer Jay McCarrol (the critically acclaimed 2023 film BlackBerry), 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—described by Millan as “Gentle songs for difficult times. I wanted to make a record for your nervous system”—is now available for pre-order.
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 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.”
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, 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 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.”
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”). 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.”
PRE-ORDER AMY MILLAN'S I WENT TO FIND YOU (5/30) HERE.
