A beloved voice of Canadian indie music by way of both Stars and Broken Social Scene, singer/songwriter Amy Millan opens up about her spiritually majestic and long-awaited solo return ‘I Went to Find You’ – a spellbinding, soul-stirring album full of grief, grace, memory, and melodic wonder. Comprised of what she calls “gentle songs for a loud world,” this soul-stirring record offers a sanctuary of stillness and sound, inviting listeners inward not for escape, but communion, and a space to feel deeply in an age of disconnection.
Stream: “Make way for waves” – Amy Millan
Wait – we might have been lonely, we don’t want another worry. Just wait, we could be motion, make way for waves. Just like the water, I might have been lonely day to day…
* * *
“Finally after centuries, a Siren and Orpheus got to make an album” – and from their meeting, a world emerged – wondrous and wistful, quietly epic and drenched in dream.
Amy Millan’s I Went to Find You is a gently cinematic reverie – spellbinding in scope and breathtaking in emotional depth. It glows like the forest at golden hour; it aches like a cherished memory. Woven from grief and grace, longing and light, the Montreal-based singer/songwriter’s new songs float through the ether with tender power and ghostly shimmer. At once a farewell and an arrival, this record is Millan’s magnum opus – a radiant, reverent collection that searches for spirit, sings to the past, and stares straight into the mystic.
Amy Millan has always had a gift for threading the intimate and the infinite – for turning personal truths into communal catharsis. As co-lead vocalist of beloved indie pop band Stars and a satellite member of the iconic Broken Social Scene, she’s spent over two decades shaping the emotional landscape of Canadian indie music.
But I Went to Find You, her first solo album in over fifteen years (released May 30th via Last Gang Records), feels like a different kind of arrival — not a reinvention, but a return to source. A homecoming. It’s the sound of an artist tracing her lineage through song, and uncovering something sacred along the way.
The making of I Went to Find You began with serendipity – a chance encounter that felt more like divine intervention. When Millan met award-winning musician and composer Jay McCarrol in 2023, something clicked: A spark of musical communion that echoed the joy of her earliest memories singing with her father. “Ever since then I’ve tried to make my life an arrow back to that feeling,” she shares, “but I didn’t fully understand that until now.”
The pair first sang together backstage at Dream Serenade in Toronto, and the connection was immediate. Encouraged by longtime best friend (and Metric frontwoman) Emily Haines, Millan reached out to McCarrol about collaborating.
“I was hoping I would find someone to help me make a follow-up solo record, and Jay dropped right in my lap as if the muses made it happen,” Millan recalls. “Finally after centuries, a Siren and Orpheus got to make an album.”
Within weeks, they were crafting the song that would become the album’s emotional centerpiece, “Make way for waves.” “There’s something so cinematic about the way he writes,” she says, “and so much drama in his music.” That vast, expressive palette opened a door for Millan to explore new vocal terrain, and to excavate some of her most personal songwriting to date.
“When Jay and I started working together, I texted him my vision was ‘gentle songs for a loud world,’” Millan tells Atwood Magazine. “The world has only gotten louder since, and it feels as though everyone is on tenterhooks with a feeling of danger. I wanted to create a sonic world where for 30 minutes you can enter and reset your nervous system.”
Recorded across a series of sessions at Lost River – a studio tucked deep in the Laurentian forest – and produced by McCarrol with engineering from Jace Lasek and mixing by Peter Katis, the album is as lush and textured as it is emotionally unguarded. With contributions from longtime friends and collaborators including Evan Cranley, James Shaw, and Charles Spearin, I Went to Find You balances dreamlike atmospheres with raw introspection. “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,” Millan reflects. “This record felt like the first time I was able to address that loss without clouding it all in lyrics about boys and whiskey.”
“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.”
The album’s title holds deep personal weight, inspired by Millan’s own journey to reconnect with her late father. “It’s layered,” she says, “but ultimately is referencing me trying to go find the spirit of my father, who was killed in a car accident when I was five. I believe I achieved this goal.” That spiritual through-line pulses quietly beneath the record’s surface – a search for meaning, for memory, and for something larger than oneself.
Making this music also involved quite a bit of spiritual surrender, as she explains: “I try to live outside the world of comparisons when channeling muses to guide me on where to go melodically or lyrically… The journey of this record was its own.”
Millan candidly describes I Went to Find You’s songs as “wet gentle gems” – glistening with grief, tenderness, and hard-won hope. Their strength lies not in grandeur, but in atmosphere and alchemy: From the cathartic unveiling of “Untethered” to the breathtaking sweat of “Murmurations,” these are slow-burn songs, full of mystery, movement, and emotional nuance.
“It’s a pretty concise tight eight,” she says of the tracklist. “Track nine is really a tail to track eight. We actually have another chunk of songs, but these eight were picked because they were my favourite – and I’m of an age where it was always about the arc of a record, not just about the songs.” Still, one track carries a particularly sweet victory: “Jay was really unsure about ‘Untethered’ in its infancy and I kept asking him not to forsake the song and that I believed! I love an underdog, so the fact that it not only made its way, but then with one of my favourite lyrics, is a high five to the song.”
Telephone was always ringing
How we love to talk in the car
The mistakes could be forgiven
Got my back so we’d go far
When I come untethered
How we weathered
Where I run when I’m unsettled
You’re the one
Millan’s gift for evocative, poetic language runs through the entire album like thread through fabric.
These are not just songs — they’re spells, scenes, and soul-searches. Asked to share a few of her favorite lines, she offers up a handful like fragments of dreams, each one rich with imagery and meaning:
“The love you make is equal to the goodbyes you’ll have to say.”
“Three swords to a wish, who does she think she is?”
“Wound around that stubborn wound – Great Lakes have tantrums too.”
“Set the masts at half for the time that doesn’t last.”
“All that glitters gets sold.”
“Feel some courage to step into where the dark is not an ending but a start.”
“Cemetery site lines, Don Valley highway signs, getting high in high rises.”
Each lyric points to a different emotional aperture – grief, absurdity, resilience, transformation. Taken together, they echo what this record does best: It leaves space for the listener to feel, to remember, and to imagine.
I Went to Find You is more than a solo comeback – it’s a quiet, cosmic triumph.
After over fifteen years away from the solo spotlight, Amy Millan returns not with a roar, but with a whisper that carries for miles. These songs shimmer with warmth, wonder, and majesty – the kind of beauty that doesn’t beg for attention, but earns your stillness.
This is the work of an artist unhurried by time, unbound by trend, and unwavering in intention. With luminous melodies, poetic depth, and a voice that holds both ache and light, Millan has crafted a record that feels timeless – not because it tries to be, but because it simply is.
“All I ever want is that there is connection,” she says. “That listeners hear themselves in the lyrics and that the songs resonate and articulate something for them that they might need.”
In I Went to Find You, she’s given us exactly that – a place to land, a place to listen, and a place to feel.
As for her own takeaways? “I feel grateful all the lights were green when it came to making this music; it’s a piece of work I needed in this time of my life. Meeting Jay was a mark on the lifeline and gathering the diamonds that was the team that helped every aspect of this album brought me hope in what’s next and has left me with the great gift of continued wonder.”
Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside Amy Millan’s I Went to Find You with Atwood Magazine as she goes track-by-track through the music and lyrics of her spectacular new album!
It’s a stirring work of deep intention and melodic magic – one best discovered methodically, minute by minute, song by song.
— —
:: stream/purchase I Went to Find You here ::
:: connect with Amy Millan here ::
— —
Stream: ‘I Went to Find You’ – Amy Millan
:: Inside I Went to Find You ::
— —
Untethered
Friendship love song. I’ve always spent a lot of time on the phone making sure to connect with my favourite people. “The love you make is equal to the goodbyes you’ll have to say” is one of the most favourite things I have ever written, and I do the drum fill into the last chorus, which was a thrill.
Wire Walks
The Peter Katis mix on this is so delicious. When Jay McCarrol sent me the music it reminded me of a music box. I loved figuring out how to wind around the sound. It has a carousel spirit.
Borderline
Ghosts got into the machine with this one. The northern lights were wild in the sky when I wrote the vocal way up in northern Ontario, and when I downloaded it to send to Jay, the ghosts had completely rearranged my vocal. They had some great suggestions, which we did end up keeping. The vocal on the album is the same from that night recorded in a remote Ontario cabin off the grid.
Kiss that summer
I loved the breezy feeling of the music on this one and it was a necessary vibe to bring to the album as a whole. I wanted some mystery and imagination to the lyrics. What does the code say on the back of your person? I wanted the song to sound like a flirtation. The way the sun flirts with water on July afternoons.
Make way for waves
The first song Jay and I collaborated on together so it’s very special in my heart. Evan Cranley and I had written the verse years prior but it had yet to launch. Jay took a deep swerve with the chorus and we were off. Lyrically it is a dirge for my youth.
The overpass
“The good old days” has always irked me as a saying. So many days to be had and some are good and some are not. Honestly I feel like these days will be the good old days for me looking back way later in life. There were so many hit songs in the 80s that alluded to high school or deep youth being a better time, and I just don’t buy it. So I hope people catch on to my cynicism when I sing the line. Mostly everyday in my 20s I felt like a whirling dervish.
Don Valley
Jay sent this and it was quite bombastic musically to begin with. Jimmy Shaw (METRIC) invited us to have a summer hang and maybe we go and try something in his studio, but really we were there to cook and chill by the fire. We went into the studio the day after our first night for just a couple hours bringing with us very low pressure. The idea was just to have fun. This is Evan, Jay and I off the floor and it became this woody, focused feel and it was exactly what the song needed. It’s a love song for Cabbagetown, my childhood neighbourhood.
Murmurations
After Jay and I solidified our collab with “Make way for waves,” he sent me a file with a bunch of music he’d been writing over the years. This was the first one I was drawn to and remember texting him “you soundtracked the sky” because there was some keyboard line that reminded me of when starlings swoop around all together at dusk (a murmuration). I have always thought when I see these birds they are trying to send me secret messages.
Lost river diamonds
This was a very last minute down to the wire idea by Jace Lasek. The idea to end the record with what our surroundings sounded like when we would walk around the night forest where it was recorded in lost river. A meditative thank you to that space. To take you from the birds to the trees. A final attempt to slow down your nervous system.
— —
:: stream/purchase I Went to Find You here ::
:: connect with Amy Millan here ::
— — — —
Connect to Amy Millan on
Facebook, 𝕏, TikTok, Instagram
Discover new music on Atwood Magazine
© Tess Roby
© Tess RobyI Went to Find You
an album by Amy Millan
