“It’s just been nice to be the girl I am when I’m on a bed by myself,” says Amy Millan—but get your mind out of the gutter. She’s referring to her solo project, and her album Honey From the Tombs, most of it written years ago in the quiet confines of a Toronto bedroom, before Millan moved to Montreal to join Stars (and, subsequently, Broken Social Scene). But honey ages remarkably well, and Millan found enough free time over the last few years to record her “toxic roots” tunes with Ian Blurton, members of her two bands, and renowned country/ bluegrass players Dan and Jenny Whiteley (aka Crazy Strings).
Sadly, the Whiteleys will be absent when Millan and her band, Tumbleweed, take the stage in Montreal this week. Dan is booked to play alongside bluegrass artist Joey Wright (Jenny’s husband), and Jenny has a bun in the oven. But Millan’s enlisted some other old friends, such as Darcy Yates from her ’90s alt-rock band 16 Tons, and members of Paso Mino, the backing band for her Arts & Crafts labelmate and BSS cohort Jason Collett.
Among Millan’s lush and lonesome songs are strains of country and bluegrass, but she’s quick to differentiate herself from the likes of Wright. “I’m not a bluegrass player,” she states. “I can sing harmonies and sway my hips and drink beer with them—I can drink them all under the table—but I definitely can’t play the guitar like that.”
At 17, Millan got her first taste of the old Kentucky sound, and conspicuous consumption, during informal jams with Dan Whiteley at a colourful Lithuanian bingo hall. “They would serve us underage, and these old guys didn’t care if we brought our guitars ’cause they were kinda permanently drunk.”
The booze kept flowing at Toronto’s Silver Dollar, when Millan and the Whiteleys were fixtures for years at weekly bluegrass jam nights.
“That’s where I fell in love with that kind of music. I was attracted to the joyous way people come together and explode with one another, and these horribly sad songs. I wanted to represent that on the record.”
Even the album’s less weighty fare, like “Wayward and Parliament,” sounds as if it’s pickled in tears, taking inspiration from “the lovely drunks” in Toronto’s old neighbourhood of Cabbagetown. People-watching on Parliament Street and drinking whiskey in the wee hours, when Millan and Dan were roommates, were integral to her lovelorn teenage songwriting.
“We’d both broken up with our respective girlfriend and boyfriend and we would stay up till five in the morning, mourning these relationships. We were both very addicted to that time of the day, when everybody is asleep and the whole city sorta gets quiet but you’re still awake and you’ve still got the bottle in your hand. You feel like you’re being rebellious in some way. But we’re older now, so I don’t really go that hard anymore.”
Millan gave her liver a break several years ago, switching “from bourbon to Bordeaux.” The last Stars album was made on bad wine, what little was available in the Eastern Townships in deep winter, but Stars are bound for Vancouver’s warmer climes come March, to record an album due out in September. As for Millan’s next solo album, she plans to record when Stars take a break in ’08, produced by her Stars/BSS bandmate (etc.) Evan Cranley.
“We’re sorta hooked up, so it seems like the sexy thing to do,” she says. But as for the subject matter, “I’m gonna sort of lay low on the drinking references. I figure I got that covered on the last one.”
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