Amy Millan's Toxic Roots

Can a member of Broken Social Scene ever really find musical solitude?

Amy Millan certainly tried while assembling her latest solo outing, Masters Of The Burial. After tours for her primary band, Stars, and BSS wrapped up, Millan took refuge in a friend's Montreal apartment, where she smoked too much and laid the foundation of her new disc.

Millan had to give up that isolation when it came time to record, but when you have friends like hers, headcounts tend to amplify quality. Aside from her touring band, Millan was joined on Masters Of The Burial by Leslie Feist, Apostle Of Hustle's Dean Stone, Stars' Evan Cranley and Chris Seligman, The Stills' Liam O'Neil and the silently ubiquitous Jesse Zubot.

CHARTattack talked to Millan about the fruits of her labour — an album that's heavy on cover songs and light on booze.

CHARTattack: How difficult is it to find the time to make these discs, in light of your band obligations?
Amy Millan: We take breaks. Torquil [Campbell, of Stars] lives in Vancouver, so I usually have chunks of time. Making and recording it isn't as difficult as planning tours and doing the promotion of the record.

Let's talk cover songs. Why did you want to tackle [Death Cab For Cutie's] "I Will Follow You Into The Dark?"
I just love the song so much. I heard Ben [Gibbard] sing it every night when we were on tour with them. I originally just wanted to play it in Calgary, because we were heading that way, and I felt we needed to learn a song for that town [because of the song's "from Bangkok to Calgary" line]. The band enjoyed playing it so much that we kept it in the roster... There was this little online release [of it] that we did, but I wanted to do it properly, in studio.

And Weeping Tile's "Old Perfume?"
It's one that I've always kept in my back pocket. I really love that song... I thought there had been enough time that I could change it up a little bit and record it in a different way.

And why Richard Hawley's "Run For Me?"
I absolutely love that song — I think it's so beautiful — but I don't really know what he's talking about. I love that about it — that you can interpret it in so many different ways. My mom heard the record and thought I wrote that song. She thought I wrote it about being on the road.

I've just always thought that the melody is absolutely gorgeous. It's the same with [Jenny Whiteley's] "Day To Day." With those melodies, there's something that just flows through you so beautifully and easily and I love singing them.

Why, generally speaking, did you decide to include so many covers on this disc?
I had written a handful of songs and I knew that if I waited to write another handful, with my busy schedule, that I might be waiting a really long time to put out a record. I'd been concentrating on interpreting these [covers] in my own way.

I often hear songs from Honey From The Tombs referred to as "whiskey soaked." Would you say this album is a little less boozy?
My term for my music is "toxic roots." I think of it as toxic, more than boozy. But, I think there's definitely a through line between the last record and this record.

If you liked the last record, I think you'll like this record. For instance, the song "Bound," that comes at the very end of this one, is basically a tie-in to the last one. But I don't mention booze once on this record.

Why Masters Of The Burial as the title?
It's actually not about death. It's more about how, in our daily lives, we bury the tragedies or embarrassments that happen to us, in order to continue on.

If you're in a room with someone and you've had a fight, or something went down between the two of you, you could make everyone in the room uncomfortable but you just bury it in order to make things more comfortable. That's how we live. I just find that fascinating. A lot of the time, the words that are coming out of peoples' faces are very different than the expressions on their faces.

We're constantly burying the things that we're actually thinking about and we're saying things that aren't quite what we mean.