Opening up the Tombs
Matt Harrison
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A peak inside the Tomb : Amy Millan
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With the release of Honey From The Tombs, Amy Millan ties up loose ends
"Can you live with it?" Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) splashes cold water on his face. When he looks back at the mirror he's not at all surprised to see Elvis standing behind him. In Quentin Tarantino's film True Romance (directed by Tony Scott), Elvis is the equivalent of Pinocchio's conscience-pricking critter Jiminy Cricket, only in Clarence's case, Elvis isn't reminding him of right and wrong. He's asking Clarence to kill his bride's ex-pimp so that they can move on with their new life.
"Are you haunted?" Elvis presses. "Do you want to get unhaunted?"
He does. And those who've seen the film know the outcome - it isn't pretty and it has serious consequences for Clarence and his bride (Patricia Arquette).
It's obvious from the cover that this is supposed to be an interview with Amy Millan, one of the headliners at the CKCU Ottawa Folk Festival next week - and we'll get to that. But after listening to and reading both the praise and criticism of Millan's new solo album, Honey From the Tombs, this scene from True Romance popped into my head.
Minus the need to perforate a Detroit pimp (as in Clarence's case), this bizarre Hollywood example does pose a similar dilemma to what Millan was recently faced with when deciding whether or not to release her solo album: Is unfinished business really worth risking the future for? Is it worth getting your face kicked in - metaphorically speaking - so that you become "unhaunted"?
LOOSE ENDS
Clarence would certainly
argue that he didn't have a choice. The same is true for Millan. Instead of having to deal with a pimp, though, it was a vault of her own music - mostly country-sounding/bluegrass heartaches - that she had created in her pre-Stars era, 1993-2000.
XPress recently caught up with Millan in Toronto (at their old "939" studio apartment where Heart was made) where she and the rest of Stars were rehearsing for their set at last week's Lollapalooza in Chicago. And much to the band's annoyance, XPress managed to pull her away from practising One More Night so that she could speak about why she had to release her solo material before she could dedicate herself to making the next Stars album (due some time next spring).
"Basically I couldn't move to the next step until I had put these songs down and out," she tells XPress. "In order for me to feel confident to make the next Stars record I had to give these songs a home. Otherwise they would've lingered like loose ends."
Instead of Elvis, Millan likely had the shade of Johnny Cash - his American Recordings being the inspiration for Honey's production - and her old bluegrass friends Dan and Jenny Whiteley of Crazy Strings fame pushing her on to get her unfinished business finished.
And like the film, returning to the past can be painful.
A quick peak on Arts & Crafts' feedback site Broken Telephone alone demonstrates the unease Stars (and Millan) fans have over her solo effort. And not all of it was directed at the change in sound - pop to country(ish) twang - but rather how "sophomoric" the record appears and the many references to whiskey, North Dakota, heartache etc. - the stuff you'd expect to hear sung by a cowgirl from Okalahoma, not Cabbagetown.
But what fans perhaps forget is that these are sophomoric songs, written long before she developed the confidence she says she has now.
"It was important for me to create something at a time when I was ready to be confident in my noes. As in 'No, I don't like that' or 'Yes, I think that's really important so it should stay.' And I needed the experience from travelling and working with different people in Stars and Broken [Social Scene], because I wouldn't have had that when the songs were written, which was seven years ago."
"I've learned so much from that process that I've already started writing new songs. I'm definitely not going to take eight years to put out the next [solo] record," she adds.
And as for lacking country cred, that's not something she says crosses her mind.
"I think if you look to the outside to give you your own credibility then I think you're in trouble. You have to trust your own stomach to tell you if you're going in the right direction. I think there's good music [on this album] and I didn't think hardcore country or bluegrass fans would embrace this record. I think it'll find an audience that will be broader than one genre.
"And you know, opinions are like parents: Everyone's got a couple. There's a whole other school of people who knew me before this band [Stars] and were encouraging me to pursue the ending for these songs, and kept wondering why I hadn't brought these songs to light. I didn't think I'd necessarily win all the fans that have fallen for me through Stars, but I also think I'll find a group of people who aren't necessarily found at a Stars shows - new people."
TOXIC ROOTS
Millan calls the music on her new album "toxic roots" and it relates to the "unusual pairing" of her Johnny Cash-inspired music with Ian Blurton, "the soul of rock" - a Canadian hard rock legend formerly in Change Of Heart, Blurtonia, Bionic and now C'mon.
"It's kind of an odd pairing if you think of the music he plays and what's on this record. It can create something on a new level when you take two sides of someone's life [her life in and outside of Stars] together... Roots music is clean, and I don't feel very clean. I grew up in Cabbagetown and I wanted to wonder [on this album] what it would be like to record roots music in space - on Mars."
The best example of this is Wayward and Parliament, where gentle Nashville cooing collides beautifully, but unexpectedly, with a brooding drum flurry and sultry trumpets.
"I wanted this album - the sound - to be confusing. To be questionable. There's really no bass in this album. I read this article that said, 'It's really good that Amy brought in a male singer to sing the harmonies on Hard Hearted,' and it's completely false. It's me singing. I wanted to sound like a man. I wanted to make the listener hear something new after the fifth time... I'm also a big Brian Eno fan so I had to slide in some odd vernacular question marks," she adds.
But traditional Folk Festers shouldn't be deterred. The majority of the songs are more like the current single Baby I, a Jenny Whitley cover, which is more whiskey 'n' tears than blissful, experimental pop.
An Ottawa favourite - she jokes that she's been here so often that she should really think about renting an apartment - she returns to headline the Folk Festival in a week's time.
Amy Millan
Thursday August 17, 9 p.m., at Capital Music Hall (128 York)
Friday August 18, 10 p.m. at World Harmony Stage (Britannia Park)
Saturday August 19 at 1:30 p.m., and 2:45 p.m., Rogers Stage (Britannia Park)
CKCU Ottawa Folk Festival: www.ottawafolk.org
| Musicain Seeks to Fills Gaps in Her Recorded History |
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There is nothing at all wrong with Amy Millan doing this "sophomoric" recording to show us more of her personal history & development as an artist. After all, this concert may be the first exposure many of us have to her work, so we might like to know of her previous work.
As an example, suppose someone's first exposure to the work of P!nk is her current album "I'm Not Dead". Regardless of whether they like it or not, I would then suggest to that individual to check out P!nk's previous album, "Mizzundastood", since time has proven it to be the most successful to date (too early to tell for "I'm Not Dead", although I did suggest in my XPress commentary that it has the potential to be every bit as successful as "Mizzundastood".) The individual could then see where the artist P!nk has come from & then if they like what they hear, then they could go on to fill in the gaps with "Don't Take Me Home" & "Try This" in order to get a more complete picture of the artist's evolution.
Similarly, if a person's first exposure to Courtney Love is through "America's Sweetheart", or to Gwen Stefani is through "Love, Angel, Music, Baby", then wouldn't we want those people to check out each artist's previous work through the bands of which they were members ("Hole" in Love's case, "No Doubt" in Stefani's). That especially applies to Love, since the XPress readers' reviews of "America's Sweetheart" generally concede that Love did better work when she was leader of Hole (e.g. the album "Live Through This").
So it's good that an artist's developmental history be made available. Too often, classical composers destroyed their previous efforts, so we don't get a chance to study their development. Brahms (1833-1897) was bad for that, for example. Chopin (1810-1849) requested on his deathbed that many of his unpublished works be destroyed. That request was not carried out, so we have more works by which to study how he evolved as an artist.
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Brad Thomas
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