Amy Millan has dropped “Make way for waves,” the latest single off the artist’s forthcoming solo I Went To Find You, available May 30, 2025, via Last Gang Records. The song is a collaboration between Millan (the co-lead singer of Stars and longtime member of Broken Social Scene) and album co-writer/producer Jay McCarrol known his 2023 film BlackBerry and 2025 SXSW Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.

“This song has a very special place in my heart. It’s the first song Jay and I collaborated on and was initially titled ‘gentle beginnings.’ It is the song that launched our relationship and the making of this album. The first verse was an old Stars demo sitting in a hard drive cemetery. I never forgot it and my attachment to the sentiment of the verse lyrics. I sent what I had to Jay and told him it needed a chorus and obviously a second verse. A few weeks later, he sent the song back completed and with this punch in the gut chorus that made me fall out of my chair. We were off,” she explains of “Make way for waves.” “Lyrically I was seeking to articulate how difficult patches in life can influence you to blow it all up or throw in the towel. I was clinging to the idea that with some patience and reflection maybe calmer waters eventually return like the cycle of the moon. Mourning time passing is a right of passage, and the forlorn can make a beautiful hook. Trying not to let fear find a home in my heart.”

The song is paired with a video directed by Gaia Alari (Naima Bock, Gia Margaret), featuring entirely hand drawn animations. “Gaia does the kind of art that feels stamped into our genetics,” says Millan. “I wanted to write songs to calm your nervous system and this is what Gaia’s art does for me.” The track was engineered by Jace Lasek (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Wolf Parade), mixed in part by Peter Katis (The National, Interpol), recorded at Lost River (an idyllic studio deep in the Laurentian forest), and described by Millan as “Gentle songs for difficult times.”

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 Evan Cranley (who is also her husband) 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, who would also sing backup, Millan stepped in for Feist and joined Hayden for a duet. “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.”

Amy Millan live:

06/14 – Toronto, ON – Longboat Hall