After no album releases for 16 years, Canadian indie rocker Amy Millan is back with a song that not only marks her comeback but unearths something deeply personal and potent. “The Overpass,” the third single from her forthcoming album “I Went To Find You,” which is to be released by May 30 via Last Gang Records, is a melancholy, poetic time capsule that sounds and feels less like a song and more like a secret confession being whispered through time.
Written with her longtime collaborator Jay McCarrol, who also produced the track “The Overpass,” it sees us on a very nocturnal emotional walk and a literal one, too, over the iconic Bloor viaduct in Toronto, once infamous for its tragic history more than its skyline view. But Millan isn’t merely reminiscing. She’s a reckoning.
It’s a track that makes the most of Millan’s unique warmth, smoky vocals, fleeting harmonies, and whispered vulnerability that creeps up on you. It’s raw but not overwrought. There’s restraint here, the restraint only time can teach. In the hands of a younger artist, this story of grief, impulsivity, and emotional chaos would have been soaked in drama. In their place is a softly sizzling lantern of wisdom, glowing with the hindsight of someone who has walked the ledge figuratively and literally and lived to tell about it with compassion and clarity.
And in director Sara Melvin’s accompanying video, you can feel that delicate tension. Its images weave memory and metaphor, presenting us with shards of youth and distance juxtaposed against the grounded solitude of adulthood. Its ring is the condition of the game and the axle, the one wind into the other like a frayed film strip dragged from a drawer, familiar yet frayed on the edges.
Millan’s descriptions of that formative night of walking a dangerous line, kissing friends in confusion, and being mostly lost shape the song’s emotional architecture. We’re not dealing with nostalgia here, but rather a hard-hitting honesty that refuses to retreat into the nostalgic myth of the good old days. It’s a gentle anthem for those who made peace with getting older and a love letter to the messy, misguided versions of our former selves. If “The Overpass” is any indication, “I Went To Find You” will be a reckoning, a restoration, a reminder that some bridges are worth walking twice carefully.
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