Millie McGuire, a 20-year-old singer from Chapel Hill, N.C., is not famous. Not yet, that is. But behind the scenes, musicians are talking: Mike Mills (R.E.M., Baseball Project), with whom she appeared in Big Star’sThirdconcerts, says she is his “favorite new voice of the last five years.” Single co-producer Dan Wilson (Semisonic, Adele, Katie Perry, Taylor Swift) insists “Millie’s voice is the real-deal, well-oiled music machine. Damn! — I love listening to her sing.” Peter Holsapple (The dB’s, Hootie & the Blowfish), with whom she dueted for Wild Honey’s 2019 Kinksconcert in L.A., joins in: “Millie McGuire is a preternaturally talented singer, with grace and poise beyond her years, and her vocal abilities are remarkable.” And Pat Sansone (Wilco, the Autumn Defense) agrees: “Millie has a rare and textured voice that possesses a combination of strength and vulnerability . . . I’ve been knocked out by her every time I’ve heard her sing, whether on stage or in the studio.”
The album Yours, Millie McGuire, her first, gradually evolved over the last several years, as Millie found herself as a writer. Producer Chris Stamey recalls: “I first met Millie during someone else’s session, where she seemed genuinely interested in learning about the studio. She was still in high school then. With no expectations I suggested she drop by and try to sing a demo for me and in return I’d show her how to stand at a mic and how headphones worked. Ha! To my surprise, she was a natural: She glanced at the sheet music, nailed the tune (‘I Fall in Love’) in about 15 minutes — and that’s the vocal that’s on the record today.” It was what he calls a “Sam Phillips surprise” — the dream of every producer, that one day a remarkable singer will simply walk in off the street unexpectedly.
“My first impression was that, at 17, she had the confident delivery of a young Linda Ronstadtand that, like Linda, frankly she could probably sing the phone book and make it sound like a hit,” he recalls. The pair started a regular schedule of recording, first with songs of Chris’s. Then once Millie added her own songwriting into the mix, the album really took shape. Principal sessions took place at the Fidelitorium (Kernersville, N.C.), with Rob Ladd on drums, Charles Cleaver on keys, Alex Bingham on bass, and Stamey on guitar, then final touches, including pedal steel from Eric Heywood (the Pretenders, Joe Henry, Son Volt) and harmonies from Django Haskins (the Old Ceremony), were added at Modern Recording (Chapel Hill, N.C.). McGuire remembers: “We were almost finished with the record, then Dan Wilson gave us ‘Two.’ . . . He rewrote it for me, sang harmonies on it, and co-produced it. Since then I have written another track with him, and hope to continue to write with him in the future.”
It’s not surprising that McGuire says she’s “been singing ever since I was little. My family is very musical and I’ve always been surrounded by it. Singing makes me feel most myself. It’s my biggest sense of purpose — when I’m singing, I know it’s what I’m meant to be doing. It wasn’t until [that first session], however, that I even considered my dreams of being a singer could become a reality.” Although this is her first full-length release, she has already opened shows (and sung backups with) Alejandro Escovedo, performed at the lauded 30A Songwriters Festival, at AmericanaFest twice, sung with the Big Star’s Third concerts, and starred in Occasional Shivers, an hour-long original “radio musical” distributed by PRX and APM that also featured Branford Marsalis, Bill Frisell, and Nnenna Freelon.
The pair tried for a timeless approach to the recordings, with Millie often cutting the final vocal takes live with the band, at times with the Southern exposure of Dusty in Memphis in mind. Millie: “‘There’s a Place’ will always hold a special place in my heart. It’s one of the first songs I ever wrote where I felt like it represented me and sounded like something I wanted to say. And I love the soulful, Memphis-style brass Matt Douglas [Mountain Goats] added. . . . I took my first draft of ‘One More Moment’ to Chris, and . . . the result is something really special. It’s one of the first songs we co-wrote together, and I believe it’s one of our best! . . . Inspiration can come from anywhere for me. ‘Tomorrow’s Too Soon’ came from a comment I saw on Instagram. It was just those three words and they told such a story. . . . I tend to gravitate towards songs that have an interesting melodic line. Singing is what draws me to music first and foremost, so if it’s fun to sing, I’m all over it. ‘Here’s How We Start Again’ is one of my all-time favorites of
Chris’s. There is a certain amount of sass and spunk to it, which I really love to lay into when I sing it—I love the emotional grit behind it.” Stamey adds, “Early on, she’d sung the ballad ‘I Am Yours,’ which is very sparse in places. And it came out great. So as we went along, I tried to leave more and more room for just her voice. I wrote ‘Your Last Forever After’ with that in mind, and then, on a whim, asked her if she wanted to try something totally a cappella! She walked up to the mic and sang ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ in one take—her pitch and rhythm was so perfect [even without any references to go by] that we were able to add some simple vibes after the fact, but the original was only her voice.”
There’s no question, she is her own person: she has an internal compass that never wavers. But she’s singing for you, if you’ll listen. She is . . . Yours, Millie McGuire.
