BIOGRAPHY
Emily Millard is a Canadian composer, songwriter and vocalist. A cross-genre artist, she draws from pop, jazz and folk traditions to create “a complex sonic world all her own” (Exclaim!). She currently lives in Nelson BC where she is in pre-production for a new album.
Over the past ten years, Emily released four records under the moniker Miss Emily Brown. Her fifth record, By Heron & By Season, released in Canada in October 2016 and Europe in February 2017, is her first release under her birth name. Produced by Sandro Perri and captured by John Raham, the album features some of Canada’s most innovative instrumentalists including violinist Jesse Zubot (Tanya Tagaq), cellist Peggy Lee (Veda Hille), drummer Dan Gaucher (Fond of Tigers) and bassist Colin Nealis (Andy Schauf).
In 2010, Emily released In Technicolor, a folk-pop record based on her grandmother’s wartime diary. The album was nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award in the category “Pushing the Boundaries” and took Emily to the top five nominees for CBC Radio 3’s Bucky Award for Best New Artist. Her 2008 debut release Part of You Pours Out of Me was named one of the top twelve albums of the year by Alan Neal, host of CBC Radio’s Bandwidth.
Emily has toured extensively throughout Canada and Europe, both as a solo artist and with a rotating band of eclectic and experimental young talent. She has shared the stage with such luminaries as Jeremy Fisher, Alin Coen Band, Fred Penner, Royal Wood, Michael Feuerstack and Julie Doiron. She was recently nominated for Best Live Show by Germany's Kulturnews.
Alongside her solo project, Emily co-founded the chamber-folk group Morlove with Vancouver Island based songwriter and producer Corwin Fox. Recent collaborators also include Juno nominated prog-folk band Aerialists and Juno award-winning string quartet The Fretless, who she joined on tour in Spring 2022.
Emily has been a guest lecturer at Carleton University’s Shannon Lecture Series, a presenter for Ottawa’s Art Beat, and a band coach for Rock Camp Montreal. She has studied voice with Dagmar Apel at Opera America in New York, vocal improvisation with Sidsel Endresen at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, Somatic Voicework with Jeanette LoVetri, and electronics and composition with Peter Hannan and Dr. Andrea Young.
Emily gratefully lives and works on the unceded and ancestral Coast Salish Territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
"Millard's complex sonic world is all her own. We are lucky to take part in the trip. (9/10)"
- Exclaim!
"'Art-folk’ is certainly an apt handle for Millard’s work, as this is a greatly artistic recording, carefully crafted like the considered brushstrokes of a painting."
- Folk Radio UK