National Post, July 31, 2001 It was a summer sleepover with songs. Music Review Hillside Festival, Guelph, Ontario By Jen Edwards ...Another great discovery was John Millard & Happy Day. Although Millard is no stranger to the music scene – he had a cult following in the late eighties with the Polka Dogs – Happy Day is his first musical outing in many years. Sounding like a mixture of the Lone Ranger and Kurt Weill, Happy Day exuberantly played its three female voices, accordion, vibes, banjo, bass and snare drum off Millard’s quick-draw lyrics and buttery baritone. .............................................. The Globe and Mail, Thursday March 8, 2001 John Millard & Happy Day John Millard & Happy Day Festival Records Rating: **** (four stars) Reviewed by Carl Wilson Toronto songwriter, singer and banjo man John Millard is a genre unto himself, his music clearly marked by his work on stage musicals, by the country and Celtic sounds of his chosen instrument, as well as by lounge-era exotica, Eastern European musics, a little jazz and his myriad collaborators. On his first album since the dissolution of his group Polka Dogs, the prominent addition is a supple feminine chorus (Karin Randoja, Randi Helmers and Christine Brubaker) that backs Millard’s mock-solemn baritone, much as Leonard Cohen’s backup singers used to do. Vibes (by Bill Brennan), accordion (Tiina Kiik), and bass (Rob Clutton) complete the soundscape. .............................................. The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, July 5, 2000 Grizzled neo-polka veteran branches out John Millard wants his new band, which blends several musical genres, to gel in time for Italy’s truffle season Carl Wilson The Globe and Mail, Toronto A sweltering night in Little Italy in Toronto, and the debris of the day’s summer sidewalk sale, both material and human, was clattering up and down College Street in the breeze. Toward the back of Ted’s Wrecking Yard, a bar where the clean lines of gentrified cafes meet the ramshackle charms of an auto-parts store, a ragtag ensemble took the stage: Upright bass, accordion, vibes and drums, three backup singers and some windblown-looking, broad-shouldered family man type with a banjo. It was a theatre benefit with a Berlin Cabaret theme; the sound was lousy and everything was running late. We’d been treated to torch songs and ethnic-music mimicry and inaudible, interminable 1920’s comedy sketches. The night was stretching out like a gila monster on a flat stone, uncurling its tail so slowly we thought we’d never see the end. The band- John Millard and Happy Day – began to play. Up at the bar, a kid with an eight-inch Mohawk and a troika of wolf dogs was regaling his buddies in a bark of his own, and judging by the regular crashing sounds, someone else had just invented the Pint Glass Shotput. A couple of aging frat boys came back to find some lower chairs to fall out of, and blurted out banjo jokes as if they’d just killed off the brain cells that serve as volume control. Toronto was doing it again: John Millard was playing and no one could hear. As the singer-composer told me later, the scene suited the spirit behind his new band’s (still tentative) name: “It comes from irony. Happy Day – it really should be Sad Day, but no one really wants to hear that, so you have to use skills of artifice to talk about your sadness. They have to be happy that you’re sad.” In the early 1990’s, Millard spent a lot of nights like this with the Polka Dogs. Like Happy Day (and including the same accordion-experimentalist, Tina Kiik), the Dogs were a seven-piece band, but with a hyperactive horn section instead of the sultry background singers and vibes. Then, as a now, the songs were Millard’s signature fantasias, about “three Dutch boys wearing wooden pants,” or a shipwreck just off the coasts of Babylon, or the medieval monks who invented the clock to govern their prayers, making possible the modern work day. Born in Hamilton to a musical Scottish family, and long ensconced as the secret-weapon composer of scores and songs for fringey theatre projects, Millard spent three years at the helm of the Polka Dogs, a group inspired by an old photo of a Spadina Avenue-area Latvian dance band. They grew popular in Europe, especially Austria. “People said we held up a funhouse mirror to European folk culture,” Millard says. “But it was an unruly group of people, a bit difficult to get on the road.” And at home, Millard’s tunes, with their laconic monologues and bursts of idealistic anger, were somehow too much (not as cuddly and chewy as the Barenaked Ladies, perhaps), a couple of excellent albums went mostly unnoticed, and the Dogs quit in 1993. “How popular was this mutant polka music ever going to be? That was always the question.” Then, to the outside observer, Millard seemed to abandon performing his own songs. He did his theatre and movie scores (“furniture music,” he laughs) – you can hear his work in the Shaw Festival’s current production of The Apple Cart – but admirers wondered if his own witty, melancholic mini epics would ever be played again. Millard himself didn’t seem keen enough on the love of crowds, his wry tenderness that of a man who’s already out past the horizon and looking back a little bitter and bemused, too aware of the game to play it in earnest. Now, it turns out that Millard has been searching for a new vehicle all along. “I only do musicals if somebody asks me to. The other songs just appear all the time….What I like about songs as single units is the freedom for a real play with words and an abstract sense of plot,” he says. “I kept trying different people until it stuck. It was a process of elimination. You want to do something that really works.” Happy Day, which has been brewing for nearly three years, on and off, seems as if it could do the trick. Even that night on College Street, you could sometimes make out tunes, with angles so sharp they could have been played by a pool shark, and curves Christina Ricci would envy. Millard’s basso-profundo tones (“like that guy from the Crash Test Dummies,” said someone at a nearby table, “except that it doesn’t suck”) licked up against his words like little blue flames. The background singers, Toronto actresses Christine Brubaker, Randi Helmers and Karin Randoja – came in sometimes just where you’d expect, honouring golden arrangements from Tin Pan Alley to the Grand Ole Opry, and sometimes at exactly the wrong moment as if nobody’d ever sung backup before in the world. “They’re all theatre performers, and they bring an understanding of drama and narrative in song, which they can project on stage,” Millard says. “They make jokes and enjoy themselves.” The music rolled out like a ballerina and a soldier from a Swiss clock, like a hodgepodge of stone and wood and rusty tin and cracked glass that somehow fit perfectly together. And the sound? Country and Kurt Weill, mazurka and bluegrass, Celtic ballad and marching band music, all at once. “The strings and accordion and percussion is more supportive to the voice than the Polka Dogs’ brass was, and it gives a singalong quality, which is something I like in music,” Millard explains. “What’s funny now,” he adds, “is that everybody [in the group] knows the parts, but it hasn’t reached the level of chaos I’d appreciate on stage. After we play live, it’ll become more of a band.” That begins tonight, with an official debut at Clinton’s on Bloor Street. Then Happy Day (if that remains its name) will record an album for release in the fall, and begin working the folk and world-music festival circuits. “None of us wants to be playing in bars,” says Millard, who has a young daughter with Toronto theatre artist Martha Ross. “We want to tour where the food is good. We’re trying to find festivals in Italy, and make sure we’re there for truffle season.” Not exactly the words of a man in search of adulation, but the songs ought to take care of that. Kids, truffles – Millard has his priorities straight. The question now: Will Toronto finally embrace a gifted musician who’s not a Wannabe so much as an Is? As he sang in that Babylonian-shipwrecked Polka Dog’s tune: “The rescuers shout joy at their find, ‘At last we’ve found one man alive, alive, alive.’” .............................................. The Regina Leader Post, Thursday March 8, 2001 Exotic blends of sounds John Millard & Happy Day (Regina Folk Festival) Sunday August 18 Emmet Matheson "I think that some people ascribe music to the realm of furniture, frankly," laments John Millard. "You've got a blue couch and a red painting, so you get purple music to go with. it. It's not meant to titillate or inspire; it's meant to affirm how you already feel." Given that premise, it's hard to say what sort of interior design scheme John Millard & happy Day's music would go with. Their 2000 self-titled album is an exotic blend of troubadour balladeering, banjo picking, and Andrews Sisters- style harmonies. If you listen closely, you can hear everything from Celtic sea shanties to Klezmer, all done with an epic sense of theater that would fit in a Kurt Weill operetta. Particularly for the jarring contrast of Millard's almost-stoic bass vocals against the swinging female-voiced harmonies, Happy Day is anything but background music. "The first band I ever did was even more geeky," Millard says of the Polka Dogs, who dissolved in the early Nineties. "It was tuba, trombone, accordion, banjo and drum kit. It was everything you're really not supposed to have in a band." These days, Millard is best known in theatre circles, where he's composed scores for productions by, among others, the Shaw Festival, Canadian Stage Theatre Company and The Caravan Farm Theatre. But his musical history goes back much further, all the way to pre-Second World War Scotland. "My grandmother was a church organist in Scotland; she'd do the Presbyterians at nine and the Anglicans at 11," he says. "But Thursday, Friday and Saturday night she'd play in a cabaret, like a Ceilidh band. In this band they had piano, accordion, violin and a comedian; and my mother, who was a child at the time, would dance. They'd tour and sing and entertain around Scotland." After the war, Millard's family moved to Hamilton, where his grandmother joined the band of Gordie Tapp, a country musician and comedian who was a regular on the American TV show Hee Haw. "So my first experience with live music, of course, would be my grand mother playing. But I also heard a lot of church music as a child," Millard says. "My first experience with live bands, though, was at the market in the Kitchener area where they would have polka bands on Saturday mornings." Though the adolescent Millard also liked the new wave and pop he was hearing on the radio, it was those first hand musical experiences that really got to him. "You know, you hear live music and your skin moves; you feel physically altered. And that's what was stirring me, these polka bands and church music and my grandmother playing the piano," he says. The Happy Day project came together because Millard saw a gap that he needed to fill. "It seems that white-bread Canadians, like white Anglo, French Irish, European- type Canadians, don't have anything that goes in the world-music category. It's either Celtic or you get on the American bandwagon of bluegrass or country," he says. "There is no voice that describes industrial Southern Ontario. I grew up in really stinky cities; like Hamilton is a sh-t hole and Kitchener's not so great either. But what is there is this amazing layer after layer of culture - the Germans crashing up against the Scottish crashing up against the reggae, crashing up against theatre music - and then you to movies and you see a Fellini flick with a Nino Rota soundtrack! How can you not absorb that if you are actually listening?" All of these elements and more come together in Happy Day, though Millard himself doesn't hear the project as being all that exotic. "I think it's truly of the world that we're living in," he says. "I don't find it weird at all. I find weird all the boring songwriters that keep doing the same thing over and over and over. They've been doing it for 40 years, the goatee boys and the nipple-ring girls. It just sounds like the same stuff to me." .............................................. The Kitchener Record Visit to Millard's musical world a wonderful, wacky experience John Millard & Happy Day (Regina Folk Festival) Sunday August 18 Robert Reid, Record Staff St. Jacobs It was an auspicious homecoming for John Millard Saturday night when he performed in concert with Happy Day at the Church Theatre. Millard, who was raised in Kitchener and the Elmira area, returned to perform for the first time since moving away as part of the Live From St. Jacobs acoustic music series. Millard performed with Happy Day, a wonderfully eccentric, joyously unique band of musicians conxixting of three female vocalists, an acoustic bassist, an accordionist and a percussionist (snare drum and vibraphone) who back up Millard on banjo and lead vocals. Millard's music is insistently unclassifiable, parading as it coes a colourful cabalcade of musical idioms, and styles spanning cabaret, Tin Pam Alley, folk, blugrass, old time country, gospel, Caribbean and Eastern European ethnic traditions. Listening to his rich chameleon-like baritone (somewhere between Tom Waits and John Hartford or Leanard Cohen and Crash test Dummies' Brad Roberts) against the multitextured musical backdrop is like falling headlong into a time warp and being swept up in a retro-musical vortex. Metaphorically, it's like in the Wizard of Oz when the movie switches from black and white to technicolour. You're aware of being transported ot a parallel world which, while recongizable to the on we all inhabit, is nonetheless strange and exotic. Millard refers to the music of Happy Day as "children's music for adults" and it's an apt description. Even when his richly poetic, evocative lyrics are at their bleakest, songs are buoyed with infectious melodies that cause your toes to tap-even as you try to figure out what it is he's singing about. Fact is, Millard's a clever, innovative and sophisticated arranger. At certain angles, Millard physically resemvbles the guitar-slinging comedian George Gobvel, as does his dry sense of humour. Millard drew much of his repertoire (including Far Away, McKenzie's Flight, Hollow Man, If I could Say I Love You No Money to Spen and The Devil and the Angel, among others) from his suberb 2000 album John Millard & Happy Day. However, he performed much else including a lovely unamplified version of the old hymn, Closer Wlak With Thee. After bing invited into Millard's strange and wonderful musical world for an all-too breif couple hours, one can only hop his next visit home comes sooner rather than later