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.’”