Veteran musicians who release new albums after a noticeable absence are often described in triumphant terms — just look at the reviews for James McMurtry’s latest, or John Mellencamp’s. By that standard, June Millington should get a statue and a public holiday for “Snapshots,” her first solo album since 1988.
Millington hasn’t been dormant for those 34 years. On the contrary, the singer, songwriter, guitarist, producer and all-around badass has been fairly busy, co-founding the Institute for the Musical Arts with her partner, and running rock camps for teen girls in Western Massachusetts; releasing two duo albums with her sister, Jean; writing a memoir; and reuniting with other members of Fanny, the groundbreaking rock band that the Millington sisters co-founded in the late ’60s, for a 2018 album under the name Fanny Walked the Earth (as chronicled in this story for Rolling Stone). She and Fanny were also the subject of a 2021 documentary, “Fanny: The Right to Rock.”
“You’ve got to be persistent,” Millington told me for this profile in The Boston Globe. “I mean, that is the lesson of my life: You’ve just got to keep doing it.”
“Snapshots” reflects the breadth of Millington’s career, from her hard-rocking early days to the folkier sound she turned to in the mid-’70s, when she was a key part of the women’s music movement, a queer-friendly alternative to the male-dominated mainstream music industry. Or, as Millington wrote on the slinky new song “Un-Knowable,” “All you see, a flash of light / But I’m the goddamn rainbow.”
That’s about right: there’s a lot of color on “Snapshots.” Some of these 12 tunes date back a long way — “The Ballad of Fanny” is a vibrant acoustic demo that Millington recorded in 1971, while “Make Me Happy” dates from 1977 or ’78, when she was living in Woodstock, N.Y. She recorded some of the other tunes with teens from the rock camps, while singer Evelyn Harris, formerly of Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Millington’s brother, Scott, a drummer, contributed to “Un-Knowable.” The bulk of the work on the album, though, took place in the fall of 2020 and early winter of 2021, when she was riding out the pandemic at the IMA.
Most of the songs she wrote during the pandemic are deeply topical, from the hard-blues shuffle of “Eagle to the Moon,” prompted by the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection, to the funky, guitar-stacked groove of “Fire in the Street,” inspired by protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police. Other tracks are more personal: layered with harmony vocals and a wistful tone, the rootsy “Girls Don’t Dream (The Big Lie)” takes on retrograde cultural attitudes toward women that Millington has been combatting her entire life, while “Stars at Night” is a tender and imaginative love song Millington wrote for her partner, Ann Hackler, who is also a force of nature in an un(der)sung kind of way.
Millington played all the instruments herself on a few songs, and recorded as many vocals parts as she could before starting chemotherapy in early 2021 for breast cancer. Other tunes feature her nephew, Lee Madeloni, on bass and sometimes drums. As it happens, Madeloni and his father, the guitarist Earl Slick (David Bowie, John Lennon & Yoko Ono), were staying with Millington for a while during the pandemic, and Slick plays some greasy licks on “Too Close to the Bone,” trading parts with Millington behind her growling vocals. Slick also played on “Girls Don’t Dream (The Big Lie)” and “Eagle to the Moon.”
Even so, “Snapshots” is unmistakably Millington’s work. It’s, well, a triumphant return from a musician who has learned over the course of an influential, if never celebrated enough, career to sidestep obstacles and keep pushing ahead. All these years later, Millington still has something to say, and she’s still making a difference.