Mica Millar arrives with her bleach-blonde bowl cut and the slightly dazed energy of someone who has just stepped off a long-haul flight and is choosing to interpret that as a fresh start. She got back to the UK yesterday.
“I’ve had a really heavy couple of weeks,” she says. “Loads of intense music videos and photo shoots, working kind of back to back.” She thinks she’s over the jet lag. She’s feeling good and she seems to really mean this.
The occasion is A Little Bit of Me, her second album. The title took her months to commit to. It isn’t a track title, it doesn’t announce itself with the same declarative weight as Heaven Knows, but she arrived at it eventually. “I like to create things with meaning,” she says. “Until I found the meaning, I couldn’t really back an idea.”
The meaning, when it came, was layered. Part of it is about lightness, about making something that doesn’t cost you everything. Part of it is her father’s voice in her head, is it at 80, is it at 90? Ninety is good enough, cutting through her perfectionism when it threatens to take over. And part of it, quietly, is about the distance between who she was when she made her first record and who she is now.
“I feel like I’ve come into my own a little bit,” she says. “This record just feels like an elevation of the first album.” The first album nearly broke her. She started recording Heaven Knows in 2017, released it in 2022, and did almost everything herself, distributing it, editing the videos, packing CDs and vinyl, and taking them to the post office. Midway through, she broke her back. She spent nine months in a back brace, still trying to finish post-production, still pushing through.
“Maybe I’m doing myself a disservice,” she says, “but I felt like I was kind of fumbling through it. The whole process was really hard and kind of heavy.”
So when she came to make the second record, the question she kept returning to was simpler and more fundamental than any creative brief: Does it have to hurt? “What I really wanted to find in that process was some joy,” she says. “Feeling like it doesn’t have to hurt to make a record, if you know what I mean.”
She started writing in November 2023. Not every day, that’s not how she works. She lets things accumulate. “I like to get all the emotions pent up inside me over a period of time and then go for a blast.” When she’s in it, she’s in it completely. “I’m quite an obsessive person. I get quite hyper-focused. Once I’ve started one song, I’m going to roll into the next and the next. I need to get fully immersed.” Before any of that, though, she left. A four-week gap had opened in her schedule, and she recognised it for what it was. She went to France alone.
In Bordeaux, she booked herself onto an electric bike tour of the vineyards, just her and two other people, rolling through sunshine and blue skies, eating well, drinking wine. At one of the stops, she got talking to the woman running the trips and told her she was a musician. The woman suggested that she go and stay with her father further into the countryside. Mica, solo, cautious, but ultimately decisive, said yes.
“On your own as a woman, you kind of think, oh, should I do something like that?” she says. “But I ended up thinking, you know what, yeah, I am going to do that.” She arrived to find the woman’s sister there, fresh out of a relationship, relieved to have company. They became close friends. They still are. The sister showed her places to swim, rivers to wade into. Mica wrote morning pages, went quiet, and thought clearly.
“I found a sense of freedom that I hadn’t been experiencing for a long time,” she says.
She tells everyone she knows to take a solo trip. “You don’t know where it goes. You wouldn’t know what opportunities it will bring you.” The trip gave her the song Oh Freedom. More than that, it gave her a way back into herself, the understanding that you don’t have to be depleted to make something honest. That rest is not the enemy of good work.
She writes by a process she calls automatic writing. She builds a beat, drums and bass first, a departure from the piano-chord approach she’d always relied on before and then puts her headphones on, records, and sings into the room. “I see what comes out,” she says. “Is there a line or a sentence, or a melody, that’s sparking my interest or making me feel something emotionally? And then I sort of hone in on that and build it around it. Sort of a bit like a puzzle.”
The shift to rhythm-first was deliberate, and it came from a specific memory. She’d been playing a show in Paris when someone had printed the wrong set list for a festival version of the Heaven Knows set that loaded the upbeat songs early and dropped the piano ballads. By accident, the crowd had lifted. When she hit Trouble, the room went somewhere close to euphoric. “It was almost like I had almost a club show,” she says. “And after that, I thought, wouldn’t it be amazing if you could have carried on from there?”
She wanted more of that. Starting with drums was how she got it. She recorded at Miraval, the studio on Brad Pitt’s château in the south of France, with musicians flown in from Nashville. She describes it with genuine economy: the most extraordinary place she’s ever worked. The food, the setting, the calibre of the people around her. But more than the surroundings, what she remembers is what it felt like inside the sessions.
“I did have a moment, a few moments, when I was in that studio, feeling very much like I’d creatively arrived,” she says. “I don’t think everyone gets to have that experience. So I feel really lucky.”
There is one song, Under My Skin, where she spent ten or twelve hours alone with her headphones in, layering harmonies and ad-libs, losing track of time entirely. “When I stopped, it was really, really early hours of the morning. I honestly felt like I was on drugs, like I was on ecstasy. I’d gotten so deep into it.” She says when she listens back now, it almost returns her to that state.
This is how she describes flow, as something close to hypnosis, or meditation. “Once you’re there, I can spend hours without noticing any time has passed at all. Sometimes I might start in the morning, and I could still be working at three o’clock the next morning, without really noticing that that’s happened.”
The record is honest about where she’s been. There’s a song called Times Like These that she started writing on tour, at a point when she was exhausted and, by her own account, struggling. “It’s one of the songs that feels maybe the most honest and vulnerable to me,” she says. “When I listen back to it, it almost brings a bit of a tear to my eye, because I remember the state I was in. I was doing a lot of stuff myself, I was on the road a lot, I think I was just exhausted. I just wanted to find another way.”
She sees herself as a writer first, before anything else. “Before a vocalist,” she says. She has never released anything she didn’t write and produce herself. People send her songs occasionally. It hasn’t worked yet. “Maybe one day someone’s going to send me something that’s just unbelievable. But writing is my thing.”
Her approach to production is deliberate, she works with engineers and musicians who can execute her vision rather than getting drawn into the technical granularity herself. “My way is production from a much more creative standpoint,” she says. “How is it arranged? How is it mixed? Working with people who have the expertise to really facilitate that.”
The album’s other story is about her father. He’s credited as co-writer on three tracks: the title song, Oh Freedom, and Handle My Soul. It’s a collaboration that clearly means a great deal to her. Her father was a musician, had a makeshift studio in the basement when she was growing up, and taught her everything she first knew about songwriting. Their bond was built through music, going downstairs together, writing songs, and learning how to record. He was there throughout Heaven Knows, too, sitting with her, listening, offering confidence at the moments she needed it most. “He helped me hugely,” she says. “Sitting down and giving me the confidence and saying, it is good enough.”
On this record, she brought him back in as a genuine creative collaborator, actually in the room, actually writing alongside her. “A little bit of me being one of them, Oh Freedom being another,” she says of his credits. “I let my dad in. And my dad is my inspiration. From when I first started songwriting, my dad was a musician and had always written songs and taught me everything.” She pauses. “Bringing him back in in a much more collaborative way, that’s been really lovely.”
That openness runs through the whole record. Where the first felt guarded, she had a point to prove and held tighter to control as a result, this one let people in. The title reflects that too. “I don’t feel like I let people in in the same way on the first record,” she says. “This record feels more collaborative.”
She spent a long time on the sequencing. Listening to it on vinyl, she says, you’ll hear the journey, from modern R&B and soul, through a 60s girl group-era sensibility, further back into blues and gospel, all of it presented as something that belongs to the present.
When she played the demos to the musicians before the studio sessions, one of them told her: When you listen to this record, you really understand who you are. It stayed with her.
“We’re all out in the world wanting to be understood at the end of the day,” she says. “If somebody gets a sense of who you are from what you write, not that it’s about that, but that’s a lovely thing, isn’t it?”
2026 will be her most extensive year on the road yet, with festival dates across the UK and Europe, a summer in-store tour, and headline shows in the UK and EU from September. The work continues, folding immediately into the next stretch of road. But for once, she seems settled in it, not drained by what’s behind her, not anxious about what’s ahead. A little bit herself. A little bit held back, intact, ready.
