Initially best known for the role of "Girl" in the Broadway adaptation of the movie musical Once, actress Cristin Milioti's career soared in 2013 when she appeared as “The Mother” on the long-running CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Beyond comedy and broadway, Milioti has excelled in small-screen dramas, including standout performances in Fargo, Black Mirror, and Made for Love. Most recently, she tapped into her dark side with her portrayal of Sofia Falcone in the Max series The Penguin. She nabbed a SAG Award nomination and a Critics' Choice Award for that one.
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For her Treat, Milioti celebrates two of the musical muses in her life: Joni Mitchell and Fiona Apple. She discusses the profound impact that their artistry has had on her, describing their music as beacons of truth as well as incredibly lyrical and melodic. She highlights Fiona Apple's Fetch The Bolt Cutters and Joni Mitchell's Hejira as her two favorite albums from each artist. For Milioti, both singer-songwriters represent more than inspiration — they are integral to her identity as a creative person.
This segment has been edited and condensed for clarity.
When I think about something, like a work of art or just something that has been very meaningful to me, I think of the music of Fiona Apple and Joni Mitchell.
They've both been such "beacons" in my life in a way that I've sort of made sense of being alive. And they have different albums for different eras of my life, for lack of a better term, I think that they're both lightning rods for the truth.
They both are artists who I think have been dismissed in various ways and obviously celebrated in so many ways. But [they both] cut straight to the marrow of the human experience while also retaining these other worldly superpowers. [They are] basically just the finest lyricists, but they also have these voices that whenever they open their mouths, it's like they're in communion with a higher power. And then also they write these melodies that — even if just the melodies existed on their own — they would be astonishing.
I listened to [Fiona Apple] so deeply and for so long that Fetch The Bolt Cutters really felt like what she'd been leading up to her entire career. And every album that she releases is truly a zero skips, every single one since she was 16 years old. But that one felt like: ‘Oh, it's always been leading to this, always, always.’
And then with Joni, Hejira is my number one. The two of them feel like they are conjurers and they conjure things within me. I know countless other people who also feel like they're whispering in your ear about something that only you know and that they know. That's my favorite type of artist, and I think that they've been such an integral part of my life as a human being.