For the first time, possibly ever, Matthew Milia is actually thinking about the future. Or at least the present.
“Something I love about getting older,” says the Detroit-based singer-songwriter, “is that you start to become longer-sighted about the bigger picture of the arc of your life.”
The cofounder of indie rock band Frontier Ruckus is speaking with us from his historic home on the west side; it’s 8 p.m. on a weeknight and he’s decompressing after a “day” at his dayjob, while his wife Lauren is in the other room putting their nine-month-old son, who’s just gotten his first cold, down to bed. Milia takes a breath. “I’ve never thought less about the past than I do right now,” he says.
For Milia, this is noteworthy. In a way, his gaze has always been fixed on the past. Over the course of writing and recording more than 100 songs for Frontier Ruckus, stretched across six albums and three EPs, he’s been pouring out achingly evocative and sometimes feverishly redolent lyrics that paint varyingly realistic or relatably hazy portraits of his past — particularly (self)-mythologizing a hyper-specific Michigan-born maturation. Years on, the somewhat eerily compelling universality of these four-minute memory palaces have deeply resonated with the band’s dedicated fanbase – even if they aren’t all from Michigan and might not pick up on all of his deeper references and lore.
“I’m obsessed with locality,” Milia says. “And obsessed with language! I’m otherwise terrible at math and numbers — I’m not pragmatic or logistical, but language is physical to me. It maps onto my physical landscape so sublimely and effortlessly. I’m a self-mythologizer — that’s been my archetype — because it’s granted me agency within this amorphous blur of metro Detroit, with all its suburban sprawl encompassing a million small towns that fold into one another with all of these overlapping socioeconomic modalities and subtle conflicts. It’s an overwhelming place to grow up.”
Milia and the band’s cofounder, David Jones, both literally grew up with, during, and perhaps because of their formidable experiences in Frontier Ruckus, which, over the span of a 20-year career could be variably triumphant, harrowing, mundane, or surreal. On Saturday, Feb. 17, they celebrate the release of their sixth album — On The Northline, the band’s first in seven years — at the Loving Touch in Ferndale.
A wholesome origin story
“We met when we were 15,” Jones regales, looking back to the turn of the millennium, when they were both attending Detroit Brother Rice in Bloomfield Hills. “I’d started playing the banjo at age 12; I took to it very fast and loved it — I was just blown away by that sound! And so Matt and I played a lot of bluegrass together through high school, and even busked on the streets of downtown Birmingham. Later we would play Dylan and Young covers in Ferndale coffee shops. But pretty soon Matt started writing his own songs — songs that started to getting a little weirder, later on, when we went off to college.”
Milia was a poetry kid who graviated toward contemplative lyricists like Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon, while Jones, with his banjo, developed a deep reverence for bluegrass, ragtime, and classical music. The former enrolled at Michigan State University in East Lansing, while the latter went to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, but their resolve to form a band only strengthened. The only question became: what other elements could they add?
“I met both of them,” says Zach Nichols, “at [Jones’s] apartment in Ann Arbor, off campus.” Nichols was enrolled at MSU as well; he’d already started playing guitar but was beginning “to enjoy variety in instrumentation, and the way each instrument can express different things,” he says. “I believe any instrument can be used in any genre in a cool way.” That included, for Nichols, not only the melodica, but also the singing saw.
“There was basically a want ad that [Milia] posted to Facebook,” Nichols says. “This was 2004, when Facebook was ‘young’ and you could only be friends with people at your school. I owned a saw and a melodica — actually, it was my dad’s saw — but I’d gotten a bow and learned how to make noise with it and started loving that. So, I went on Facebook and searched ‘singing saw,’ because I wanted to find other singing saw players — like, maybe there was a club or something on campus? And [Milia]’s profile showed up with a post, and it said: ‘We’re looking for a singing saw player or a melodica player…’”
He pauses to acknowledge the wild coincidence. “The truth is we were into the same kind of psych-folk music popular at that time which is why he was also interested in these types of instruments,” he says. “And so I brought those instruments with me to meet them, along with a trumpet.”
In 2006, the group competed in the MSU Battle of the Bands. “And, we won!” Jones says. “We were so thrilled. We were awarded a cartoonishly big check and we brought it back to [Milia]’s dorm room and drank our asses off; that culminated in Zach opening the window and shouting, ‘We’re the best band in East Lansing!’”
Jones pauses to laugh. “But we used that cartoon check to buy all of our first gear, and then we started playing our first real shows, and then eventually our first real tours,” he says. “It’s all a very wholesome origin story.”
Peripherally en vogue
There was Milia’s nimble acoustic guitar, his mellifluous voice, his swooning lyrical sketches; Jones, with his superb and dexterous fretwork on the banjo; and then there was Nichols, affably providing an assortment of varyingly unconventional instrumentations, with each of the latter two bringing creative arrangements to enrich the foundation of Milia’s songwriting. That was the DNA of Frontier Ruckus — that, and a “wholesome” friendship that quickly became as durable as tempered steel. Other talented players joined to fill out the band, some for only a span of months, but others quite longer — notably with singer-songwriter Anna Burch performing on bass and adding harmonies for nine years of the band’s (ongoing) run.
And with a humble one-two punch of 2008’s Orion Songbook and 2010’s Deadmalls and Nightfalls, the band was swept up into a wave that was cresting at that time in the indie music world, making them contending contemporaries of other patchwork alt-folk, neo-folk, and alt-country stylists at the time who employed literate lyricism and distinctive tonality – eventually winning them not only considerably good critical reviews but also a spot at 2010’s Bonnaroo music festival, which that year also featured Arcade Fire and My Morning Jacket.
Together, the members of Frontier Ruckus experienced a nine-year odyssey of touring and album cycles. For several consecutive years, they were spending up to 10 months out on the road, taking them all across the U.S. and Canada, and even over to Europe. More records followed: Eternity of Dimming (2013), Sitcom Afterlife (2014), and Enter the Kingdom (2017). All the while they remained on the radars of veritable tastemakers, regarded as an authentically good and interesting band, sure, but, as Milia puts it, “A tad too rootsy for Pitchfork and too eccentric for the Americana crowd.”
“Career aspirations were a nice carrot to follow,” Milia says, “But I think deep in our hearts we always knew that what we were creating together, not just materially, but also emotionally, were the bonds that were going to last. And it eventually became clear we weren’t going to sell a million records or be the next Wilco... There were moments where we thought we were, though, because it often seemed to be happening, or it seemed like it was always just about to happen. We were peripherally en vogue with various industry people hopping onto our bandwagon for a minute or two, but it would always only last up until the moment they realized that my voice is always going to be this idiosyncratic — I own my nasality — and that I’m never gonna stop writing about Michigan. And, that we, as a band, weren’t willing to change any of that.”
“I guess when we were younger we cared more about being seen as ‘cool’ or being considered as such, by that hip, erudite indie rock world,” Jones says. “And there was a period in the early 2010s where we tried to be more on that indie side of things and less into our sort of rootsy ideas — trying more electric guitars and stuff and playing banjo through pedal boards — until we eventually said, ‘Wait, who cares? No one? Well, then let’s just make the music that we’re gonna make,’ and that’s all we’ve ever really done.”
It wasn’t all Bonnaroo, of course. All three of them can recall a blur of bleak to boisterous weeknights spent slogging through “sticky bars” performing to a gamble’s amount of people and winding up on the floor of some charitable stranger’s loft to catch four hours of sleep before heading out again.
“We’d go all over on these tours together,” Milia says. “And each time we’d eventually make it out to Los Angeles, we’d always wind up at the end of a night on someone’s balcony, feeling like we should be living there, that we should move to somewhere like L.A. But something in me always said no. And then you come out on the other side of it, 10 years on, and it all turned out as the way it should have — and that we have so much to be grateful for. We’re blessed just to have people still listening! But all these cliches are true — you realize a lot of things that you hoped for were pretty much bullshit — that you would have been miserable if they came true: that the only thing worse than not getting what you want is actually getting it. So much had to go wrong for me to wind up here, right here, married to the absolute love of my life and now with a son who’s the light of my world.”
“Of course I’ll always miss those touring days,” Nichols admits. To which, Milia adds, “And I would never choose to spend my twenties any other way…” Milia continued to release music as a solo artist, including 2019’s Alone at St. Hugo and 2021’s Keego Harbor.
“We’d go all over on these tours together ... feeling like we should be living there, that we should move to somewhere like L.A. But something in me always said no.”
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“But I think ultimately,” Nichols continues, “it’s been a little more healthier for each of us to be able to tend to our lives and relationships, instead. I love being able to be creative with these guys. Plus, we’re able to get together all the time just to hang out as friends. And we’ve been able to talk things over — I just think things are going to be a little more relaxed, now, going forward. [Milia] has a kid, we’ve all got jobs. We’re still gonna take the shows we can and just make the most out of it all.”
“We’re certainly the best of friends and, really, brothers,” Jones says. “Our relationship has blossomed and evolved into something very comfortable. Of course, not being inside the pressure cooker of touring all the time helps that,” he chuckles. “But we’ve really grown into this wonderful adult relationship together, to where I’m now the godfather to [Milia]’s son and I come over to his house to help him install light fixtures, now. I mean, it’s just… very wholesome and lovely. Of course we still play music together often, we’re just elated every time we get together.”
In-tense sense
The lead single and title track from On The Northline finds Milia talking directly about the passing of time, the experience of aging, and peeling away at muddled feelings until you can actually see what’s real. Milia’s life’s work as a lyricist has been forming a delirious montage of memory — with an eloquence that could make those intangible echoes and mind-polaroids feel real. But for someone who’s seemed to be nostalgic his entire life — it’s like he’s finally arrived at the present.
“[On The Northline] is definitely me finding myself on the other side of show business,” Milia says. “Taking stock of having fallen ass-backwards, accidentally, into domestic bliss and just being overwhelmed with gratitude for lucking out — that it all worked out. But you’ve got to wake up every day with tenacity to make the best of your present. That’s why I started writing songs in the first place, unbeknownst to me at the time. It was just a way of making my own present tense bearable.”
But on one new song, “Mercury Sable,” which details his falling in love with his now-wife, he sings an admittance: “I can’t make sense of something completely intense.” Which is saying a lot for an artist who’s spent his career trying to make sense out of his entire existence; he sounds astonished, yet joyful. It’s a confused excitement for what could be, rather than a rumination for what’s already been.
But Milia, of course, continues to make sense out of Michigan.
“I don’t know what else I would write about,” Milia says, assuring that the local references continue aplenty on Northline. “I’ve left the state many times, but it’s still all I want to write about. My faculties of expression are so inextricably bound to this landscape that I like to say, ‘No one can write a Frontier Ruckus song like me.’ That’s all I know how to write.”
Based on the positive reactions to Northline’s three singles, it’s also clear that Frontier Ruckus’ dedicated fan base, even if they aren’t Michiganders, are still hungry for these mitten-state ruminations. “Wouldn’t have made it this far,” Milia says, “without some of these truly dedicated listeners.”
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