Singer, guitarist and songwriter Matthew Milia and his band Frontier Ruckus have been singing songs inspired by his life in Michigan for over 20 years. Now in his late 30s and raising a family, Milia is liberated from artistic striving and is enjoying songwriting even more. The band’s sixth album, On the Northline, is set for a mid-February release. I had the privelege of a chat with Matthew, in which he discusses personal mythology, 19th century pop poetry, Frontier Ruckus reality tours, and sadness.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can check out the video of the full interview at the end of this article.
360°Sound: I feel like I know you a little bit, having immersed myself in your songs and your lyrics.
Matthew Milia: I hope to be that kind of songwriter. I feel like I am. I mean, the songs are intimately, excruciatingly personal. So hopefully, who I actually am comes across.
Let’s talk about the new record. I really like the title track, “On the Northline.” And watching the video reel of your old still photos, I feel like I could wander down from our place on Lake Huron, pull up a chair, and crack a couple All Day IPAs. Very idyllic.
It’s funny you say Lake Huron, because ‘the Northline’ references sort of vague north places where north Oakland County, or the Metro Detroit grid, disperses back into a blurry, more rural landscape where I can just have fun with these dreary domestic characters with sinister or nefarious enterprises. I love investigating the underbelly to suburbia – things that seem idyllic on the surface.
“On the Northline” is very much like classic Frontier Ruckus; we actually consider it a sequel to an earlier song called “Dealerships” [from 2013’s Eternity Dimming], very minor key, rapid-fire lyrics. “Clarkson Pasture” is, I think actually the song on the record that’s most still in that lineage of power pop. It’s catchy – your REM, major-key elements.
“Clarkston Pasture” has the languid feel of a summer tube float. It’s a really realistic love song. It’s like, ‘I’m thinking of you. And y’know, it’s not too bad.’
That brings me to my wife [Lauren], who is a really important fixture to this record. Because of her there’s this beautiful tension. Some of the songs have this classic Frontier Ruckus angst to them. And then songs like “Mercury Sable,” or “First Song for Lauren,” are the most unadulterated love songs I ever wrote, just thanking my lucky stars I met this person.
In “Clarkston Pasture,” the verses take place in the Michigan winter, and then the choruses escape into this Michigan summer world. There are few places more harsh than a Michigan winter, and there are few places more resplendent than a Michigan summer. That’s why I love living here. It just represents the polarity of existence. So, by the choruses, we’ve escaped to this summer world of the meadows of outer Metro Detroit, and cruising with the windows down, and feeling the totality of love’s impact.
You recorded On the Northline in Ypsilanti [near Ann Arbor]. What drew you there?
A good friend named Ben Collins. He has a home studio, the same place where I recorded my two solo records, Alone at St. Hugo and Keego Harbor. Ben is a musical genius. He somehow has both sides: he’s the most consummate player I’ve ever met, but he also has a beautiful technical scientific engineer mind. We used a Tascam 338, just this vintage, eight-track reel-to-reel, quarter-inch tape machine. We dumped it into the computer from there, but tape gives it this nice warmth – really cozy. All of us in a really tight-knit space, not worrying about [mic] bleed, just a really authentic, honest approach.
We know we’re breaking [the rules], but we don’t really care. We’re reaching our late 30s, where there’s a beautiful letting go. Some might call it laziness, but it’s actually a really healthy kind of letting go. Not letting perfect be the enemy of great, kind of thing. More capturing a feeling, rather than perfection or a product.
How do you guys approach instrumentation now? It really sets the mood for your songs.
With Davey [Jones, on banjo & vocals] and Zach [Nichols, on trumpet, melodica, saw, etc], they have carte blanche to do their thing. That’s a benefit of having been best friends with these guys for decades. And having spent so much time on the road, there’s a telepathy built into it; I know they’re going to serve the song. Zach’s not writing a trumpet part, he’s writing an extension to my song. It’s a very generous and loving kind of collaboration. And we were fortunate on this record to have a great rhythm section in Connor Dotson on drums and Evan Eklund on bass and harmonies. Everyone just honors the song and there’s hardly any conflicts. It’s just sublimely natural.
I really like the sympathetic, complimentary harmonies on so many of your recordings. There’s an intimacy and a longing that’s enhanced by harmony.
Harmony is a magical device. The songs that Davey sings harmony on, it’s a totally different element, and it’s beautiful. It has this brotherly kind of ethos; he can do so much. It just changes the whole complexion of the feeling.
I especially love the richness of the detail in your songs, and all the local color. Tell me a little bit about the role of place in your songwriting.
It’s the most important thing – specificity. My mantra is that the universal resides within the particular. For instance, Orion Songbook [their first album from 2008] is named after a specific place, Orion Township in Michigan. It’s full of I-75 references. Someone put together a Google map of all the Metro Detroit places I’ve referenced in songs, and you can’t even see the space between the pins.
The first time we went to play in London, I was singing songs about these very specific Michigan places, and people in the front row are shouting lyrics back, like inches from my face, with such enthusiasm. I’m like, ‘Why do you care about Lake Erie and Michigan?’ They’re like, ‘You might as well have been singing about my own town here in England.’ There’s a translation that we’re all capable of. That’s why you can read any richly detailed book or poem and kind of translate it to your own emotional interiority. So that’s the MO I’ve been operating with for my entire songwriting catalogue.
I write the songs for myself first and foremost. Every time I fit in one of those places – Keego Harbor, Sylvan Lake – these little obscure, esoteric places, it’s a trigger for me when I sing the song. It gives me some agency in this amorphous emotional pursuit of being alive. I can map my emotional landscape onto this physical one, and it makes it more tangible and comprehensible to me.
It’s cool to hear references to the region where I grew up. I can almost envision your drive from home to school in the back of the minivan.
In Boston once, this kid came up to me with a stack of Polaroids, without any context, and I started going through them. It was like, my dad’s CVS up the street from our house, my elementary school. He had taken a Frontier Ruckus reality trip tour to all these places, and took pictures with them. It was amazing. Awesome. That’s why we’re a Michigan band.
I love the images on the sleeve, as well as the photos in your lyric videos.
[The album cover for On the Northline] is my grandpa’s neighborhood in Troy, Michigan in the ’70s. My dad took all the photos in the ’70s on this camera that I still have.
You studied with the poet Diane Wakoski. What’s the difference between poetry and lyrics for songs?
Diane always used to be sure to differentiate – songs aren’t poetry; poetry is its own thing. She taught me so much about self mythology. I already had that tendency, but she really encouraged me in this process of self mythology, of self anthology. Myth has the benefit of ambiguity; it doesn’t have to be completely factual. That’s why myth can be so much more poignant. I found a whole different layer, a whole different dimension, to benefit from.
Poetry is harder, I think. The metrics of a good poem are kind of more nebulous, so you have to spend time cracking that equation. Songwriting is a pop medium. I mean, poetry was more pop in the 1890s. But there’s a lot more popular considerations for songwriting. And Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize [‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’], to much controversy. I take less of a strict stance – there are undeniable poetic elements in the DNA of good songwriting.
There’s a melancholia that pervades your work. These are really wise and mature songs that seem like the words of an older soul. So my question is, was the Dread Pirate Wesley right? Is life pain?
It would be boring without pain. We’re talking about polarities, and you need one thing to give the other thing definition or even existence. Pain is beautiful. Life is an endless bombardment of pain, but without it, you wouldn’t grow whatsoever. The most painful moments of my life, I grew the most, and learned the most, and found the most beauty ultimately. Pain is a momentary thing – beauty is everlasting.
The reason I’ve written so many songs is not about pain necessarily, but a wistfulness or ache – just kind of this ineffable sadness. Sadness gets a bad rap, but it’s a beautiful thing; it’s the emotion that necessitates art. Art is there to work through it, to grant you catharsis. I’m less prone to write a really happy song, because I’m busy being happy; I don’t need to work through it, I just want to be there in the moment experiencing it.
That’s why I’m proud of a song like “Mercury Sable” on this record, because it came out of a sadness and loneliness that had been in my life right up to meeting my wife. So that happiness is brought into sharp relief, and given so much more poignancy. That, to me, is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever written, or just means the most to me. You can still sense the sadness, and it’s like someone released a pressure valve. That’s why the song literally makes reference to myself crying these tears of joy, which is almost like a diary entry, but I didn’t even care, it was just so honest.
I’m glad that you’re still making music, now that you’re a family man.
I’ve actually got my ten-month old son down for a nap [checks baby monitor]. I still have fun doing [music]. It’s weirdly gratifying to do it at this point in my life. I still get to make songs and records, and the songwriting is just so pure now. I mean, it always was, but I’m not writing a song to get a feature in Rolling Stone or to go on tour. I just get to make music and fill it with as many Metro Detroit references as possible, just for myself. And I’m immensely privileged and grateful for the way it came together. I’m a lucky guy.
Frontier Ruckus celebrated the release of On the Northline with a show at The Loving Touch in Ferndale on 17 February. It was a great show, featuring Fred Thomas and Loose Koozies. Dig into Matthew’s rich trove of lyrics on frontierruckus.com
Learn more about Diane Wakoski here.
