For Matthew Milia, lead singer, songwriter and guitarist of alternative folk/bluegrass/indie band Frontier Ruckus, memories are a lot like ghosts: They remain in the attics of our imagination, rattling chains and never letting us forget for even a moment that they’re there.
Milia’s songwriting revolves around his own “ghosts,” which are memories of everything that is essential to him. He is the kind of writer who is perpetually engulfed in his own world where these memories are just as real and important as anything tangible and defined in the “real” world.
In the band’s songs these memories mix with vivid imagery of rural landscapes, religious iconography and contemplations about all manner of human relationships to create something which is unique among songwriters: a world that is simultaneously personal to the artist, yet also engaging and familiar to listeners.
As poignant as Milia’s words are, it’s really the reaction his songwriting evokes in the listener that makes the band’s music incredibly special.
“I love a specific and vivid landscape to be created, but it also relies on a certain enigmatic or a serious kind of emotion, which is very important to me,” Milia said.
“The things that I’m trying to express are the things that I’m obsessed by, which even to me are very vague and poorly defined,” he said. “And that’s why I’m still haunted or overwhelmed by them and it’s hard for me to put my finger on them.
“What the listener gets is probably derived from their experiences and totally separated from me, the writer,” Milia said.
“They will develop that image and it’s a totally different projection, which is a beautiful thing. It’s almost like I’m kind of giving them a… catalogue of images and to them their references and what they bring to that catalogue will create an entirely different concoction, which is beautiful and that’s what makes songwriting a living, breathing agent. The creational process is still continuing during listening.”
The blend of Milia’s complex and occasionally mystifying (in a good way) songwriting, the raw and unhinged quality of his voice and the subtle, smoldering energy with which the band plays is what makes Frontier Ruckus one of the most exciting acts to come out of Michigan in the last several years, and sets up comparisons to the likes of The Decemberists and Okkervil River.
Frontier Ruckus began in 2003 when Milia and banjo player David Winston Jones were in high school. What started as two good friends sharing their passion for music, quickly evolved when Milia left for college at Michigan State and Jones went to the University of Michigan.
The two still played together, but the band really started taking its present form when Milia met Zachary Nichols (musical saw, brass), Ryan ‘Smalls’ Etzcorn (percussion) and Anna Burch (bass, vocals) at Michigan State.
“Everyone that joined the band just sequentially added this wholly new dimension that brought the songs to life in a way that we hadn’t really even imagined before,” said Milia.
They played one of their first shows as a full band at Michigan State’s Battle of the Bands in 2006, which they won. Since then they have released one album, “The Orion Songbook,” on Quite Scientific in late 2008, and an EP, entitled “Way Upstate and the Crippled Summer, Part 1” in 2009.
They have a busy year planned for 2010 with the release of their new full-length album, a second “Crippled Summer” EP, plenty of national tour dates and a month-long trek through Europe in May.
“Right now we’re really wrapped up and absorbed in the album that we’re finishing, so it’s hard to look past that,” Milia said. “Recording for me is a very nerve-wracking and anxious process. You make permanent renditions and versions of these songs, and the whole process of recording is very nerve-wracking, so it’s what I’m totally paranoid and obsessed by right now. It’ll be done by February and that’ll be a huge relief off my shoulders.”
Regarding the new album, which again sees the band working with Ann Arbor producer Jim Roll, Milia said there will be some changes in the band’s sound, but it doesn’t represent a complete shift for them musically.
“We’re never really holistically following one single philosophy,” he said. “There’s a lot of arbitrary elements in Frontier Ruckus. We’re not bound to any one thing, so we’ll kind of pursue something at a whim, but there’s nothing too radical or drastic.”
In terms of his songwriting for the new record, Milia has essentially retired the “Orion Town” mythology that he developed for their first album, though pretty much all of the same themes regarding relationships, landscapes and memory, among others, are still in tact.
This time around a significant theme for Milia’s lyrics is the idea of dead malls, like Summit Place Mall in Waterford Twp, Mich., where his grandparents used to take him to play while his mother worked.
Today, the mall is almost entirely vacant and dilapidated—as are his memories of it.
“It’s the run-down-ness of memories, the dilapidation of memories, which is what makes it profound and gorgeous,” said Milia.
In addition to the new album, the band has also signed to a new label, Ramseur Records out of North Carolina. According to Milia the change from Ann Arbor label Quite Scientific, who released “Orion Songbook,” to Ramseur Records was no slight against their old label, but simply a necessary move for a band trying to make the jump from local favorite to national act.
“Quite Scientific is an amazing label,” he said. “We wouldn’t be anywhere close to where we are, wherever we are, without them. I recommend any Michigan band, or any band in the county really, trying to put out a release with them if they can. They are incredible people, they are hard working, they only put out music they care about and working with them is an honor.”
“We got approached to put out our follow-up album on Ramseur Records, which is just a bigger label,” Milia said. “They just have a bigger machinery behind them, and that’s not necessarily a value good or bad thing, but at this point we’re just concerned with getting our music out to as many people as possible, because if we’re putting it out at all…you obviously want people to hear it, so why not have more people hear it?”
The band’s next shows in Michigan are Saturday at The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor and then Feb. 19 at the Erickson Kiva on Michigan State’s campus in East Lansing.