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Frontier Ruckus: Detroit's Living Room Folk Rockers

February 21, 2014, 11:00 AM

As Frontier Ruckus, Matthew Millia, along with band/soul mates David Jones and Zachary Nichols, craft nostalgic folk rock set in the sprawling suburban streets and vacant lots of Detroit. Matthew Millia talked about the band at High Bias Recordings in Corktown on the last day of mixing their new album. Fronter Ruckus will start touring living rooms across the Midwest later this month.

Where did you get the name frontier ruckus?

I have no idea. Davy and I started the band in 2003, ten years ago during some nebulous era of adolescence. We were in someone’s basement in Bloomfield Hills with a microphone, passing it around, trying to come up with non-sequiturs and names, and those were two words that sounded good together. It was so long ago. Ten years ago. It was such a nebulous birth that we don’t know when our anniversary is. Me and Zach, Davy lock together so well musically and we’re best friends, creating music is the best thing in the world for us.

How do you collaborate with the band to create your songs?

I write the songs, the chord changes and the melody, the song is completed when I take it to the band, lyrically and musically. They help me take it in new directions with arrangements. On this record we’re putting our first instrumental song that I wrote. We’re really excited about that.

Your songs have a dreamy, trippy quality to them. What’s your song writing process?

I have backlogs of language. I’m always collecting language in interesting ways. I have a queue of couplets or rhymes I want to get into a song. Sometimes it’s like I write a song just to have an excuse or a vehicle just to get those little bundles of language for catharsis or expression. The language and the words are the most important part for me. Right now I have 20 songs that I don’t know what to do with. There’s never a dearth of songs or things that need expressing. We already have the record after this written.

It differs from song to song, I have categorical groups of songs. Like there’s the type of song that’s long, like Pontiac, The Night Brink/Adirondack Amish Holler. It’s like each record has that type of song and another shorter, sweet song that’s not that complicated – it’s just me on acoustic guitar. It’s a very internal process that’s hard to convey how it works. It’s an internal process. I write these songs for self-therapy. It depends on what kind of song I need to write for myself in that moment.

Your music is intensely personal, how do your fans outside of metro Detroit relate to Frontier Ruckus songs?

People who are from these places in Michigan have a very direct relationship with the specificity that I use, but it’s amazing that people outside of Michigan relate to them too. They even switch out the proper nouns for their own, but it’s a similar condition everywhere.

People will be like, Sylvan Lake, they’ll feel like they lived there. Because they did basically live there, but it’s called something elsewhere they’re from. I write about a suburban obsession. It’s a pretty ubiquitous kind of condition in the United States. If you write about one suburban sprawl you write about most of them.

Someone had asked someone if they’ve ever been to Michigan in the winter time and they said “No, but because of Frontier Ruckus songs I feel like I have.”

What got you into playing music in the first place?

At my house at White Lake my cousin’s girlfriend at the time gave me a Walkman and some R.E.M tapes. You can’t explain it when you’re a kid why music appeals to you. It just, there’s something ineffable about it. It induces feelings that are impossible to elicit from any other life experience. It’s a sublime reaction. Writing and producing my own music was just indescribable catharsis, a way of feeling some agency and existence with all these nebulous feelings. My specific desire to write about metropolitan Detroit was due to the crazy system of Detroit, and how all the parts of this whole system ranging from Lake Orion to Clarkston to Royal Oak, these constellations of localities. I was trying to connect them in my mind, so I started mythologizing my own geography of this area based on emotional connections and relationships with people. I just tried to write songs that made sense of this landscape and maybe reduce it in a way that was more manageable and less unwieldy in my psychology. There’s so much diversity of affluence mingling with and immediately contiguous with poverty. There’s so many interesting reactions going on between all these different areas.

What does the new album sound like?

Our pervious record, Eternity of Dimming and this new one that we’re working on, there’s a lot more 70s and early or mid 90s pop alternative rock. Like radio music. And 70s pop bands like Big Star and stuff like that. There’s more of a pop sensibility creeping into things. Still with the folky, organic influences but I’m playing a lot more electric guitar and 12 string electric guitar. So the influences now range from The Birds to 90s band like Teenage Fanclub or Mathew Sweet. I’ve been indulging in more of a pop thing. It’s gratifying. It’s catchier,  and more melodic and upbeat. This record is very different from our last one. Eternity was very indulgent. Twenty songs and hour and a half in duration. This one is 10 songs and the songs are much shorter. The songs tend to have choruses and repeating parts. It’s a little more conventional but it’s still the same wacky, idiosyncratic lyricisms, just packed into a shorter template. I could never write . . . dumber, for lack of a better word.

Living room shows. What’s driving the shrink down of the shows from the big tours and festival circuits to living room shows?

For me, that’s the most gratifying means of playing and performing for people. It’s unmediated. The songs that I write are designed to be as intimate and immediate in their conveyance as possible. So when you abolish the sound system and the crazy acoustical disaster of a huge room, so much can go wrong and so much can get in the way. It’s such a simple thing, and we’re really trying to relate and connect and reduce the complications. It makes it a lot easier for us as performers and I hope for the audience.


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