Frontier Ruckus - Roots and memories

Twenty songs thrown together at random, like clothes in a teenager's closet. “Eternity Of Dimming” is one of the most moving albums of the year, in how it captures the passage into adulthood, in how it painstakingly rebuilds a small museum collection of sensations, smells, urges, friendships. Matthew Milia doesn't skimp on words in his songs, and he doesn't skimp on them here either, answering these questions with a genuine deep dive into the world of Frontier Ruckus.

The sheer size of the project is kind of a practical byproduct of having been away from home for two years straight, in 2010 and 2011 – with all these songs piling up, tied together by complementary themes. It was the first time we'd done such a grueling tour, or been away from home for so long. I'd always written about complicated, conflicted feelings around the concept of "home" up to that point, but being away from home meant that the intensity of memory, the stylistic zoom into personal, domestic portraiture, got exaggerated almost exponentially. While I was away, I developed this boundless obsession with the most maniacal specificity of detail regarding my local world of memory, from which I felt, for the first time, unpleasantly estranged.

So I had plenty of time to write a lot of songs, which all sprang from the same condition, with no real way out, for about two years. When it came time to make the new record, there was nothing I felt like cutting. Every song leaned on the others, in my mind, as essential intertextual parts of overlapping stories and references. Plus, we didn't feel any real pressure to conform to popular, easily digestible products, so there was really no internal resistance to making a long record.

If anything, we enjoyed going against the trend of making shorter, easier releases. There are plenty of technical advantages to making something that's more novelistic in its machinery. The bigger the world you create, the more room you'll have to connect all the components, with varying degrees of perspective and complication of conflict.

I could say that the truly dominant theme running through the record is the persistence of an idyllic childhood memory, shot through with adult pathos, tragedy, or just plain disillusioned reality. Like the birthday party scene in “Black Holes”, full of pizza and liters of soda, but it happens on the same living-room carpet where dad collapses during a breakdown. A recurring metaphor is this image of a grainy, magical, young summer that gradually disintegrates into an endless wave of distance and decline.

Did you have a particular musical goal in mind for this record? I think it's a perfect blend of your past and more recent reference points, from the Band to Neil Young, all the way to Neutral Milk Hotel and Okkervil River, and with that, a real showcase of musical mastery.

Thanks. We wanted the sonic side of things to stay complementary to the musical storytelling and to keep the instrumental elements our audience associates us with, but use them in an innovative way, with a lot of new additional layers on top. The banjo, for instance, has become such a widespread, standardized instrument that modern pop music has co-opted it. But at the same time, we have Davey playing it in such an expressive, almost impressionistic way, in how he plays with and against the melody. He did several banjo parts using strange delay effects and other tricks to pull the instrument out of its rut. And Zach [the keyboardist, ed.] had free rein to be as weird as he wanted – so we grabbed a bunch of obsolete organs and keyboards, hooked them up to beat-up old amps and other stuff, to get the most unusual combinations of noise-making going.

An important theme of the record is obsolete technology from the '80s and '90s, and how the clunkiness of dated things acts as a paperweight on temporality and memory in our lives. We used mics from old tape recorders and recorded by hand on old tape decks, etc., to echo that feeling. We bought Smalls [the drummer, ed.] a timpani, because we were falling in love with people like Bobby Vinton or Roy Orbison, with the arrangements of great '60s orchestral pop. Smalls really sets the pulse of the record, spinning the listener through this succession of rooms in an overcrowded house, where the pounding in the walls rises or simmers with different intensity depending on what's happening in the songs. I layered electric guitars like never before, going for a kind of shimmering melodic tone that pays tribute not only to '90s radio pop, which really says a lot about my melodic sensibility and is a reference point on the record, but also to early-'70s guitar pop, like that of Big Star or Elo, which is also very important to me.

Your mash-up of "Sylvan Manor – Dealer" paints an almost epic picture. What can you tell us about these songs?

The version of "In Protection Of Sylvan Manor" on the record is really just the demo I recorded in my bedroom, in the neighborhood I grew up in, which is called Sylvan Manor. It was inspired by my walks around the block of modest, single-story houses in springtime, when all the mailboxes were stuffed with junk mail, pizzeria coupons and, for some reason, minnows, and by feeling a certain sense of ownership over my most intimate environment, one I knew so well that my body had come to feel it as a physical extension of itself — something no outside force could ever pull out or take away from me. I felt the need to protect the sacredness of my personal experience — an internal archive that every person carries within the vessel of their body, where the specific contents vary wildly but the condition and the respective purity are exactly the same. The interlopers in the song are old, petty summer soccer coaches, critics, high school bullies, or any agent in life that tries to diminish or damage what is rightfully yours by eternal right.

Yes! That was the melodica on the Band track. My favorite sonic detail in "Eternity"… Hmm. There are so many little secret nuances we put in there, even just for ourselves. In the part where I almost "rap" in "Open It Up," where I reference a discarded Nintendo-64 in the closet of an old friend's divorced mom's apartment, right at that moment Zach plays a little keyboard motif from a certain video game, and that's musical poetry manifesting itself right in that line.

My favorite musical mechanism we used is very sneakily planting references between songs, both on this record and across others. It's an interesting way of interfacing with the overall mythology, making it all work together for me. I do that a lot in the lyrics in general, and the band has been great at pulling off musical callbacks.

Most of your songs have a strong narrative drive, something fairly rare these days even in the singer-songwriter scene — pretty odd, I guess. Do you write the lyrics before the music?

I write and collect pieces of language separately — rhymes, images or interesting feelings I want to put into a song, forming a kind of queue of things that need to find their way into something else. Songs like "Careening Catalog Immemorial" or "Springterror" are the result of having a surplus of "graphic" lines that I truly loved and that couldn't find a home anywhere, like little orphans.

So these songs became these wacky tangential experiments, and I love them! I think my songs fall into about four or five different categories of tracks I'm capable of writing. I know from the start that a given song will be a piece in the vein of "Adirondack Amish Holler/Pontiac the Nightbrink" or "The Tower/The Deep-Yard Dream," etc. I've developed this little menu I can write against. But along the way it's really important for me to challenge myself, for instance by writing a line that makes me uncomfortable, or asking myself: "Am I pushing further?" That usually means I'm breaking the ice a little, that I'm transgressing, finding new things to talk about.

What's the most beautiful story ever told in the history of popular music, in your opinion?

I still think "MacArthur Park" by Jimmy Webb, sung by Richard Harris, about the cake left out in the rain, sums up love, loss and mourning in the most striking way. I really mean that.

Absolutely. The glory of a personal mythology is that it's really an infinity of discoveries. It's as varied and revealing as you want it to be. It can include the whole world, or the universe, if you like, in a Whitman-esque way. It can also contradict itself. Mine, though, has a local specificity — I try to tie all this unwieldy metaphysical stuff to a vague physical landscape. For me that's the immense sprawl of metro Detroit. If I stayed here my whole life, I could never exhaust everything there is to write about — every infinitesimal component, every connection. That's perhaps the risk of fetishizing detail, but it satisfies me.

I think I might take a break from this crazy specificity for a moment on the next record, though. My new challenge will be figuring out whether I can write more generic love songs, with a chorus. It'll be like pulling teeth. But also fun, a game. For me it's always been thirty verses before I get to a chorus. I can't bring myself to repeat something when I could fill that space with new language instead. But I guess there's something to be said for repetition.

You've repeatedly been called out, on webzines, as an anti-Mumford band. How do banjo musicians react to the banjo going mainstream?

I've never listened to a Mumford song all the way through, so I'm really not qualified to comment on them one way or the other. What I can say is that I really hope people investigate the specific work at hand when they talk about us, rather than clumsily sketching something out based on such a thin set of references. That's the ever-present flaw of journalists these days. Every idiosyncrasy, every nuance gets crudely swept aside by the immediate need to qualify things through the most inappropriately imposed comparisons of the moment. Whether you like the record or not, I'm sure there's a whole small galaxy of details worth commenting on substantively. I know because I put them there deliberately. And, wouldn't you know it, they don't have even the remotest connection to this or that band I've never heard. Now, if we're talking about the influence of 90s radio, though, well, that's a safe bet!

This makes precise, well-thought-out questions like these a real pleasure.

I imagine live shows are now the main source of income for bands, and you've played plenty of gigs. Do you feel confident enough to record a live album?

Some fans have asked us for one. We haven't seriously considered it, but I'd say I like the idea of being able to bring together all our songs from different albums and have them line up in new configurations and relationships. We've got a solid repertoire at this point, and it's always a challenge to put them together coherently in a live set. I tried keeping a record of the setlists from every night, but it got too frustrating. A lot of the songs sound very different live now compared to how they are on record. It would be nice to document the experience of seeing us live rather than through some shaky YouTube clip. People say: "You're a great live band." Maybe we'll do a quintuple live set of us attempting to play every song we've ever written. It would have its ups and downs. Of course we encourage people to make bootlegs and to follow us around like we're the Grateful Dead.

I know you played in Italy on your last tour. What do you remember about it?

For a lot of us it was our first time in Italy. Truly beautiful. I'd love to see all the different regions and how they contrast with each other, because we only made it to the North. We had a day off in Milan and spent the whole day wandering around. I had some fresh coconut from a little stand where it was being sprayed with water. Lots of attractive people out in the scorching sun.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google