By Lexi Bissonnette
Folk rock band Frontier Ruckus traces its roots back to high school when two members of the band, Matthew Milia and David Winston Jones, formed the band in Detroit, Michigan. Their name alone inspires the idea that they take on something new, something unexplored in the music industry, and in fact, to an extent, they do and their name was quite intentional
“We were very suburban kids. Suburban life and landscape has informed all of our songs from the start.” Milia explains as to how they found their name. They wanted to take on the vast frontier that is music and leave their mark.
The group began in 2003 and released their first full length album, The Orion Songbook. Since then they have released two full studio albums. But how has the time changed their band? Milia believes they’ve changed gears a bit with their sound for sure. “In 2008 we limited ourselves pretty strictly to acoustic instruments and organic folksy sounds.”
Now, nearing the end of 2013 he feels they have veered towards some old school pop elements. “We’ve embraced some of our early environmental pop influences of the like, 90s radio or 70s guar rock.”
Five years after their first full release, Milia reflects that the band has of course had some struggles, but overall, he feels that, “our path has never been too much of struggle.” He mentioned that they have the traditional struggles and that just being a band can be a struggle, but also that having a banjo in the band sometimes limits peoples sight of just what they can do.
Banjo or not, the band has accomplished some amazing things in the industry, most recently their release of their double album, Eternity of Dimming. The 20 track album set out to do more than just be music, it was created to tell a story by employing different sounds and messages within the songs. “I wanted it to have more of a novelistic emotional span than straight-ahead folk songs. Milia used it as a way to explore and paint a variety of things.
“It stands as probably the document I’m most proud of producing in my life so far,” says Milia. When asked about the year, he immediately went to their album. “We set out to make it with no intentions other than to gratify ourselves artistically and express the mythology from the first to records to the maximum.”
In direct contrast to that, he revealed that he and Jones are currently recording their fourth album and it’s the opposite of the grand scale work that Eternity Of Dimming was. The new album will be “a concise album of 10 hooker, uptempo songs less about childhood and more about adult relationships.”
A double album release isn’t the only mark they’re leaving on the industry. They’ve also won an award for Best Folk Rock and had their songs on ads for Adult Swim and others. But even still, Milia is modest about the bands success. “We’ve had a moderate amount of feathers in our cap. They feel good and reaffirm for a month but at the end of the day temporary external validation like that only lasts so long and belief in what you’re doing really has to solidify within yourself. ”
Even with such an outlook he can joke about the band’s success. “But then again, if you go too long without something “big” going on in your “career”- as in my field- you start to get weird questions from your relatives around the holidays.”
Not to mention the age old question of what would he change if he could? A few more zeros in the bank of course.
Don’t miss the folk rock due when they come to Philadelphia on December 6th at Boot and Saddle.
