Frontier Ruckus

Answers are from Matthew Milia of Frontier Ruckus:

Q: How did you create your sound?
A: The genesis of what became the modern-day Frontier Ruckus sound really began just shy of a decade ago with Davey and I as youths in suburban Detroit with a guitar and banjo, discovering the enormous and inviting world of imaginative creation for the first time. We started to construct a world of our own rearrangement and wonder based on the specific physical landscape we had come from and memorized our entire lives. That established the heart of what we wanted to write and sing about, the groundwork for the mythology and meaning that interested us. The entrance of the full band though forever changed and intensified the manner in which that meaning would be expressed. It became much more textured with a focus on things like thick harmony and not to mention Zach’s provision of layered singing-saw, horns, and melodica. Plus Smalls’ drumming crucially nailed down and accentuated to the forefront all the rhythmic idiosyncracies that were hiding out in the compositions.

Q: What inspired you to become a musician?
A: Probably “Like A Hurricane” by Neil Young. After that it was probably just the psychological therapy which I discovered songwriting to afford.

Q: What was the journey like on the road to this album?
A: Well, the literal road I often took the studio was M-14 in Michigan, in the winter, so it was often icy and treacherous.
More figuratively though, the road was pretty varied. A lot of the songs were written about very anxious, somewhat desperate, lonely and hot summer desire. Some of it was based on very rare and holy scenes of brief peace and cohibernation with the object of that desire in heated rooms within Michigan winter. Either way, it was all intense and obsessive and immediately longed-for as soon as it passed into the sacred past-tense!

Q: If you had to choose one word to describe the band what would it be?
A: Nostalgic.

Q: How did everyone meet each other?
A: Davey and I met at our all-male Catholic high school. Actually, we technically met at the all-female Catholic high school right next door where we took drama class.
I met the rest of the band one-by-one throughout my sophomore year of college in West Circle, where we all lived at Michigan State University. One of our first shows as a full band was Michigan State’s Battle of the Bands, which we won. An encouraging start!

Q: What is the biggest goal as a band?
A: To continue the development of a singular and rich world, containing a meticulously organized sense of place and complex memory and locality in our music. It’s a world we invite others to enter and hopefully feel comforted by a depth of detail and peace within the insane but beautiful confusion of memory.

Q: Although tour dates do not cover every city, do you plan to go on a tour that does?
A: Well, there are a lot of cities out there, connecting and blending into each other in the vague definitions of night to compose the totality of experience! We’ve been a lot of places and we’re just trying to cover as much space as possible while we can. The realm of experience grows and grows as the crystallization of “home” hopefully continues to clarify and beckon in its distance.