Listen to New Track from Matthew Milia, “Me and My Sweetheart”

It seems that with every song Matthew Milia writes, he inches closer and closer to achieving a neo-folk/indie-pop magnum opus that will perfectly encapsulate the quaint monotony of the suburbs. If you consider all of Milia’s songs as a grand collage, from 2019’s Alone at St. Hugo or any track from the five albums by Frontier Ruckus that features him as lead singer and primary lyricist, then you begin to see the suburbs as he does: As its own removed planet, something we associate with features like bland architecture, the indomitable frequency of “party stores” and the mingling of maple tree branches with telephone wires.

You either escape from the ‘burbs or you get stuck there, which brings us to Milia’s latest …

Milia may have achieved that aforementioned magnum opus with this summer’s Keego Harbor, his third solo album. While the settings of most of Milia’s songs have often orbited very closely around northern Oakland County, specifically cities like Waterford, Pontiac and Auburn Hills, this new album is named for his hometown. Keego Harbor is a small town (population 3,000) with its borders shaped like an inverted axe-head along the glamourless shore of Cass Lake. You can see plenty of images of Keego Harbor in the new lyric video for the album’s lead single, “Me and My Sweetheart,” spliced in with photographs of Milia and his wife, Lauren Milia, who provides harmonizing backup vocals. The video features snapshots of the couple’s yard in southwest Detroit, a few glimpses of Auburn Hills and Waterford, and even a few freeze frames from Ypsilanti, where Milia produced the album with Ben Collins.

“Sweetheart” is a bit of a roundabout ode to Lauren, hinting that life isn’t boring, even in the suburbs, with your soulmate by your side. It’s a fresh perspective considering that previously to this, Matthew has largely been the main character of most of his songs. This traipsing acoustic ballad includes plenty of sweet pedal steel and dashes of humming mellotrons, with lyrics sung from the distinct perspective of someone entering their early 30s, a period when your alma mater starts hounding you for donations, when you consider the importance of status symbols like SUVs and you wonder how successful your peers are at fending off their own existential crises.

Milia is honest about how close he had come to that certain kind of ennui. He doesn’t articulate it so specifically, but this track comes across as a “…’til there was you” sort of love song, an escape from a potential fate of inertia. As the song reaches its final chorus, Milia is constantly employing the word “we” instead of “I,” realizing how they can find a place, together. You get more than 60 images in the lyric video, many of which have an understated beauty to their mundanity, but three main characters are prominent: Matthew, Lauren and those suburbs.