1. |
Salad Bars
06:40
|
|||
Salad bars in this frigid town
Where the repo’d cars are blood-red brown
October stars flash numbers down for keno
Candy corn in an empty cart
You still mourn the brand-new start
That ended with a broken heart
Yeah, we know
But somehow it doesn’t make you cry
To know the junk mail that you and I
Will still receive long after we’ve been long-dead
So I stop to give the psoriasis
That’s there above your eye a kiss
And sip a beer to hear just what this song said
No one’s nineteen for very long
Everything I mean, I’ve said it wrong
So do you see the danger?
And don’t you be a stranger
Yeah, that’s what your mom said
And it broke your heart apart
And then it sent you to the start of it again
Apartments passed down friend to friend
Till you’re standing at the decade’s end
With nothing really left to spend but more time
You’re in Madison Heights
When the morbid fascination bites
That’s triggered by the dull lights of some slow climb
Not so special after all
In the deathlike center of the mall
Where the broken skylight sunbeams fall on you
I flash to the children’s hospital
With the gown and IV that I pull
Behind me to the game room draped in blue
I never saw that blue so thin
I never heard from you again
You never knew this all could end, yeah we know
Now it’s salad bars in this frigid town
Where the repo’d cars are breaking down
October stars flash bright as the casino
No one’s nineteen for very long
Everything I mean, I’ve said it wrong
So do you see the danger?
And don’t you be a stranger
Yeah, that’s what your mom said
And it broke your heart apart
And then it sent you to the start of it again
So do you see the danger?
And don’t you be a stranger
Yeah, that’s what your mom said
And it broke your heart apart
And then it sent you to the start of it again
|
||||
2. |
Sunburnt Landscapers
04:09
|
|||
Sunburnt landscapers in the country club gulch
The entire spring world smells like wet humans
And rotten mulch
And the lilacs
My done-to-death climax
Well, I don’t care
They’re all I’ve got there
The dumpsters behind the bleak tanning salons
The entire spring world is just broken roads and damp coupons
In the after-rain
The smell that I can’t explain
Petrichor mingled in your hair
You look so blissfully high
After you’ve had yourself
A good cry
And I know that
You are my…
Trailing behind the dumb vanity plates
Out past the outrageous Bloomfield Hills mansion estates
The lunch-timers and sad corporate climbers
Are driving home into the hot sun
Last night I slept in a hospital recliner
Next to your bed and I watched the tubes exit your hand
And then I wept alone in a diner
And pitifully prayed that you’re not one
You look so blissfully high
After you’ve had yourself
A good cry
And I know that
You are my…
I wanna list of every kid I used to know
And their current careers
My therapist insists I should let all this go
From my formative years
But the feral spring softness is swarming the offices
Where mutual funds and cummerbunds get rented out
The roads are all paralyzed
We travel the service drives
Searching for the slightest sign that it all might work out
We’re just sunburnt landscapers from the trashier towns
On the north edge of the county
Where the endless love always abounds
Where the oil change places
And terrified faces
Remind me that I’m in my heaven
You look so blissfully high
After you’ve had yourself
A good cry
And I know that
You are my…
|
||||
3. |
Condo Lakeshore
06:05
|
|||
Oh, my friends, what can I say?
In some strange year on an even stranger day
Well, I guess I’ve had some luck
But overall I felt like I’ve been stuck
Inside a department store
Where no one looked before they locked the door
So I’m waiting overnight
Consumed by love, just starving for the lightning
This soft summer we’ll go find the brightening
The sky above some condo lakeshore might bring
The great reminder we’ve been looking for
Dead streets full of slush
Dead friends who eventually lost touch
Dream houses you might buy
On some part of town you deliberately drive by
Small talk just burns my ears
A solo walk across town turns my gears
Back to a hopeful mode
If I don’t bust it I just might explode, dear
Thirty slushy lifetimes flush my right ear
Where I just sneeze some antifreeze and light beer
But I got reason to believe by next year
On a long drive home down Woodward we’ll be free
Kids in a backyard ravine
Clinton Watershed snow, cold and clean
Trace a trail back to the fridge
From Krogers through misnomers like Quail Ridge
Middle-class lifetime galore
Midnight run to your sacred party store
Best case scenario
A hidden paradise where we can go
A subdivision full of friends
The sun sets low but the feeling never ends
Yeah, and something’s gotta shake eventually
I know that, but who can wait a lifetime to break free?
It’s all black
The sky above some condo lakeshore swallows Pontiac
The pre-storm song of sweetness sung for me
|
||||
4. |
Me and My Sweetheart
06:12
|
|||
Small donations
From alumni this fall
Should cover the celebrations
In some suburban banquet hall
As Lions traffic
Darting north at dusk
They leave town lickety-split
While you and me
Pass every SUV
And head back into the thick of it
Nobody acts like they know it
I can’t relax till I show it
There’s a funny feeling back this fall
31 cyclical flavors
On your tongue as this season quavers
You’re the one who smells like rain
And something I can’t verbalize at all
Me and my sweetheart
Unstoppable
We were born in the same hospital
About four years apart
Brought back to modest homes
In the shadows of the soccer domes
Our mothers clung to cordless phones
As the summers all began to drone by
Five accountants
Four in real estate
High school friends at their wits’ ends
With reason to anticipate
Some cataclysm
That’s slowly creeping down
Every year they smell that fear
Just trickle in
Like a fickle wind
And spread its deadliness around this whole town
But me and my sweetheart
Unstoppable
We were born in the same hospital
About four years apart
Brought back to modest homes
In the shadows of the soccer domes
Our mothers clung to cordless phones
As the summers all began to drone by
Known as the flirty one
I met you, I was thirty-one
I just stood around and hoped that you would notice
Figured I had given up
Like people who smoke with the windows up
In their Tauruses singing choruses so hopeless
In love with the crooked tooth
Where the snow boot hit you in your youth
In this endless grid
Where the springtime hid like crocus
We’ll drive out to Bloomfield Hills
Laugh at the size of the utility bills
As the futility spills and I’ve lost all my focus
It doesn’t have to feel that way
We’ll find the place where the good things stay
When the Dairy Queen of the quarantine reopens
Nobody acts like they know it
I can’t relax till I show it
There’s a funny feeling back this fall
31 cyclical flavors
On your tongue as this season quavers
You’re the one who smells like rain
And something I can’t verbalize at all
Me and my sweetheart
Unstoppable
We were born in the same hospital
About four years apart
Brought back to modest homes
In the shadows of the soccer domes
Our mothers clung to cordless phones
As the summers all began to drone by
|
||||
5. |
||||
I can’t believe how reluctant the warmth has been
As we wait
And the shitty cars that jumped the gun
They blast their stereos till the windows shake
With the sound
Yesterday you and me drove out to the place
Where the sun
Shoots down from outer space
And shines off everyone standing there
Dumbfounded in drive-thru lanes
Or the hospital parking lot
On the brink of Pontiac
Well, I still remember how it used to be
When the world was still young
It broke in the morning
It settled in the dusk
With the taste of metal on its tongue
I buried an old lifetime in the off-ramp’s fresh overgrowth mess
Where blue jays and cardinals and starlings and darlings of the scene obsolesce
As the night shuts down all the big-box stores open up for the day
As the day wears on all the traffic lights dangle and blink their lives away
We’re dumbfounded in a set of clothes
That were bought years ago
From some bargain bin
That our grandmother’s knew before they’d go home
I still remember how it used to be
When the world was still young
It woke in the morning
It settled in the dusk
With the taste of metal on its tongue
|
||||
6. |
Autumn America
04:36
|
|||
I shaved my face this morning
For a laugh
Oh, I’d shave the past three years
If I didn’t think that they’d grow back
I saw your face this afternoon on someone’s phone
The look upon your eyes was just an endless dial tone
And I’m the one calling
To say that I am falling
Faster than the masterplan did anticipate
Yesterday morning I woke up to find
Your little warning about leaving things behind
Without ever really knowing what they’re worth
And I’ve been leaving things
Far behind
All around this earth
We could be so fine
But I don’t wanna make you
Toe the broken line
No, I just wanna take you there
Into the sunshine
Of autumn America
Will I return to Keego Harbor
Where I am from?
When turning 31 has got me feeling kind of dumb
But then it won’t be long before I’m 32
Flirting at the bar-and-grill
With Jill and her tattoo
That says “I’m sorry”
And I’ll be sorry, too
And look around
All over town
For any glimpse of you
Yesterday morning I woke up to find
Your little warning about leaving things behind
Without ever really knowing what they’re worth
And I’ve been leaving things
Far behind
All around this earth
We could be so fine
But I don’t wanna make you
Toe the broken line
No, I just wanna take you there
Into the sunshine
Of autumn America
Autumn America, autumn America
Autumn America, autumn America, autumn America
Autumn America, autumn America, autumn America
Autumn America, autumn America, autumn America
Autumn America, autumn America, autumn America
Autumn America, autumn America, autumn America
Autumn America
|
||||
7. |
||||
Snowflakes big as bumblebees
McMansions through the twilight trees
The sterile solace hibernating there
The weekend comes, we’ll have some fun
I feel so bad for anyone
Divorced from that sweet force
That made them care
And I haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
A secret sorrow fills the yard
And all along the boulevard
Buses growling northward to our home
The lilacs bloom and I’ll be there
A bathroom where the light’s so rare
Streaking in a childhood monochrome
And I haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Everyone that you know
Has got a reason to
Hold onto the flow
That sent them into
The present tense is full of recompense and wonder
It’ll level out just like a shout blends into thunder
We’ll drive up Adams Road until the wheels fall off and I just
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Haven’t heard you laugh in a long time
Snowflakes big as bumblebees
McMansions through the twilight trees
The sterile solace hibernating there
|
||||
8. |
Inherited Cars
05:09
|
|||
The Hail Mary you sent me
Was a full week tardy
I just wanna be the cigarette you sneak
Outside your family Thanksgiving party
And the resentment’s grown larger
It’s fully juiced on your forgotten phone charger
That’s still plugged in beneath my bedside table
It channels something I’m unable to label
And when I go out walking
And the dusk sounds like my past lives are talking
I don’t wanna see the sun
I don’t wanna see anyone
What remains now
But inherited cars
And the stars’ smoky evacuation?
If you tried to abduct me
I’d make it back
To sleep in the black high school tomb
Time can’t corrupt the immaculate lack
That’s left there in the back bedroom
Or steal the feel that’s ours
As the dusk shadows
Straddle the bars
Of our inherited cars
You eyeball yourself in the gas station mirror
And set off the auto hand dryer
You can’t recognize your face
But you recognize the fear
That you might be a compulsive liar
You drive past the complex
Where your grandparents answered the phone
At the end of their days
You’ve lost any context
For the world that was transferred
To you in the subtlest ways
What remains now
But inherited cars
And the stars’ smoky evacuation?
If you tried to abduct me
I’d make it back
To sleep in the black high school tomb
Time can’t corrupt the miraculous lack
That’s left there in the back bedroom
Or steal the feel that’s ours
As the dusk shadows
Straddle the bars
Of our inherited cars
|
||||
9. |
Home Improvement
04:57
|
|||
You called me up
You said, “Are you still alive?”
I said I’d just been sitting in my bed at night
And listening to I-75
The motorcycles are very loud
I wish I had something to advertise
Of which I was half as proud
September’s landed
And soon the leaves’ll land, too
Maybe we’ll rake a pile
And I’ll fall in right after you
You can try to clarify each moment you’ve spent
As the suburban Detroit fall spills out your ears
It reminds me of the backyard set on Home Improvement
Although I’ve lived her firsthand 30 years
Your mother called me
She said she didn’t know where you’d been
I said the last time that I’d seen you
Was at the Franklin Cider Mill when
You looked up at the sky
And said it was similarly hued
As the night that your grandma died
And you family ate Chinese food
I had that dream again
With the vicious ex-lovers
With suspicious motives
As they hid there beneath your covers
A childhood friend’s dad started a talent agency
They tried to throw me some voiceover work selling shoes
But maybe on account of my midwestern nasality
I was unable to give them anything they could use
Pour the lakes of coffee that I drank
When I die, into the tank
Of desperate daily perseverance
If you’re able to get the clearance
I want death by morning breath
And a rerun of our chats
As the world wakes in the pre-dawn
And checks their social media stats
Somewhere it is always almost Halloween
Somewhere you are always almost turning 17
The solitary moment’s all I’m endlessly defending
I’m stuck inside forever and it’s never not endlessly ending
|
||||
10. |
Keego Harbor
05:03
|
|||
Someday I think I’ll move back to Keego Harbor
Rent an upstairs room where the pear trees bloom for the barber
That I used to see
Since the age of three
In Keego Harbor
My parents met in a bar in Keego Harbor
And the video store isn’t there anymore by the water
Of Dollar Lake
Where there’s so much at stake
In Keego Harbor
Maybe I would get a shift
Working at that all-night gift shop at the hospital
Where the brink of luxury
Meets the stink of drudgery
I’ll find a place where it’s all possible
In Keego Harbor it’s all possible
In the first part of life you just let in the light
And you loop it like a DVD menu
And some day in your 30s all your colors lose their bite
And you can’t change the channel now, can you?
So you just re-sign the lease in perpetuity
You can do your grocery shopping in a blindfold with acuity
And you still feel the magic in the parking lot at dusk
Though it’s getting kind of hard to say
What year it is
But I kept the sacred place safe inside of me
I kept it safe through all the foreign things I tried to be
Like the robin’s nest nestled in the letter C
In the mini-mall sign for Nail City
Where Orchard Lake bends and the trailer park ends
And your affluent friend’s dad had offices
Where no one else could know the esoteric way to glow
With the late fall chemical processes
And our uncles, they were all in their mid-thirties once
They’d drop by to check our height charts every couple months
We slowly outgrew everything that we knew
Till we stood inside a world that looked so odd to us
Keego Harbor waits for me
The inland lakes and rusting phone lines lead
To disintegrating subdivisions
Where your parents wait out winter
At the center of your little world
The world is falling all to pieces
June implodes and then releases
Sports arenas from our childhoods
Someday I think I’ll move back to Keego Harbor
Rent an upstairs room where the pear trees bloom for the barber
Though they smell like death
It’s the sweetest breath
In Keego Harbor
Someday I think I’ll move back to Keego Harbor
‘Cause keeping alive’s hard
But giving up’s even harder
And I’m not ready to die
I’ll just go simplify
In Keego Harbor
|
Matthew Milia Detroit, Michigan
Matthew Milia is a critically acclaimed songwriter, best known as the lead singer and guitarist for Frontier Ruckus. Celebrated for his obsession for memory, domestic minutiae, suburban redundancy, and the fragility of family dynamics, Milia has written over 100 songs constructing an intricate personal mythology based in his lifelong home of Detroit, Michigan. ... more
Streaming and Download help
If you like Matthew Milia, you may also like:
Bandcamp Daily your guide to the world of Bandcamp