Frontier Ruckus and Samantha Crain reunite at the Magic Bag

Metro Detroit's word-drunk folk band plays Ferndale next Saturday with an old Ramseur labelmate and Dick Texas.

Frontier Ruckus songs are full of places you can drive to from Ferndale: subdivisions, two-lane roads, the parking lots of a Michigan adolescence, all piled up in Matthew Milia's dense, rushing lyrics. Next Saturday the band plays them a few miles from where a lot of them happened.

Frontier Ruckus play the Magic Bag in Ferndale on Saturday, Nov 14, at 8pm, with Samantha Crain and Dick Texas. Tickets are through See Tickets. The Bag holds about 400, which is close to ideal for a band whose banjo and trumpet sound best when you can hear each one.

Detroit is the band's most-played market in our records, 12 shows and counting, and it's not hard to see why. Milia and David Winston Jones started the group, and Michigan has run through everything they've made since. Their most recent album, *On the Northline*, arrived in February 2024 as their first full-length since 2017. It was recorded in Ypsilanti on a TASCAM 388 tape machine, and its title track reaches back to New York's North Country, where Milia's father's side of the family settled after leaving Sicily. Speaking to Local Spins around the release, Milia talked about the seven years between records, the new songs and the long friendships holding the band together.

A reunion of two acts the same small label signed in the same season.

The opener is the other story here. Samantha Crain, a Choctaw Nation songwriter from Oklahoma, and Frontier Ruckus were both signed to Ramseur Records, the North Carolina label behind the Avett Brothers, around 2009, when the two were pitched together as new Americana acts handpicked by the label. They've crossed paths on record too: Milia shares vocals with Crain on "Santa Fe," from her album *You (Understood)*. Crain has since won Native American Music Awards for Folk Album of the Year and Songwriter of the Year, and in 2022 for Single of the Year with "Bloomsday." Seeing the two on one bill again, in Milia's home territory, is a small piece of mid-2000s Americana history coming back around.

Dick Texas rounds out the night, so it's worth getting in early rather than catching only the headline set.

A Frontier Ruckus show rewards people who know the words, and there are a lot of words to know. It also works if you don't.

Get there for Crain, stay for the singalong, and listen for the street names you recognize.

Sources: Frontier Ruckus at the Magic Bag — See Tickets (prod-nts-api.seeticketsusa.us); The Magic Bag — Live Nation venue page (livenation.com); Frontier Ruckus — Bandcamp (frontierruckus.bandcamp.com); On the Northline — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Frontier Ruckus Announces New Album On the Northline — BroadwayWorld (hartford.broadwayworld.com); Frontier Ruckus releases new song with album on the way — Detroit Metro Times (metrotimes.com); Michigan's Frontier Ruckus drops first album in 7 years — Local Spins (localspins.com); Samantha Crain — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Erin Recommends: "Santa Fe" by Samantha Crain — Memoir Mixtapes (memoirmixtapes.com); Frontier Ruckus — The Pitch (thepitchkc.com)