Hi friends!

My new album is called Keego Harbor. I poured everything I have into this collection of songs. What is Keego Harbor? Well, it’s the 3rd smallest town in Michigan by area. It’s also where I grew up. It’s where the cherry red shell of a DQ cone melted into rivulets down my Little League arm. It’s where I discovered odd artifacts of impending adulthood in the woods behind the Taco Bell. It’s where I skateboarded into a thousand dusks, wondering if the elastic infinity of early age would ever finally run its course. (It did.)

But Keego Harbor still exists. Its families still experience untold triumphs and tragedies. Its liquor stores still have grand openings and going-out-of-business sales. I still drive there with my wife on idle Tuesday evenings when I need to move down a road where the world make some semblance of sense. Where familiarity like a balm slathers across the dreams that failed. Injecting hope, impossibly, into the new ones fanning to life. Feeling the subdued ecstasy that is occasional adult joy as the car drifts across the blurry contiguous borders of Sylvan Lake, Waterford, Pontiac.

My wife Lauren and I were married a few weeks before the pandemic shut down the world. To me, her voice on these songs represents so much more than the amazing harmony it provides. It represents the miracle of love in a world that only gets scarier with age. An untenable one of entropy and existential estrangement where the stakes only grow and the returns only diminish. Or so it would seem. Until love comes along and turns that whole silly perspective on its head.

Because the lilacs still explode in the spring. The air still grows heavy and calm with inexhaustible return. And that eternal glow of the Keego Harbor Dairy Queen sign still ignites like a personalized beacon at winter’s end—as soon as its owners return from Florida to open shop. What more do you need?

- Matthew Milia

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

Keego Harbor will be released July 16 via Sitcom Universe. Pre-order on LP/CD/Booklet/Digital here.

Matthew is indebted to Ben Collins who co-produced and engineered the album, as well as played drums and a ton of other instruments. Lauren Milia sang harmony.

Pete Ballard played some of the most gorgeous pedal steel guitar ever committed to tape. And Ryan Hay (Matthew’s collaborator since The Orion Songbook) contributed beautiful piano.