It was the first of February, 2014, on the set of Austin City Limits, and the Milk Carton Kids were a bit stressed out. Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale were getting set to make their debut on America’s most watched and admired roots music program, and sound check wasn’t going well. Without getting in the weeds, they weren’t hearing each other properly, and their close harmonies depended on it. There had been a two hour delay due to a power outage, and they had 10 minutes to fix everything.
“The feedback from the stage was so cacophonous and unsettling. And it was at this point like maybe the biggest pressure moment we had ever been in, and something felt off about it,” says Pattengale in Episode 358 of The String. “And in that moment, Joey and I threw out the idea: why don't we take away all the microphones and just put the one microphone up?” It was the oldest of old-school approaches, but it worked. The noise and crosstalk went away, and now it sounded like two human beings singing together on a porch - for themselves and the audience. “Joey and I had just spent three years on stage knowing exactly what it needs to sound like. And you know, we mix ourselves just based on proximity to each other. And so we did the one microphone, and we never looked back.”
This story, from the Milk Carton Kids’ early years as a touring duo, has a few things to tell us about their journey. First, they landed Austin City Limits, something most artists never do, after releasing just two albums. But it’s also a story about how much care they’ve taken to be literally heard. Ryan and Pattengale’s subdued folk music does best against what audiophiles call a ‘black background’ - a canvas of silence, where every word and every musical nuance is audible. We talk about this in some detail, including a moment early on when Pattengale asked the bartenders at a Cleveland club if they’d be willing to turn off the compressor in the buzzing beer refrigerator. And they did. “So by the time the audience showed up to a show in a bar where usually it's a loud rock band, there's two guys in suits, and the room's actually quiet. And we went to the trouble of finding folding chairs for all of them, and so all of a sudden, then you've got a folk show.”
If their stylistic forebears Simon & Garfunkel had a hit with “The Sound of Silence,” then the Milk Carton Kids have made a career out of the Sound of Subtle, and their newest album, their seventh, is a fine case in point. Lost Cause Lover Fool (no punctuation) is a nine-song set that sounds more intimate than the instrumentation may suggest. Joey Ryan recounts a journey from a pure duo to the more involved and arranged sound of their 2017 album with producer Joe Henry, to this album’s seductive hybrid.
“There's bass on basically every track. There's mandolin, there's banjo, there's some, there's some, you know, slide guitar happening,” Ryan says. “And so I think the way that I've been able to process this idea, and I’m very proud of us for being able to achieve it, is that we finally got to know ourselves well enough that we can still sound like ourselves, even with a bunch of other musical elements around besides our two guitars and two voices.”
The album’s songs are as understated as the sound, full of quiet inner monologues and emotional revelations bound by small scenes. A road trip is made uneasy in “A Friend Like You.” A relationship’s imperfect beauty is captured in a photograph in “Blinded And Smiling.” The title track presents a heart and soul in doubt. And Joey says that in his mind, it’s as complete a statement as the duo has yet made.
"This is the best I've ever felt about the songs, the nine songs that we have on a record,” he told me. “We have a show tomorrow night. We've been rehearsing all nine songs. And I truly think that when we go on tour, we will play all nine songs from this record. And I can't say that about any of our other albums."
This historic, harmony forward partnership began in late 2009 at a Los Angeles music venue called Hotel Cafe, where solo songwriter Joey caught a set by solo songwriter Kenneth. Conversations ensued, as did collaboration and rehearsal and shows that led to more shows. I was at one of their first performances in Nashville in the fall of 2011 and was moved by their close harmonies and the hushed attention they evoked in our voluble Music City Roots audience. They’d recently released their debut Prologue, which they made available on the internet for free, with liner notes by the great songwriter and producer Joe Henry. The buzz was strong about this new duo and the show validated the excitement.
Since then, the Milk Carton Kids have earned four Grammy Award nominations. They took the Americana Award for Duo/Group of the year in 2014. They have played every leading folk and roots venue and festival and even started gatherings of their own - the LA Folk Festival and their Sad Songs Summer Camp. In general, they’ve boosted the stock for folk music in America by fully embracing the genre and its traditions of artful storytelling and art for catharsis sake. And they’re sounding confident and grateful after 15 years.
“Every couple years,” says Kenneth, “we try to take a lot of energy and funnel into something that can serve (our) community and can serve us and can give us all a reason to get together and avail ourselves to the healing power of music. That's the only thing we're here to do.”
