Interview: Joey Ryan (The Milk Carton Kids)
The Milk Carton Kids had to lose their jobs to find the identity of their seventh album, I Only See the Moon.
Sidelined from touring during the COVID-19 pandemic, Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale made good use of the downtime, reexamining their priorities and passion for the craft they’d spent a decade building. Time away from traveling to perform for an audience reminded the Los Angeles-based duo why they love playing together, and why their fans love their music.
“I don't know that we ever allowed ourselves to feel super connected to the community of music lovers and fans who like this kind of weird, a bit off-the-beaten-path, non-mainstream folk music we play until we went away from it for almost two years and then came back,” Ryan says. “We realized everybody in these rooms shares a unique bond. It's a really special, cohesive community. And that really informed what we were trying to do with the record.”
They challenged themselves to recapture the emotional intimacy and acoustic minimalism of their first releases — Prologue (2011) and The Ash & Clay (2013) — that established The Milk Carton Kids as Millennial torchbearers of the harmony-driven folk genre defined in the ’60s and ’70s by Simon & Garfunkel and The Everly Brothers. Recent experiments with a 15-plus piece ensemble sound, driven by a restlessness to forge new ground, ultimately felt like an overreach.
“Our big goal for this new record was to write songs that felt lyrically sharp and incisive, and that we’d want to share on stage with our community,” Ryan says.
An initial three-week session in the fall 2021 failed to hit the mark. A veteran producer taking on that role for the first time with his own band, Pattengalemade the call to scrap the dozen or so tracks and return to the drawing board. The partners spent the next seven months in their newly secured North Hollywood studio, free from the pressures of label deadlines, engineering budgets — or travel logistics as Pattengale had recently moved back to L.A. from Nashville.
By intentionally inviting the gifts of time and space into the creative process, The Milk Carton Kids delivered a 10-song collection that would ultimately earn a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album and rekindle their collaborative purpose.
Asheville Stages spoke with Ryan between rehearsals for a short, intercontinental tour that includes a Monday, Jan. 29, show at The Orange Peel. The conversation was peppered with the dry humor that is, arguably, as much an ingredient of The Milk Carton Kids’ identity as Pattengale’s lightning-fast fretwork — which sprinkles capo-ed up notes over Ryan’s tuned-down rhythm guitar — or the pair’s tethered vocal harmonies.
Jay Moye: You guys are heading over to the U.K. in a few days?
Joey Ryan: Yes, it’s the classic routing of London, Dublin, Glasgow, Asheville.
JM: Will this run of shows mark the first time playing songs from I Only See the Moon?
JR: No, most of them are pretty well road-tested by now. This is the culmination of a year of touring where we slowly started incorporating these songs into the set — some as we were making them and before the album came out, and a bunch after. But we seem to have saved many of our biggest and favorite cities for this run leading into the Grammys. Asheville sneaks in not as one of the biggest cities, but as one of our favorite cities.
JM: We're honored to make the shortlist. You guys have played here a number of times and even name-checked our city in the leadoff track [“Asheville Skies”] of your album, Monterey. I first saw you in 2013 at a [now closed] tiny venue called The Altamont Theater in 2013, which probably seated 50 people.
You’ve always made a point, even as you’ve graduated to much bigger rooms, to preserve the intimacy of those early days. How did your first few post-pandemic tours inspire your approach to the songs that made it onto the new album?
JR: Those shows felt so different. They still feel different, to be honest, than how they did before. We felt newly reconnected with the idea of how lucky we are to get to do this in the first place, with a more acute sense of community. We were like, “These are our people. They know each other, and they know us.” We wanted to write songs that honored that and felt really true to us.
JM: For the last few years, you guys have served as “faculty” at the Sad Songs Summer Camp, where you teach songwriting and harmony singing workshops in upstate New York. You also produced the inaugural Los Angeles Folk Festival last October. How do those projects fuel, or feed off of, your renewed appreciation for community and connection?
JR: I’d say the camp was a big precursor to that realization, and the festival is a result of the realization. The camp is the most intimate and meaningful interaction we have with our community of fellow musicians and folk music lovers where we all get together and work really hard on our craft of songwriting in this idyllic space in the Catskills. It’s a totally transformative thing.
Even before COVID, it was the spark that reignited our love for this job we have as performing songwriters by realizing who the people are that we're surrounded by, how talented they are, and how much everybody wants to roll up their sleeves and get involved in this form of self-expression of writing what we call “sad songs.” This artform is a bond that holds everybody together.
Festivals are where we have always felt that sense of community with our fellow artists, so wanting to put something like that together in L.A., where we're both from and where we both grew up, is a natural extension of that. The first year was everything we hoped for, in terms of collaboration and bringing together unique and diverse elements of our folk scene. The backstage jams were as exciting as the ones onstage, which is what you hope for in a festival from an artist’s perspective. We're working on year two now.
JM: You had some great names on the bill, from Waxahatchee to Sierra Ferrell to David Garza. How’d you go about curating the lineup? What were your core criteria?
JR: We knew we’d be booking artists that essentially perform solo, which is a hard thing to do. It's one thing to have great songs, great arrangements, and a great band. But it's a very hard thing to be exciting and have an edge when you're performing solo.
We know a lot of people who aren't household names that can get up there for 40 minutes with just their instrument and totally captivate a room or an amphitheater. We know that when Willie Watson or Tré Burt or Haley Heynderickx get on stage in front of people who like our kind of music, they'll be blown away. And we also got really lucky with availability. We wanted four artists across two nights [to precede The Milk Carton Kids’ headlining sets], so we made a dream list and almost everybody could do it.
Kenneth Pattengale, left, and Joey Ryan. Photo by Brendan Pattengale
JM: Speaking of captivating an audience, how do you maintain a freshness and excitement in your live show — both for yourselves and your audiences — considering you’re just two voices, two acoustic guitars, and now a banjo, playing and singing into a single condenser microphone?
JR: The intention we set for ourselves every night — and this is a post-COVID thing — is to remember that we're there for the audience; that it’s our job to have a good time on stage. We're not there for ourselves or for some sense of ego fulfillment, which can be easy to slip into because you're on stage with a microphone and a spotlight on you. You're the center of attention.
There was a long time when nobody got to do this thing where we get together in a room to be transported and share this unique thing that bonds us together of songwriting and harmony singing. That’s been really rejuvenating and fulfilling for us.
JM: Your 2018 album, All the Things I Did and All the Things I Didn’t Do, was recorded and toured with a full band as an intentional effort to broaden your sonic palette and liberate yourselves from having to carry every song with just your voices and guitars. What worked or didn't work about that experiment, and why did you decide to return to your roots as a duo?
JR: A lot of things worked about it. There's a real complexity to that record — which, when I occasionally go and listen back to it, I really love. The people that played on that record are our favorite musicians in the world — from the rhythm section of Jay Bellerose and Dennis Crouch to Russ Pahl on pedal steel, to Nat Smith doing a bunch of string arrangements and Levon Henry playing a bunch of woodwinds. It’s all of our favorite heavy hitters, and they did some beautiful, beautiful stuff on that record.
We’ve done a lot of reflecting on it, and where I’ve arrived at is that we spent so much time thinking about it as a studio record that we didn’t spend enough time thinking about how it would fit in with what we do live and with what we do as songwriters.
Something was missing from our last two records, to be honest. As much as I think those records hold up, for whatever reason not enough songs from them have made it reliably onto our setlist. And that has to be a litmus test for us. [I Only See the Moon] is a lot of people's favorite album of ours, and I think it’s my favorite album of ours. So, I don't think it's a coincidence that we're playing almost all the songs from the record live.
JM: You play banjo on the new record for the first time. How did you connect with that instrument?
JR: Thank you for noticing because it’s a proud moment for me. I fell in love with old-time banjo seven or eight years ago on tour with Sarah Jarosz. She and our sound engineer, Mark Richards, taught me clawhammer banjo and I’ve just been practicing and practicing until the day I could finally tell Kenneth, “I don't suck anymore. You’ve gotta let me use this in our band.” So, I’ve got two banjo songs on the record [“When You’re Gone” and “One True Love”]. And the first song on the album, “All the Time in the World to Kill,” is not one I played banjo on in the studio, but in the show we've arranged it for the banjo.
JM: What about the banjo speaks to you differently?
JR: There's something deeply resonant about the open tunings, the drone-y trance-y-ness, and also the themes I personally was inspired to tap into on the songwriting front. It adds a new level of excitement for us in terms of having a new color and feeling. And who doesn't love the banjo?
JM: Folks here certainly do. What works in terms of the chemistry between you and Kenneth, as writers, performers, and singers? And what’s the recipe to keeping a partnership like yours alive — and thriving — for a dozen-plus years?
JR: It's the contrast, I think. Clearly, there are some instincts that we share. We both like the same finished products, but in the making of them, our instincts often could not be more different — and where we're coming from. I basically only think about lyrics and Kenneth is mostly thinking about music and arrangements. That's where it starts. I think about tempo as being on a grid and more defined, and Kenneth is all over the place. So, somewhere in the push-and-pull between our senses of time, there's a magical thing that happens when we play music together.
And it extends through different aspects of our personalities, including our senses of humor. I want to talk to the audience all night on stage, and sometimes I think he’d just like to play our songs in the darkness and not say a word to anybody. Somewhere in the middle of all that, the thing that makes it work is we both have immense respect for the way the other person sees it.
Before the show, Kenneth might say, “I don't want to talk to the audience tonight.” And I might say, “I only want to talk to the audience tonight.” And if we do a show that’s somewhere in between, we're both gonna like it. Because in the end, we have a very fundamental similarity in our tastes. That and mutual respect and a healthy dose of time apart.
JM: Would you compare it to a marriage?
JR: I would, and I often do. You’ve got to have your own life. That’s true in my marriage and in our musical relationship.
IF YOU GO
Who: The Milk Carton Kids with Alix Page
When: Monday, Jan. 29, 8 p.m.
Where: The Orange Peel, 101 Biltmore Ave., theorangepeel.net
Tickets: $30 advance/$35 day of show
(Photo by David McClister)
