The Milk Carton Kids: A Matter of Time
photo: David McClister
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In the fall of 2021, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan were nearing the end of the recording sessions for what was to be the seventh album from their minimalist indie-folk duo, The Milk Carton Kids. Then, with roughly a dozen songs tracked and slated for mixing, Pattengale hit the stop button. In no uncertain terms, he told Ryan he wanted to scrap the album. Ryan happily agreed. And with that, the pair started over, decamping to their newly christened studio and emerging some six months later with I Only See the Moon—an album the duo consider to be their finest work since forming The Milk Carton Kids 12 years ago.
It’s a Tuesday morning in early March of 2023, and Pattengale and Ryan, both natives and current residents of Los Angeles, are at their respective homes, sheltering from the storm. Another in a series of historic winter rain events is pummeling the Golden State, and the two are equally in awe of the ceaseless torrents. The album’s release date is still two months out, yet it’s an oddly appropriate moment to discuss this beautifully understated and contemplative new set, given the anomalous and tumultuous conditions outside.
If there is a thematic undercurrent that winnows its way through I Only See the Moon, then it is the notion of time. Whether examining the passage of time, recognizing specific moments in time or offering metaphors—overt or subtle—that symbolize time, the album is ticking with implications and reminders. And while Pattengale and Ryan insist that there wasn’t any intent to build this collection of songs around a specific concept, they both concede that time is a recurring theme throughout the record.
“I’m not surprised that [theme] is what speaks most loudly. Joey and I have arrived at a point in our lives where that is one of the central questions. You frame the experience of life via time,” Pattengale says.
The two members of The Milk Carton Kids have officially reached middle age, each recently turning 40. They are also both living in Los Angeles again after Pattengale returned to the city following a long absence. They are both married now, and Ryan is a father of two. And for the latter musician, the notion of time has been a constant wellspring of inspiration.
“It’s basically in every song that I contribute lyrics to,” Ryan says. “It is something I think about.”
Though not a stated goal of the new record, the duo wanted a return to their more minimalist roots as well. Their last studio album, 2019’s ironically titled, The Only Ones, strayed furthest from their signature two voices/two guitars premise, expanding the band by over a dozen musicians, and led to touring with an extended ensemble for over a year and a half. “From that, we knew where the gutter was,” Pattengale says. “We knew what was too far.”
Additionally, the two spent part of the COVID lockdown revisiting Prologue— their debut as The Milk Carton Kids—for a 10th-anniversary reissue in 2021. It was a stark contrast from the stretching they’d done on The Only Ones. Ryan also craved a return to the stark simplicity of that original format.
“We needed to do that [on The Only Ones] and we loved doing it. One of the things it did was breathe new life into our passion for our minimalist approach. As a minimalist duo, our whole mission with every album has been figuring out what new thing we can do with just the two of us. We ask ourselves, ‘How can we forge some new ground and find new territory as songwriters? How can we change the way that we perform in the studio? What new instruments can we bring in,’” questions Ryan, who added his banjo-playing to The Milk Carton Kids’ tableau.
Unspooling why various elements of time are as woven into this album starts, perhaps, with the culture Pattengale and Ryan presently inhabit. It’s a shortcut, and a false one, to assume this suit-wearing, acoustic-strumming, harmony-singing pair is simply a throwback homage to some bygone era, even while they dust off an occasional lyrical reference to satchels or wink at Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country.” Instead, these two are pilots of a modern and virtual age when time is far more elastic.
“The exercise of trying to popularize our own music—and then, on an abstract level, the exercise of promoting music in 2023—is constantly about trying to embrace the moment, acknowledge the moment, magnify the moment, exist in the moment. I sort of reject that on principle,” Pattengale says. “Music has been not only a vessel of history, but also the ability to time travel. I can go into a room with Carlos Gardel in Argentina in the 1930s and listen to what he did for an hour. It’s all there.”
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Before they started initial work on the album, Pattengale asked to be the record’s sole producer. It was a conscious shift away from their previous process—either utilizing their longtime producer, Joe Henry, as a third-party arbiter or co-producing themselves—that entrusted the majority of the creative decision-making to Pattengale, a veteran producer in his own right. Pattengale saw a potential to move away from a documentary recording of the duo and into a more acute point of view. Acting as a lone producer seemed the reasonable way to hunt down that intention, with Ryan cosigning on the plan.
“I was able to tell Joey that I’d like to shoulder the responsibility for a lot of those [creative] decisions myself. My primary motivation was that I thought that it would make the process of making music a little more efficient or allow a different side of the creativity to come through,” Pattengale says.
It also meant knowing when the exercise of making the album wasn’t going well. Sessions began at a friend’s studio in Burbank, Calif. It was common practice for the two to work quickly—both say they can’t remember any prior album taking more than two weeks to complete. After several weeks, and with about 80% of the recording completed, Pattengale pulled the plug.
“All of that [first] material, when taken in total, sounded like a few guys wrote some songs and threw them into a pile and that’s where it’s at,” Pattengale says. “That wasn’t good enough.”
Ryan was relieved. He’d been thinking the same thing, but wasn’t ready to be the one to say it. “I have to give Kenneth the credit,” he says. “Because he was feeling both empowered and responsible for the ultimate product. He said we should go back to the drawing board with writing.”
Of the dozen songs from the aborted session, they only carried two forward, then went back to the well. The two also shifted from the Burbank studio to their own new digs. They’d found an available space in a North Hollywood complex, located near fellow tenants like Death Cab for Cutie’s Zac Rae and Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, and, coincidentally, across the hall from the studio where they tracked Prologue.
They dubbed their space, Far Cry, and outfitted the live and control rooms with gear that Pattengale had collected over the 25 years he’d spent away from Los Angeles. “It’s wonderful to have a place where we can come and do things where we have all of our tools,” Pattengale says. “And the money burns a little more slowly.”
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Without a firm release date hovering over them, the Milk Carton Kids also had time. Each musician wrote and brought songs to the other, gathering at Far Cry for sessions, focusing on meticulous vocal arrangements. Again, Ryan credits Pattengale, whom he calls a “genius-like prodigy as an arranger.” Note-by-note, word-by-word the two searched for the most affecting choice for their intersecting harmony. “What note either of us is singing makes up a huge part of the emotional content,” Ryan says.
Pattengale adds with a laugh, “I don’t know why, but it’s usually me kicking Joey around a lot more than him kicking me around.”
In performance, the duo is devoted to reprising that emotional content. Though Pattengale has room to improvise on guitar, the pair maintain a far stricter adherence to the vocal arrangements they had labored over and nurtured with such discipline and care. Both on record and onstage, Pattengale and Ryan’s voices wrap around each other with awe-inspiring, serpentine skill and, at times, indistinguishable cohesion, reaching deeper and deeper into the blending of two notes. At its best, from that well-blended harmony of two, a virtual third voice emerges.
“One of the things great harmony singing can do is be disorienting and confusing. And it can do that even for me as one of the singers—with two voices combining in such a way that you lose yourself in the whole of what is happening,” Ryan says. “That’s what I’m after.”
There were the early days, hoping their concerted efforts could connect with audiences in dive bars and rock clubs or opening for Old Crow Medicine Show.
“We played for a lot of people with red Solo cups who were waiting for ‘Wagon Wheel’ while we’re up there with two guitars, not even plugged in,” Ryan says. “It’s very difficult. One thing we learned was to wear fancy suits. When two guys go onstage at a dive bar looking like they’re going to a funeral, people pay attention to the first half of the first song, at least. You’ve got a chance to stop time for a second.”
I Only See the Moon kicks off with “All of the Time in the World to Kill.” Its hushed simplicity and gentle chorus belie an urgency within the implicit message. It was a song first imagined nearly 10 years earlier as The Milk Carton Kids enjoyed a social hour on the tour bus while rolling across the plains of Saskatchewan. With Texas singer-songwriter Brian Wright along for the ride as their support act, they chipped away at the marble—finding something balanced between purposeful and over the edge, but not quite fully realized.
“It wasn’t there yet. But, eight or nine years later, I kept remembering that this song had something,” Pattengale says. “The turn of phrase can be a contradiction and a call to action. I hope it’s not lost on people that much of the song’s content can be taken specifically to mean that many of our existential issues are present and we don’t have much time to address these things that threaten us.”
What follows that opener is a collection of songs bathed in warming eloquence and poetic nuance, with affecting lyrical passages telling of broken clocks and aging hearts, rising suns, their lunar counterparts and time slipping away graciously. There is humor, the brightness of hope and the dark candor of reality within these examinations of love and life—each, to Pattengale and Ryan’s satisfaction, is executed with a workman-like resolve.
“Your job is to write something that’s potent enough that, when it’s time to perform, you can try to capture some point of view. You want to try and represent some slice of time in a way that will have meaning for people later,” Pattengale says.
Pattengale and Ryan feel that much of their recent output hasn’t truly endured onstage. But, they both also agree that material from their forthcoming set already seems to be translating well in concert. With half of the album already passing the live litmus test, Ryan sees the record’s entire repertoire as a candidate for the setlist. With this new album and touring ahead, he and Pattengale see The Milk Carton Kids union hitting a similarly high point in its arc.
“Any partnership between two people is an incredibly complex and different dynamic. Our relationship has been through every phase, including completely dysfunctional and horrible to totally joyful and productive. For the last couple of years, including the entire process of making this album—just the two of us in a room for a year—I’m happy that this is the best our relationship has ever been,” Ryan says. “In no small part, that contributes to how happy we are with the way the record turned out. This is our favorite album we’ve made.”
