Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

On The Milk Carton Kids‘ latest album, All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do, which came out this past summer, Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale added some additional players to the mix. As we noted in our review, “Bringing in a rhythm section and melodic instruments provides the acoustic-music duo with more real estate atop which to overlay their close, pristine harmonies and plaintive lead vocals. Any trepidation among longtime fans that some purity may be lost in the shuffle can be set aside in advance. All the Things… not only still sounds just like ‘em but, despite the expansion, is arguably their most intimate work to date.”

Today we premiere a video that presents a live version of “I’ve Been Loving You” from the new record. Pattengale reflects on the origin of the song, noting “I’ve written songs in every way that you could imagine– in desperate solitude; via email with my best friend 3,000 miles away; by pure and hasty improvisation; revising, retracing and reviving ideas over the course of 6 years; lyrics first; music first… It happens every way and there are no rules–no rhyme or reason to how you might shake some kernel of truth free and snare it all your own.

“What you’d really hope, as a songwriter anyway, is to sit down and find that truth laid out neatly in front of you for the taking. That’s how “I’ve Been Loving You” came about. I can acknowledge a confluence of events– on the same day I found myself with something to say I was invigorated by exploring a set of new voicings on the guitar and had planned, anyway, to write a song; and to do so focusing on the simplicity of a strong melody and accessible chords. However, in the end the song itself is the expression of a single moment of emotional clarity. And so perhaps, too, it wasn’t exactly by luck that I wrote it in twenty minutes one summer morning in the bedroom of my house in Nashville, TN.

“I tried my best to put into words & music the feeling in my gut. Perhaps, most successful in that pursuit is the last minute of the song where by words & music, by arrangement and performance, I’ll submit: everything that needs to be said is said.”