Tag: harmony

Artist of the Month: The Secret Sisters

Posted on by Editor

The secret is out, as the Secret Sisters have finally issued their newest album, Saturn Return. Time is a through line of the project, heard in songs like “Late Bloomer,” as well as the album title, which is an astrological reference to Saturn returning to the same location in the sky as it was when you were born. Motherhood also informs the music, as sisters Lydia and Laura Rogers were new mothers at the time, but also grieving the recent loss of their grandmothers.

Produced by Brandi Carlile and Phil and Tim Hanseroth (aka “The Twins”), Saturn Return positions the sisters as solo vocalists to some degree, as both Lydia and Laura recorded separately for the first time. And in contrast to their other albums, they wrote all of the material here themselves. A sweet celebration of the women who came before them can be found in the opening track, “Silver,” while the final track, “Healer in the Sky” is poignant, vivid, and simply beautiful.

Look for a two-part interview with the Secret Sisters — our BGS Artist of the Month for March — in the weeks ahead. (Read part one here. Read part two here.) In the meantime, enjoy our Essentials playlist, comprising choice covers (including one of Carlile’s songs), rare and interesting collaborations, and new music you’ll want to hear from Saturn Return.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Lonely Heartstring Band See Light and Darkness in ‘Smoke & Ashes’

Posted on by Editor

The Lonely Heartstring Band curiously placed “The Way It All Began” in the middle of their new album, Smoke & Ashes, yet it serves as a cornerstone of the project. Somewhere between sweet romance and saying goodbye, the song conveys a contrast of emotions that are woven throughout the album. They recorded the album with Lake Street Dive’s Bridget Kearney as producer; together they ventured beyond bluegrass boundaries while retaining the acoustic approach that led to an IBMA Momentum Award in 2015, as well as a deal with Rounder Records.

The band is composed of twins Charles Clements (bass) and George Clements (guitar), Gabe Hirshfeld (banjo), Patrick M’Gonigle (fiddle), and Maddie Witler (mandolin). Starting a winter morning in Boston with mugs of hot tea, the Clements brothers fielded a phone call with the Bluegrass Situation.

BGS: Let’s start with “The Way It All Began,” which has a wistful and sweet quality. What were you hoping to evoke in that song?

George: Patrick brought that song to the band, and he told me it was his idea about how a relationship starts. It’s two people who are young and traveling together, trying to capture that reflective, looking-back element.

Charles: I’m pretty sure it’s based on a true story from his life and I think it’s actually bittersweet. It’s a moment that comes together in a relationship, for a summer, then by the end, there’s distance. It’s the way it all began, but the way it ended too.

George: We had a lot of fun arranging that song, coming up with different ideas, like little modulations in the middle with the fiddle.

Did you have a certain sound in mind when you went into these sessions?

George: Yeah, I think we wanted to capture the natural sounds of the instruments as best we could. We recorded this record at Guilford Sound in Vermont and that studio has a really cool, natural reverb chamber, so we were able to capture some spaciousness in that.

Charles: For that song, a high priority was to make sure it had that laid-back, California, spacious, unhurried feeling. We went back and forth on tempos quite a bit actually – that’s too slow, that’s too fast. It’s a delicate thing because you want things to groove and move forward, but you don’t want to lose the character of the song just because you want more energy. A great example of that is Neil Young. He’d do these slow grooves that still keep you rolling forward, but they’re not fast songs.

The song “Smoke & Ashes” has some interesting imagery in there. Several times, you are singing “Come back…” Who are you saying that to?

George: When Patrick and I were coming up to the lyrics to that, it was like a post-apocalyptic song in the sense that we’re losing a lot of things that we love in life. They’re slipping away, like maybe nature is becoming threatened by mankind. I think the “come back” is like, let’s return to the things that matter most. Come back to your senses, come back to reality. Come back to the moon, the sun, the things that are universal.

Why did that song make sense as the title track?

Charles: That’s a good question. We went back and forth on album titles. We settled on it because we think it has good imagery and openness to it. Smoke and ashes can be a pessimistic thing, like things have burned down, but it’s also kind of optimistic. It has a sense of rebirth to it. There’s a sense of ending and starting.

George: We thought it had enough space for the listener to put their own interpretation to it. And I think that “Smoke & Ashes” is a pretty unique track on the album because it’s real slow and spacy, with lots of interesting chord changes. I think we all liked the way that track turned out.

“Just a Dream” has a cinematic, sweeping quality to it. Are you all inspired by movies or film scores when you write music?

Charles: Yeah, when I wrote that song, I think I was letting my imagination run free and create these kind of dreamlike images. … You know, an album is like the inverse of a movie score. The listener obviously has to bring their own imagination. [An album] requires a lot more of an audience than a movie does. Movies sometimes are just gonna give, give, give. With a song you have to bring a little more attention to your own life, your own imagination, and fill it in more with questions about, “What are they trying to say?” I think about that a lot. With songs, you have to supply your own movie a little bit.

Do you all collect vinyl?

George: Charles is a big collector. Patrick has a lot. I don’t have a vinyl collection at the moment because I don’t have a record player. [Laughs] I’ve been moving around so much that I just don’t want to lug all of that around – but someday I’d like to have a collection.

Charles: Maddie, our mandolin player, has probably the largest collection in the band.

Do you turn each other onto music that you discover on your own?

George: Oh yeah. We spend so much time in the van. That’s all we do in the van, either listen to audiobooks and podcasts, or just show each other new music. We’ve got a big text thread going where things will get sent out sometimes.

Charles: Yeah, the Lonely Heartstring Band text thread goes back about five or six years now. It’s full of stuff! (laughs)

George: Somebody should transcribe that. It would be a great, hilarious coffee table book.

I like to hear you all sing together on “Only Fallen Down.” So I wanted to ask, who are some of the vocal groups that you really enjoy?

George: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young comes to mind. We also really like The Wailin’ Jennys. Charles and I grew up with a lot of Everly Brothers and Simon & Garfunkel, though that’s more two-part harmony.

Charles: The Trio album – Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt. That’s powerful three-part harmony there. And obviously the Bluegrass Album Band, as a model of how to do tight, three-part, bluegrass harmony.

That song seems to be about a temporary setback, but with a sense of determination to go on. Do you see some parallels in your own life? That decision to forge ahead through the challenges?

George: Yeah, like every day. [Laughs] Being in a band is not easy. There are always challenges in relationships. So I think the lyrics reflect an intimate relationship between two people but it can have a universal appeal. Any time you have a challenge or you feel like you’re ready to give up, you can always change your attitude and say, “Well, yeah, this is a setback. I can pull myself up by my bootstraps and keep on going.”

In that song, there’s a line that says something like “Reach out for a hand to pull me through.” That’s a line that we came up after the song was written. That line replaced another one lyric. I really like that line because I think the hardest thing to do when you’re down is to ask for help. Sometimes we wallow in our own misery, and I think what you have to do is ask for help. You don’t have to do it on your own, basically. If you’re having a tough time in life, there are always people who want to help. That’s the amazing thing about the human spirit. We are here to help each other.

Charles: “Only Fallen Down” is a simple song when you think about it. It has a clear, straightforward message. I think that song stands out on the album because it is like a Beatles-esque sweet song. It’s very direct, not trying to be obtuse or metaphoric. I think we were ready for something like that, where you can feel good, like a simple soul song where we’re not trying to say anything other than that simple idea.

Do you think your audience will hear a departure from your prior album when they hear this one?

George: Yeah, I think they will. When I listen to our first record, it’s a little more traditional style – although not super traditional. We still had our own take on things. But this record doesn’t have any covers. It’s all our own original music. I think it reflects more of our unique musical sensibilities without trying to be anything other than what we are. We’re not using electric instruments, we’re not using drums. We still have that Lonely Heartstring Band sound.

Photo credit (on location): Louise Bichan
Photo credit (studio): Mike Spencer

The Show On The Road – T Sisters

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week on the show, Z. speaks with Oakland’s soulful singing T Sisters. For this trio of sisters, singing harmony-rich songs isn’t just their full-time job, it’s a way of life. It’s what they do — and damn do they do it well.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Sisters Erika, Chloe, and Rachel Tietjen are harmonic masters. Whether it’s demonstrated in their sassy originals accompanied by upright bass, guitar, banjo, and mandolin, or with their delicious vocal-layer-cake covers of hits by Kylie Minogue and Paul Simon, family runs deep through the music. T Sisters will be releasing their next EP, We Are Bound, produced by Oliver Wood (The Wood Brothers) in March 2019.

 

The Gibson Brothers Still Call It Music, Just Not Bluegrass

Posted on by Editor

Featuring the stunning blood harmonies of days gone by and an abiding love for classic sounds, The Gibson Brothers long ago earned the respect of the bluegrass establishment – even scoring back-to-back wins as the International Bluegrass Music Association’s (IBMA) Entertainer of the Year in 2012 and 2013. Even so, they’ve always cultivated an adventurous spirit.

Having grown up on a dairy farm in the far north of New York State, sandwiched between the Adirondack Mountains and Quebec’s provincial border, their musical appetite was as varied as their home was removed from the bluegrass heartland – from Flatt & Scruggs to Celtic traditionals, and from Tom Petty and The Eagles to French-Canadian fiddle tunes. Throughout their two-decade recording career, The Gibson Brothers have subtly mixed bluegrass reverence with a hint of rock refreshment, but with their new album, Mockingbird, Eric and Leigh Gibson have taken a bold creative departure – at least for the time being.

Mockingbird’s 11 tracks still feature their celebrated close harmonies, but also pull heavily from the countrified world of late 60s/early 70s rock, all masterminded by producers Dan Auerbach (of The Black Keys) and David Ferguson (Johnny Cash’s American Recordings series). Freewheeling and fun, but also rooted in the crisp refinement of their past success, the boisterous rural funk of tracks like “Sweet Lucinda” stands alongside breezy Laurel-Canyon rock in “Cool Drink of Water,” while “Travelin’ Day” explores a trad-country template and R.E.M.’s seminal 90s hit “Everybody Hurts” becomes a swaying example of country R&B.

“The impetus behind the music was that we had done bluegrass our whole career, and when we got talking about the next record, we really just decided we didn’t want to do the same old thing again,” he explains. “It’s not because we were ashamed of what we were doing. We love what we do. There was no intention of anything. This all really happened naturally.”

“I think people love a band where they found them,” banjo-playing lead singer Eric Gibson adds. “But it was so exciting that we didn’t have time to think about ‘Oh, is this gonna upset people who are used to what we’ve done in the past?’ We just dove into the process and had a ball.”

Speaking with The Bluegrass Situation by phone, The Gibson Brothers dug into the inspiration for Mockingbird – and the creative avalanche that followed.

The obvious question here is “What made you want to get away from bluegrass?” But I feel like being from upstate New York might have had something to do with it. Is your approach to bluegrass a little different?

Leigh: We started learning how to play bluegrass when we were 11 and 12, and the guy who taught lessons at our local store played five-string banjo and guitar, among other things. Our father just happened to have both of those instruments, but he didn’t have a banjo because he was into Celtic music. So the guy we took lessons from taught Eric out of the Earl Scruggs method book, and I think that’s what pointed us in the direction of bluegrass.

Eric: Yeah, and once we heard Flatt & Scruggs it really drew us in, but if we hadn’t gotten into the Scruggs handbook, we probably would have played something else.

So what was the idea behind Mockingbird? Do you think of it as a rock and roll album?

Eric: There are definitely elements of rock and roll, but I hear country in it, too. I don’t know where it neatly fits. I’ve heard some people call it an Americana record, but on top of it all I hear the brother harmony. I think it’s that, weaving through a variety of styles.

Leigh: We wanted to do something different, and originally we had some tunes that didn’t fit neatly into the box of a bluegrass band. But we didn’t know we were gonna make a whole album. We were just looking to record some tracks.

Eric: And we ended up not recording any of the songs we were thinking about. We just wrote a bunch of new ones! … When we went to Nashville and started working with Dan Auerbach and David Ferguson, they asked us, “Do you wanna make a country record?” And we said, “Let’s just write songs and see what they need.” They handled the producing chores and did a beautiful job, and came up with sounds that I know I couldn’t have come up with.

You reached out to Ferguson to produce Mockingbird first, and I know he also engineered your first Nashville bluegrass album, Another Night of Waiting. Why was he at the top of the list for this project?

Leigh: [Laughs] Because he’s fun.

Eric: He’s a character and once you meet him you don’t forget him. We’d see him here or there and he’s been doing all kinds of big things in the last 20 years. He’s the one who engineered all those late-career Johnny Cash albums with Rick Rubin. He’s worked with U2, and lately he’s been working with Sturgill Simpson and Tyler Childers. We’d see him and he’d say, “Why don’t you come record some music with ol’ Ferg?”

Leigh: And I’d say “I don’t think we can afford you, Ferg.” And he’d be like, “You’re right, you can’t.” [Laughs]

Eric: But we were riding around DelFest on a golf cart with him in 2017 and he brought it up again, and by fall we were feeling a little restless. We kept listening to records that he worked on in the van, and I think Leigh was the one who said “Maybe we should call Ferg.” I said, “Why do you think I’ve been playing all these albums over and over again!”

So then Ferguson suggests bringing in Dan Auerbach from The Black Keys. Was that a surprise?

Leigh: I was floored, to be honest. Our manager called me and said, “Well, Ferg’s first action as your producer is to bring on another producer, and it’s Dan Auerbach.” [Laughs] So I called Eric and I couldn’t believe it.

Eric: What was funny was Leigh said, “Is this something you’d be interested in?” And I was like, “Duh!” This is the kind of thing that falls out of the sky and you have to go for it.

I read that the whole album was written and recorded in just a few days. Is that unusual for you?

Eric: Yeah, we’ve never worked like that before. … Every day it would be Leigh and Dan and me, plus one other writer. We didn’t go in with any melodies. I had a couple of lines jotted down but we hardly used any of those. A lot of it just came out of conversations we were having at Dan’s studio kitchen table, like “Travelin’ Day.” Dan said, “You know, Ferg lost his stepdad a few days ago,” and we got to talking about that. Ferg said, “He really showed us how it’s done. He was brave at the end.” We said, “Our dad was the same way.”

It’s interesting that you started off with something so heavy, because the album doesn’t come across heavy at all.

Eric: It’s not. That first song is pretty heavy, but there’s a lot of love songs on there, and we hadn’t written a lot of love songs in the past.

Leigh: Dan and Ferg showed us how to love. [Laughs]

“Love the Land” seems like a reference back to you roots on the farm. Where did that come from?

Eric: That was written with Joe Allen.

Leigh: With that song, obviously Eric and I have a background of shared memories, so we’re probably thinking about the same thing as we’re writing it. But Joe’s from Oklahoma and Dan’s from Ohio, so they’re thinking about different things. I remember talking to Dan and he said, “Man, I need to get outside more. I miss it.” It’s kind of funny that it’s wherever your head is at the time. If we sat down with the same guys tomorrow, something totally different would come out.

Eric: Dan loved that we kept showing up early. I’d apologize and Dan would say, “No, no, make yourselves at home.” So we’d go back to that kitchen area and he has this beautiful vinyl collection. We’d put on different records and I think sometimes they would influence the direction of the day. Like, that one has a very Don Williams feel, and I think we were listening to Don Williams that morning.

Why did you pull Mockingbird out of that song as the album title?

Eric: Just because that kept jumping out of my head. Joe came up with the line, something like “Mockingbird, if you haven’t heard / Never been a sound so sweet.” I loved that, so I actually Googled “mockingbird.” [Laughs] It turns out they can sing a variety of songs. They don’t just sing the same thing every day, and I thought “Wow, that’s kind of what we’re doing here.”

I’m sure you’ve been asked a million times, but did the cover of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” come out of left field?

Eric: Totally out of left field.

Leigh: Just before the last day of tracking, Dan said, “Think of a song from the 80s or 90s that everybody knows but no one would think of you doing.” So Eric and I talked about it on the way back to the hotel and came up with something by a female artist, and we got to the studio the next day and Ferg is like, “So what song did you choose?” We told him and he’s like, “Oh, I hate that song.” Allen Parker, who is Dan’s in-house engineer, said “Hey, how about ‘Everybody Hurts’?” I had heard the song – you couldn’t miss it if you’re a person my age – but I never in a million years would have thought about doing it. Those guys went and charted it, and it had such a comfortable, funky feel, that we were compelled to learn it.

Do you think your fans saw this album coming?

Eric: No. I mean, it’s a hard question. If they’ve really been paying attention to us over the years, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise because we’ve recorded stuff by Tom Petty and The Band and The Rolling Stones and Mark Knopfler. We have a variety of tastes.

Leigh: I think there are certain fans who see you as one thing, and if you do something else it can be upsetting, but no one twisted our arm to do this. It’s absolutely what we wanted to do and we’re proud of it, but we didn’t do this to offend anybody. If somebody is offended, there’s nothing we can really do about that except say, “Look at our track record and all this other stuff we’ve done that you really love. Why not give this a chance?”

Photo by Alysse Gafkjen

Mountain Man: The Magic of Women in Harmony

Posted on by Editor

The splendor of women’s voices raised in harmony has found fresh spirit in the modern folk era. From The Wailin’ Jennys to The Secret Sisters, groups built around visceral vocal blends — whether backed by instruments or a cappella — have continued the powerful legacy formed by the Carter Sisters, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, and other tenacious singers.

Mountain Man’s Amelia Meath, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and Molly Erin Sarlé discovered their harmonies while studying at a liberal arts college in Vermont, and turned their quick and fast friendship into the 2010 debut album, Made the Harbor. Then life pulled the members in different directions (Meath, for starters, co-founded electronic pop duo Sylvan Esso), and their next project took much longer to arrive than anyone anticipated.

Magic Ship, the trio’s sophomore album and their first on Nonesuch Records, finds the group experimenting with rhythm and cadence to give their original tracks a pop and flourish that doesn’t always exist in such partnerships. As friends who have found a kind of family in the way their voices blend, Magic Ship is about celebrating that bond and all its magic.

I saw you perform at Eaux Claires last year. Did you already have plans to record again, or did it take that set to see the bigger possibility?

Amelia: The Eaux Claires set was kind of a tester just to see if it felt the same to sing together, and what it would feel like to do that. After that set, we were immediately like, ‘Oh of course we’ll do a record. That’s a great idea.’

The audience was rapt.

Alexandra: That felt like such a special time because we had no idea after seven years, or whatever, how many people were going to show up—to have people continue to arrive and fill out the woods, and stand in places where it was not comfortable to stand just to try and hear a little bit. … I think festivals can be a tricky thing for a largely a cappella band, and that stage is the perfect festival translation for [such] a band.

In describing a trio of women’s voices, I feel like some people have resorted to hackneyed descriptions based on myth—like sirens. How do you see yourselves pushing back against that stereotype, or trying to do something within that image?

Molly: I imagine when we’re singing together, we’re not trying to do anything other than be ourselves, so I don’t see us as pushing back against it in any other way besides not trying to play into it.

Amelia: I think like with most things you do while you’re a woman, if you do it without thinking about it, you are being subversive in a lot of ways.

Alexandra: You’re just saying, “Fuck all of that, and we are who we are. Here we are.”

Molly: There is that thing that I like about this, other than the fact that sirens are people that pull men to their death, which is also funny. I do like the assignment of magic, which I think is something we get to live in when we sing together.

It’s interesting that you use the word “magic,” because harmonies that close are almost familial, like you only get it from sisters or brothers. How do you explain your closeness?

Alexandra: I feel like magic is the way that we commonly explain it to ourselves. When we first started singing together it did feel like powerful magic, like, “Whoa, this feels like nothing else has ever felt. It’s really cool and I want to do it more.” It feels like a really honest form of connection, and it’s a special, wild thing that we all happened to meet each other at the same time and discover this thing. Magic is part of the definition.

You cover Ted Lucas’ “Baby Where You Are,” and you’ve retained that to some degree. What was the recording process like for that particular track?

Amelia: For me, I learned about that record from our friend William Tyler who had something to do with its release in general, so I didn’t even know that he’s a Midwestern artist, but I like that. Recording it was really fun. It’s always so great to sit down and figure out a song with your pals.

What does the arranging process look like when you’re dealing with an original song?

Amelia: It looks like us singing it about five times and making suggestions, and that’s about it. Usually we’re like, “Ok, well uh we’ll do that. That sounds good.”

Molly: Similar to the way we work on the songs that we write as individuals and then bring together in that usually when we choose a cover, someone is holding down the main framework of the song, and then the other two are working around that to complete the feel.

So the lead always switches?

Alexandra: Yeah. And usually the notes we hit are kind of up to whoever has the idea of what part to hit. Sometimes we’ll be like, “Oh, there’s this note up here that we like. Will I just abandon my bass part and go up higher?” And then what harmony makes sense with that first initial, intuitive idea?

“Stella” and “Rang Tang Ring Toon” feel straight out of a traditional songbook. What inspired those songs? What was your composition process like?

Amelia: I wrote the song “Stella”— or I wrote the lyrics and the melody, and then we did the arrangements together, like we do with all of our songs — but I never really thought of it as being plucked from the past. At the time that I wrote it, I was thinking that we were going to be writing a children’s record, so I wanted to write a song about a kid playing outside in New York. That’s where it’s placed for me, in Manhattan in the 1980s.

Molly: It always reminded me of a Paul Simon song. Our manager Martin thought it was a song about a cat.

Situated next to “Stella,” you’ve got “Underwear,” which—and I mean this in the most loving way possible—is such a beautiful weirdo of a song. What inspired that?

Amelia: That was about dealing with turning into your parents in some ways, and also inspired by the search for the perfect pair of underwear, which is a real struggle.

Have you found one that you like? Is it a brand or a cut?

Amelia: No, and I keep on doing this thing where every time I find a pair that I think might be it, I’ll buy 30 of them and be like, “This is my underwear forever,” and then three weeks later, I’ll be like, “I don’t like this underwear anymore,” and I’ll have this sea of underwear.

Alexandra: I didn’t know you did that with underwear!

What do you do with the leftovers?

Amelia: I keep them and wear them out of guilt.

How do you decide which songs are best serviced by instruments and which are best left as an a capella affair?

Alexandra: I feel like often, Molly and I will write songs with a guitar, and those are the songs that have guitar. I don’t think we’ve ever retroactively added instrumentation to anything.

How have your other projects — Molly and Alexandra, your solo work, and Amelia, your work with Sylvan Esso — informed this new collection of songs?

Alexandra: I feel like so much of our music is about feeling, and where we are in life and I think having lived our lives in different directions from each other just informs it in a subconscious way. We have years of life lived to draw on, and years of experience in bands, or doing whatever that we’ve been doing, so I feel like we’re bringing more varied things to the table than we were when we were 20.

It’s brighter, too, even though the themes aren’t always!

Amelia: Yeah, bringing in the joy.

Alexandra: Bringing in the joy!

Necessary in this day and age.

Amelia: Darn tootin’.

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

All the Things: A Conversation With The Milk Carton Kids (2 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

In the second half of our conversation with the Milk Carton Kids, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan openly shared their disagreement over some pretty serious issues. The pre-release publicity for their new album, All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do, revealed some of the life experiences the two have been through since their last album. Pattengale dealt with cancer and the painful end of a seven-year relationship; Ryan had a child. And they have a real difference of opinion on whether those things should be brought to listeners’ attention as the subject of these new songs. But beneath the bickering, you may still sense the milk of human kindness.

[Read the part one of our conversation with Milk Carton Kids.]

The fact that you guys live in different cities now [Pattengale has moved from L.A. to Nashville], does that help or hurt the relationship?

Kenneth: The jury’s still out on that one. [Laughs.] It seems to be fine, for now.

Obviously a big part of why people love you on stage is the rapport you guys have on stage. It must feel a little strange now when you have a band on stage and suddenly there are other people there waiting for you to talk.

Kenneth: It’s become such a part of our identity, and I’m kind of confounded as to why. Anything that anybody’s ever laughed at on stage that we’ve said, it’s just what we do in the car or on the phone. And sometimes it’s funny and sometimes it’s not, and we’ve learned how to make it read a little better for an audience with the timing, but it’s how we always are.

With you guys being in such different places geographically as well as probably emotionally, was it easy to sort of come together and write on the same page? There’s a pretty consistent mood to a lot of the album, or at least some sort of thematic undertow, despite your different experiences.

Kenneth: I think that just might reflect a commonality of vision. Because truthfully the songs on this album are the most singular Joey and I have ever written. Outside of “One More for the Road,” which we wrote together in a different era before our band existed, every single song on this record was written by one or the other of us, lyrically. It was not like our song “New York” on Prologue where we sat down together and wrote lines and talked about what would happen to the story if we changed this or that. I showed up with that song “All the Things,” and Joey said, “Would you consider changing this word?” And I said, “Nope!” The same thing for “Unwinnable War,” “Blindness,” and “Just Look at Us Now” when he wrote those.

Joey: The thing that I’m really proud of in terms of the album having a commonality amongst the songs is the thing that the band brought to bear on it. I have a real fondness for albums that sound like they’re played by a band in a room, and where the whole album is sort of treated conceptually, not necessarily from a writing standpoint, but from a recording and production standpoint. And while we did have some musicians come in and out for certain songs, the core of the band that was there for the 11 days that we recorded gives such a strong identity to the record that ties songs together that could feel very disparate… as opposed to something where everybody said, “Okay, let’s take it one song of time. What does this song need? What does that one need?”

There are some very stark, end-of-relationship type songs in here, or maybe the ends of things that aren’t even relationships — looking back on the past, or doing something for the last time. Was it daunting to write in a really direct fashion where there is pretty emotional stuff happening?

Kenneth: Not daunting. Maybe where there existed more insecurity or preciousness in years past, there’s just maybe less f—s given, and maybe some confidence that’s come with artistic, if not financial, success. We seem to have an audience that’ll listen to us. I think that that engenders a specific amount of courage in digging deeper and being more honest, and it was maybe time to do that anyway, so the stars aligned on that front.

And as a songwriter, the hardest thing you can ever search for is honesty. And when you have these sort of traumatic events that happen, that’s a real easy way to sort of cherry-pick some relatable honesty. You don’t ever want to have to suffer to do that. That would be silly. But while it’s there, you might as well take advantage, you know, when you get dumped after seven years.

Joey: It’s true. There was some real stuff that happened.

Kenneth: But with Joey, when Joey had kids, it’s so funny — they write in the press release about him having kids like it’s some seismic shift that nobody’s ever gone through and experienced before. [Laughs.] It’s literally the basis of human existence, and somebody in our organization said, “Man, people are going to be really shocked that Joey had kids!”

Joey: I know. [Sarcastically.] I wish we would just focus on the unique heartaches, like, you know, a breakup.

Kenneth: I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about beating cancer.

Joey: Oh, yeah, that’s true. That’s something almost nobody’s ever done. [Long pause, followed by awkward laughter.] The whole point that you were making was that they’re relatable! That means that everybody goes through it. But some shit happened in our lives.

Kenneth: Yeah, but having kids…

Joey: My favorite part of Kenneth is when he talks about having kids — either like birthing them, or taking care of them. It’s really cute, Kenneth. Keep going.

Kenneth: Joey went from just wandering around life aimlessly with all this free time to then having kids and having a bunch of people hired to take care of ‘em so that he can just wander around aimlessly with all the free time, but having kids at home that somebody else is taking care of. Just a seismic experiential shift! Everything changed!

Joey: Anyway, to get back to the truth of it all, some shit happened in our lives over the course of the last few years, and there was something to write about. And…

Kenneth: I don’t know.

Joey: We’re not going to argue about this. It’s unquestionably true, and we can list them if you want, but they’ve already been listed in our press release, and…

Kenneth: I would argue that all that happened is we just became better writers.

Joey: Before you finish interrupting me…

Kenneth: You’re interrupting me, technically.

Joey: All right, well, let me finish interrupting you then before you jump back in. It’s the decent thing to do. I mean, you only have to listen to the songs to know what we’ve gone through, which is the whole point of the record. … A lot of things which were actually profound shifts in our lives and ways of perceiving reality happened, and so for me it became easier to write more directly and truthfully than it had been at least on the last record. It’s the reason that I like to write songs, to process things.

Kenneth: I have trouble seeing it, because… Sorry, I know Joey thinks I’m just sandbagging everything now, but I’m not. This is my honest take on it. I think Joey’s always written some really nice songs, and he’s writing them better than ever, and I don’t actually see a very different change. The same thing’s true with me. I’ve always written the best song that I’m capable of.

So whether or not I’ve gotten better at songwriting over the last few years, or if it needs to be contextualized for people to understand that it comes out of some life event, I call bullshit on it, because that to me is just a formal, contextualizing sales pitch for what’s actually just a collection of the best songs that we could write over the last three years. And I think it happens to be better than the ones that came before it, and we’ll see if everybody else agrees.

Joey: It’s interesting for you to reject that sort of attachment to it. But (the closing track) “All the Things” is about your breakup, as is “You Break My Heart,” and there’s no other way to say it than that’s you processing your breakup. I mean, that is a song that you wrote that’s about your breakup. So whether it’s better or worse than others…

Kenneth: Well, I have an issue with that, because it’s not that… Why are you laughing? I’ve being very serious here.

Joey: I’m excited to see how you’re going to say that your song “All the Things” is not about the ending of your relationship.

Kenneth: Because it’s exactly the opposite of that! It has nothing to do with the breakup. It’s about chronicling six years of my life that I look back on very fondly. It has to do with trying to say something that is maybe not able to be said out loud unless you put it in poetry and song. I don’t think that it resounds with people because the human experience is all about breaking up…

I mean, in some ways, yes, maybe it took the trauma of a breakup to put it into words, but it’s about celebrating what was a really beautiful relationship between two people. And frankly, if I’m half the writer that anybody thinks I am, I could have written that song at any moment during the six years, even before it all ended. That song is about reflecting the human condition as I see it and how it relates to me personally, and to couch it in some breakup thing seems like a headline that a publicist thinks would grab some attention. I think that’s crazy. [Pauses.] Did I do a sufficient job?

Joey: I think that was the best you could have done.

Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

Dismissing the Suits: A Conversation With The Milk Carton Kids (1 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

The Milk Carton Kids have been about nothing if not duality. That’s down to their very name, which evokes both comedy and tragedy, and their stage presence, in which some of the stateliest and most delicate songs possible are broken up by riotously deadpan banter. They’ve always been about duo-ality, too — two voices and guitars, gathered around a single microphone, contemplative Everlys for the 21st century, unaugmented by anything that would have seemed rank or strange to the Stanley Brothers back in the 1950s.

But now, suddenly, almost everything you know about the Milk Carton Kids is wrong — at least the formal elements. They’ve dropped the formal suits and picked up separate mics… and a full band, too, while they were at it. Could this be their Dylan-goes-electric moment? Not to worry — there probably won’t be any cries of “Judas!” greeting their fifth album, All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do, or a touring ensemble that no longer fits in a single front seat. It’s not just that the new material is superb — although that never hurts — but that the fuller arrangements sound like a natural progression in what is still scaled for intimacy.

Before we get to the Kids, we queried producer Joe Henry for his thoughts about how necessary or smooth the transition was, going from duo to band configuration. He admitted there was at least the fleeting consideration of a backlash — “I don’t imagine it possible that the Kids weren’t individually and collectively pondering the response of an audience that has been so steadfast in their devotions to the band’s brazen and brave duo commitment to date.” But, Henry says, “I saw no evidence that the looming question gave them any pause… And no one involved that I’m aware of had any doubt that such a shift was now not only timely but imperative: they’d reached a point where the color of the light, so to speak, needed to reflect their growth as musicians and songwriters––this batch of songs being so particularly strong as to invite, nay, insist on a presentation equal in its evolution.”

The producer adds that the Kids are “still very much a duo in ethos and execution. There is real drama in the intimacy of Ken and Joey pushing up to a single mic in symbiotic solitude, and it was important to all three of us going in that that image remain intact ––even as new sonic weather kicked up and swirled around them.”

When we sat down with Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan at a Van Nuys coffee shop in June, we found that off-stage they’re just like they are on-stage… only more so.

As part of changing things up, you’ve decided this is also the right time to go for street clothes in concert, right?

Joey: Talk about decisions that were never actually made.

Kenneth: Yeah, that one’s still TBD. I mean, we get on the tour bus tonight. Joey’s near his closet, but I didn’t bring anything from Nashville, so if I’m wearing a suit tomorrow, I’m gonna have to go to the Men’s Warehouse in Tucson. The advice I’ve gotten from literally everybody on earth is that they’re gonna be saddened to not see me in a suit, and that we should be wearing them. But… f— ‘em. [Laughs.]

Joey: Well, I never wanted to wear a suit. The reason that we wore suits in the beginning was as a part of a collection of survival techniques.

Kenneth: Given your druthers, you’d dress like an ass-clown, that’s why. And you can quote me on that!

Joey: [Sighs.] See, how can people not love us? No, it was a part of a suite of survival techniques that we developed when we were playing in very…

Kenneth: Techniques or tactics?

Joey: Techniques.

Kenneth: There are survival techniques? I think they’re mostly tactics. It’s interesting to hear you’ve developed survival technique. It sounds like something they’d sell in the Valley.

Joey: Those words are synonyms. It’s a survival tactic and a technique. In any case, in the early days, we were playing this really sonically fragile show, and the only places that would book us were like the smallest rock club or bar or coffee shop sometimes in town. In a dive bar, we would wear suits to visually indicate that it was just something different than what they would maybe expect to see in that room, so that you could have some chance for the first couple minutes of people taking note and going, “Alright, what is this gonna be? I’m going to shut up and listen for one song.” You at least have a song. You have that chance to get ‘em to stop talking loudly in the bars that they’re used to talking in and maybe pay attention to the show, because our show required that.

It’s not like an attention-seeking preciousness. It’s like a physical, sonic fragility that we had, because we mic-ed our guitars, and you just can’t turn it up that loud. The perfect example is how we played at the Beachland Tavern in Cleveland, Ohio, many times. It’s a great place but the beer fridge is louder than we could get the PA, so we had to ask the bar to unplug their beer fridge, and they were so accommodating. I don’t know what happened to the beer. And they would also bring in rows of folding chairs, which literally no other band would ever even ask them to do. But we always wanted to be in a theater where people would be able to receive what we were trying to present, and the suits were just part of that. Now, with the band…

Kenneth: You’re gonna go back to flip-flops!

Joey: With the band… [Long, exasperated pause.] See, people always say we’re antagonistic. I think it’s just him. No, with the band, we don’t have the sonic fragility that we had before. … And so the whole misdirection of wearing a suit in unexpected places is not required. That was a long way of saying: I’m excited to not wear suits.

How early or late in the process did you decide to go with a band for this album?

Joey: We decided three years ago in Dusseldorf, Germany that we weren’t going to make the next album as a duo… It was just a moment. It wasn’t like we even talked it out. [To Kenneth:] You were like, “I think we should probably do the full-band thing next.” And I was like, “Oh, thank God you said that, because I’ve been worrying about how to bring that up.” But you always break the ice.

Kenneth: Yeah. I’m a talker.

I’m always interested in how people who are identified with a very specific thing decide to change it up… or not. A lot of times, people back away from giving up the thing that people identify as unique.

Kenneth: It’s always risky to go down these philosophical rabbit holes in interviews like this, because invariably they come out not reading exactly as intended, but I’ll go anyway, because who gives a shit? One of our blind spots -– and I think it’s a common blind spot for artists specifically — is that Joey and I for a long time had a complete inability to understand what was good about our band, while also knowing it in our core. And it’s necessary. If we knew what that was, I think that we would lean into it, and it would get tired very quickly and wouldn’t mature and evolve.

But for the first year and a half of our band, Joey and I didn’t realize that we were good just because when we sang together, it sounded like something that people either had never heard before or hadn’t heard in a while, or it bore a trueness that was just apparent in its physics. Joey and I thought that it was a result of all the hard work we do about making sure our harmonies are tight or about phrasing or about all these marginal things that we quibble over. You really lose sight of what the fundamental thread is that actually is the reason the whole thing exists. And we still have that blind spot. There’s something that’s just innate in what you do from the beginning that we take for granted.

So what is the thing you have the blind spot about, that your audience totally gets?

Kenneth: To put it really simply, when Joey and I sing together, it reminds people of Simon and Garfunkel, the way they actually physically combine, like alchemy in the air, or the way the Everlys did it, or the Louvin Brothers. When Joey and I sing together, there is some physical chemistry that is actually, like, we have to try hard to f— it up. And we have from time to time, but we’ve got an advantage coming out of the gate to other people singing harmony together, in that there’s something that just works about it.

And then there’s a similar shared vision in our writing and stylistic choices, and even essential life administration, where, outside of a few blowouts where we figured out what the problem was, the way they rub together results in this strange band that people haven’t kicked out of life yet.

Read the second half of this interview.

Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

Cory Chisel and Adriel Denae, ‘Just Pleasing You’

Posted on by Editor

It’s Indigo Girls month at the Bluegrass Situation, and it’s hard to talk about that dynamic duo without addressing one of the most potent components of their magic: harmony. It’s one of music’s most primal things — no instruments needed, just voices ringing together in a mysterious pattern that sounds perfect but takes true mastery to actually perfect. Few do it as well as Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, who meld themselves like two bodies of water intersecting, yet somehow retain their own individual clarity along the way. A good harmony is true wizardry to the ears. It really is.

Cory Chisel and Adriel Denae’s debut duets LP, Tell Me True, is dedicated to the magnetism of those harmonies. Romantic partners in life and craft, they blend their vocals in both natural and unexpected combinations, volleying in a seamless game with lyrics that chart their life, love and struggles together. “Just Pleasing You,” a sparse and strikingly beautiful ode to what we leave behind to follow a romance — the good, the ugly, the staggered parts of ourselves — is built on Chisel and Denae’s ability to lace their words around each other in that magical way, teetering together with just some simple guitar to pull it all along. “Just pleasing you, is the last thing I’ll do,” they sing, the melody moving and the key escalating with each breath. Pleasing each other, but our ears, too … true wizardry, indeed.