Tag: Joey Ryan

MIXTAPE: Growing Up Hardly Strictly with ISMAY

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

I consider myself to be amongst the luckiest of music lovers. Growing up, I saw some of the most incredible roots artists from backstage while holding my Jack Russell terrier and playing with my cousins. When I was 8 years old, my grandfather Warren started a free bluegrass festival in San Francisco called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. These artists shaped me since they were the first ones I watched perform, but the connection went on to become even deeper. When my grandfather passed away in 2011 I started performing music, and the larger community of Hardly Strictly was where I found my encouragers and mentors.

This is a compilation of the artists who I heard from and listened to as a child, and those whose songs I learned when I first became a musician. – ISMAY (AKA Avery Hellman)

“Dark Turn of Mind” – Gillian Welch

Just after high school I spent time working on some small homesteads with a farm labor trade for room and board. This was the same time that The Harrow & the Harvest by Gillian Welch came out – a literary masterpiece. Every time I listen to this record it reminds me of those homesteads and my borrowed car with a faulty battery. It brings me back to the day I arrived late to a new farm in West Virginia while my roommate was still sleeping and how odd it felt to be in a house with a stranger. I got up in the morning to make sourdough toast with an egg wondering what that person who was asleep in the loft of that ’80s wood cabin would think of me.

“Concrete And Barbed Wire” – Lucinda Williams

In the ’90s I was fortunate that my mom had great music taste. She took us around in a magenta suburban car and played Lucinda Williams. She said us kids used to sing along with silly accents to the words “concrete and barbed wire.” It took me another 20 years to fully appreciate Lucinda Williams and the masterful lyricist she is. Over the last four years, I’ve been working on a documentary about her, and it’s been so rewarding, because Lucinda’s music is the kind that gets better the more you know it.

“Dallas” – The Flatlanders

My grandfather was not a professional musician for most of his life, but in the final years he played in a bluegrass band with his friend Jimmie Dale Gilmore. What a kind man Jimmie is, with a voice that reminds me of a dove fluttering away. Because of this relationship he had with my grandfather, I heard about this record Jimmie made with his band The Flatlanders that was lost for 40 years. It was raw and made me feel like I was under a tin roof in Texas. It’s said that this tape helped mark the birth of alt-country.

“The Times They Are A-Changin'” – Odetta

A few years ago I was asked to perform at an event that compared and contrasted Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. I’m more of a Cohen person, so I had more trouble finding a Dylan song that felt like it would fit my feel. That was when I came upon this remarkable Odetta cover and I was inspired. She changed the whole feel of the song to make it her own. In 2008, she performed at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass just two months before she passed away, it was one of the final times she ever performed.

“St. James Hospital” – Doc Watson

I know that most people know Doc for his flatpicking, but I’ve always been much more drawn to the fingerpicking style of guitar in general. “St. James Hospital” feels like a fascinating departure from the more well known Doc Watson performances, and I love hearing him playing in a less linear fashion. This shows he can do it all. In the music that I’ve recorded I sometimes feel a bit out-of-the-norm and nowhere-to-belong, but this song feels similar to one I recorded called “A Song in Praise of Sonoma Mountain.” Hearing “St. James Hospital” makes me feel less out-on-a-limb in roots music.

“Permanent” – Kenneth Pattengale & Joey Ryan (The Milk Carton Kids)

As I started playing music I found this record by The Milk Carton Kids before they had that name, and played under Kenneth Pattengale & Joey Ryan. Listening to this song now, it is still unreal that it was all recorded live at a concert. It was deeply inspiring to see artists like Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings generating a new live sound that was somehow very modern and yet felt like a continuation of original folk music. As if the ’80s and ’90s had never happened! What a gift. Then, seeing The Milk Carton Kids take that torch and carry it on was so exciting for me as a 19 year old.

“Boulder to Birmingham” – Emmylou Harris

I listen to Emmylou every year on Sunday night at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. Her silver hair and steadiness feel beyond time. I can’t believe she is still here, with that same strong presence since I was just 8 years old. As a performer she has a strong sense of worthiness to the audience, a sense of mutual respect for the relationship between listener and performer. I hope that I can hold just a bit of her steadiness within myself.

“Restless” – Alison Krauss & Union Station

I was in 6th grade and didn’t much enjoy recess out on the playground. I brought my CDs over to an empty classroom, and sat in the back listening to Alison Krauss & Union Station. Sometimes I’d show these CDs to my friends. This was before I figured out that it was cooler to be listening to rock music. But I loved that music, and the songs were amongst the first I tried to learn in singing lessons.

“The Silver Dagger” – Old Crow Medicine Show

Old Crow Medicine Show was playing at Hardly Strictly as they rose up in mainstream culture. I appreciate the edge that this recording preserves. There’s even a moment where it sounds like someone might have dropped something or hit their instrument on another (01:35). I wish more recordings kept imperfections preserved within them.

“Pretty Bird” – Hazel Dickens

Part of the reason that my grandfather started Hardly Strictly Bluegrass was because of his love of Hazel Dickens. They were from very different backgrounds, but they became friends and saw the common humanity in one another through music. She played every year until she died. This is my favorite song of hers. What is beautiful to me about Hazel’s take on bluegrass is the imperfections and raw emotion. She brought her whole self to the song.

“Harlem River Blues” – Justin Townes Earle 

I can still picture Justin on the stage with his impeccably curated suits. Back around 2018, I opened a show for him in Santa Cruz, California. He drove up to the venue in a red convertible, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. Just a guy and his ride. He was very kind to me and I wish I had more chances to see him play again. May his music never fade away.

“Tiniest Lights” – Angel Olsen 

When I was 20, I went into a record shop in Ohio. The guy there said they only really carry more obscure records. No problem, I thought, I was here for Captain Beefheart and PJ Harvey. But when I asked, he said those artists were too well known. He pointed me towards Angel Olsen and I heard something in songwriting I had never heard before. My world opened up, and I knew there was so much more that was possible after listening to “Tiniest Lights.” She performed at Hardly Strictly in 2015 and her voice was as real and penetrating as the recordings.

“If I Needed You” – Lyle Lovett

What’s better than Lyle Lovett playing a Townes Van Zandt song?? We listened to Lyle a bunch when I was a kid. No, I’m not from Texas, but I do love those Texas songwriters.

“Long Ride Home” – Patty Griffin

The first time I performed at Hardly Strictly (although somewhat tangentially) was at an artist after party. I chose this song, because it had a fun fancy guitar line I could play with my beginner fingers. Someone who was performing came up and said they thought I was talented. I think that might have changed my life right there. It was the first time anyone had come up to me and said I was good enough to do this as a job, not to mention amongst professional musicians.

“Are You Sure” – Willie Nelson

Willie played Hardly Strictly in 2003 and I remember that big black bus sitting behind the main stage. I can’t even imagine the thrill of the audience members, his fans are as dedicated as they come. I heard this song at a recently released film that is fantastic called To Leslie.

“Little Bird of Heaven” – Reeltime Travellers

This band was part of that wave of old-time style artists that came at the same time as Hardly Strictly. The vocals are so unexpected, but real and honest. One of their band members became a mentor of mine and helped me get my start in the music business and I am forever grateful.

“Essay Man” and “The Golden Palomino” – ISMAY

These are two songs from my latest release, Desert Pavement, that would never have happened if it weren’t for Hardly Strictly. I am trying to find my way with my own version of folk, and can’t help but be inspired at what a rich trove of artists I have to draw from.

Photo Credit: Aubrey Trinnaman

Basic Folk Debate Club: Your Career vs. Your Soul

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Welcome to Folk Debate Club, our occasional crossover series with fellow folk-pod Why We Write! Today, to discuss Your Career vs. Your Soul, we welcome our panel of guests: music journalist and Why We Write host, Kim Ruehl, Isa Burke (Lula Wiles, Aoife O’Donovan), musician and Basic Folk guest host Lizzie No, yours truly, Cindy Howes, boss of Basic Folk and a very warm welcome to Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan of The Milk Carton Kids.

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I’d like to think that the act of “selling out” ebbs and flows with the passing of time. As the earning power of the folk musician changes, so does the allowance of what is perceived as abandoning your principles for the almighty dollar. That doesn’t mean that it always feels great. Choices musicians have to make to further their careers can be exhausting and detrimental to their art. How do you strike that balance at the intersection of art and commerce in the folk music world?

Photo Credit: Sam Kassirer (Isa Burke); John Gillespie (Lizzie No); Rich Amory (Kim Ruehl); David McClister (The Milk Carton Kids)

WATCH: The Milk Carton Kids, ‘Live From Lincoln Theatre’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Milk Carton Kids
Album: Live From Lincoln Theatre
Release Date: Released on video in 2014; released on streaming services in 2020
Label: ANTI- Records

Editor’s Note: The Milk Carton Kids both filmed and recorded Live From Lincoln Center in Columbus, Ohio, in October 2013 during a tour in support of their Grammy-nominated album The Ash & Clay. Originally the video was edited and the audio mixed by band member Kenneth Pattengale in the band’s Sprinter van in the days following the show. Now it has been remastered by Kim Rosen, one of the band’s favorite collaborators.

In Their Words: “Live From Lincoln Theatre is the truest representation of what Joey and I have been up to for the last decade. The set list is like a greatest hits album of Milk Carton Kids songs. I’ve never played guitar in the studio quite the way that it comes together on stage. Our voices also communicate something extra for the occasion. And, of course, Joey doesn’t ramble about our master recordings, but there’s no stopping him once the lights are dim and the mics are hot. … In Columbus everything came together the way that it does when audience and performer are in fine form, the energy coalescing into the mystery that drives us musicians to do EVERYTHING we do.” — Kenneth Pattengale

Photo credit: Jessica Perez

MIXTAPE: The Milk Carton Kids, In Harm’s Way

Posted on by Editor

“There’s a paradox at the heart of great harmony singing: when voices combine in so elemental a way that they disappear into each other, the effect is dizzying, mystifying, disorienting, and yet by far the most satisfying sound in music. Here’s a VERY incomplete playlist, spanning a few generations, of bands defined by their harmonies, who set my mind spinning with their vocal arrangements, execution, and pure chemistry as singers.

“Full disclosure: my own band is included aspirationally and for the sake of self-promotion. Author’s Note: Sorry not sorry for naming this playlist with a pun.” — Joey Ryan, The Milk Carton Kids

The Jayhawks – “Blue”

That unison in the first few lines is so thrilling cause you know what’s about to happen, and when the parts separate it just feels so good.

Gillian Welch – “Caleb Meyer”

The harmonies and Dave’s playing are so intricate in this song you’d be forgiven for glossing over the lyrics, which tell the story of an attempted sexual assault victim killing her attacker with a broken bottle. Check out the Live From Here version with Gaby Moreno, Sarah Jarosz, and Sara Watkins, and catch the alt lyric subbing “Kavanaugh” for “Caleb Meyer” about halfway through.

Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris – “Hearts on Fire”

Just one of the all-time great duets. Who’s singing the melody, Emmylou or Gram? Hint: trick question.

Our Native Daughters – “Black Myself”

Do all supergroups hate being called supergroups? I wouldn’t know. Our Native Daughters is a supergroup though, and the power of their four voices in the refrains and choruses of this one are all the proof I need.

Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, & Emmylou Harris – “Those Memories of You”

It’s insane that three of the great singers of their generation just so happened to have this vocal chemistry. Their voices swirl together like paint and make a color I’ve never seen before.

boygenius – “Me & My Dog”

Favorite game to play when this song comes on is “try not to cry before the harmonies come in.” Very difficult. Impossible once they all sing together.

The Smothers Brothers – “You Can Call Me Stupid”

GOATS. IDOLS. Favorite line is, “That’s a pun isn’t it?” “No, that really happened.”

The Milk Carton Kids – “I Meant Every Word I Said”

My band. Imposter syndrome. We recorded the vocals on this whole album into one mic together. It helps us disappear our voices into each other’s.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – “Carry On”

For me, CSNY are the pinnacle of that disorienting feeling harmonies give you when you just have no idea what’s going on. I’ve never been able to follow any one of their individual parts and I LOVE that.

Sam & Dave – “Soothe Me”

When the chorus comes around and you can’t decide which part you want to sing along with, you know they did it right.

Louvin Brothers – “You’re Running Wild”

The Louvins sound ancient to me. Primal. The way their voices rub against each other in close harmony is almost off-putting but I’m addicted to it.

The Highwomen – “If She Ever Leaves Me”

There’s probably even better examples of the Highwomen doing that crazy thing with their four voices where they become one entirely unique voice, all together, but this song is just so good I had to go with it. And the blend in the choruses is just as intoxicating as it gets.

I’m With Her – “See You Around”

Really an embarrassment of riches in modern music on the harmony front. Hearing I’m With Her perform around one microphone drives me insane with the best possible mix of confusion, jealousy, and joy.

Mandolin Orange – “Paper Mountain”

The melancholy is so satisfying when either one of them sings alone, and then they bring that low harmony and I have to leave the room.

Skaggs & Rice – “Talk About Suffering”

This whole record is a masterclass in two-part harmony. It changed my entire concept of singing. I’m Jewish, but when this song comes on it makes me sing wholeheartedly of my love for Jesus.

The Everly Brothers – “Sleepless Nights”

The absolute masters of both parts of a two-part harmony standing alone as the melody. Credit to Felice and Boudleaux for that, for sure, but the Everlys executed it better than anyone before or since.

Simon & Garfunkel – “59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy) — Live at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY – July 1970

This is far from my favorite S&G song, but this live version especially showcases what geniuses they were at arranging crossing vocal lines, unisons, parallel melodies, nonsense syllables and swirling harmonies. Plus the nostalgic “awwww” from the crowd gives me hope that a sensitive folk duo could one day achieve mainstream success again.

Shovels & Rope – “Lay Low”

This starts out as a song of profound loneliness with just one voice singing, then the harmony comes in and it gets… even lonelier? Harmony is magic.

Boyz II Men – “End of the Road”

I’m a child of the ‘90s, don’t @ me. I never realized at all those 8th grade slow dances that we were subliminally being taught world-class harmony singing and arranging. Good night.

Photo Credit: Jessica Perez

MerleFest Announces Finalists for Chris Austin Songwriting Competition

Posted on by Editor

The finalists for MerleFest’s annual Chris Austin Songwriting Competition have been announced. This year, the event will be judged Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale of the Milk Carton Kids, Cruz Contreras of The Black Lillies, and Radney Foster. Jim Lauderdale will host the competition and Mark Bumgarner will return as emcee for the finalist contest taking place at MerleFest’s Austin Stage on Friday, April 26 at 2:00 p.m.

From its first incarnation in 1993, the competition has seen the likes of Gillian Welch, Tift Merritt, and Martha Scanlan rise to the top of an always competitive field of up-and-coming songwriters. Legendary songwriters have presided over the competition from the start as judges, too. Darrell Scott, Hayes Carll, and Guy Clark have all taken a turn at judging the CASC.

This year’s Chris Austin Songwriting Competition Finalists each fall into one of four categories:

Bluegrass:
Wyatt Espalin (Hiawassee, GA): “Light Coming Through”
Anya Hinkle (Asheville, NC): “Ballad Of Zona Abston”
James Woolsey (Petersburg, IN) and David Foster (Petersburg, IN): “Sugar Ridge Road”

Country:
Hannah Kaminer (Asheville, NC): “Don’t Open Your Heart”
Andrew Millsaps (Ararat, NC): “Ain’t No Genie (In A Bottle Of Jack)”
Shannon Wurst (Fayetteville, AR): “Better Than Bourbon”

General:
Wright Gatewood (Chicago, IL): “First”
Alexa Rose (Asheville, NC): “Medicine For Living”
Bryan Elijah Smith (Dayton, VA): “In Through The Dark”

Gospel/Inspirational:
Ashleigh Caudill (Nashville, TN) and Jon Weisberger (Cottontown, TN): “Walkin’ Into Gloryland”
Kevin T. Hale (Brentwood, TN): “We All Die To Live Again”
Russ Parrish (Burnsville, MN) and Topher King (Savage, MN): “Washed By The Water”

All three finalists in each category will have the chance to perform their songs for the judges on MerleFest’s Austin Stage before category winners are ultimately decided on Friday.

Net proceeds from the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest support the Wilkes Community College Chris Austin Memorial Scholarship. Since its inception, the scholarship has been awarded to 91 deserving students.

In addition to the songwriting competition, MerleFest’s band competition will take place on the Plaza Stage on Saturday the 27th from 11:00 a.m to 3:30 p.m. Judged by members of The Local Boys and emceed by Mark Bumgarner, the competition’s winners will be announced at 4:00 p.m on the Plaza Stage. The winning band will head over to the Cabin Stage, where they will perform to an enthusiastic MerleFest audience from 6:35 to 7 p.m.

This year’s band competition finalists include Shay Martin Lovette (Boone, NC), Pretty Little Goat (Brevard, NC), None of the Above (Piedmont Triad, NC), Brooks Forsyth (Boone, NC), Alex Key and the Locksmiths (Wilkesboro, NC), Massive Grass (Wilmington, NC), Redleg Husky (Asheville, NC), and The Mike Mitchell Band (Floyd, VA).

Photo of Milk Carton Kids: Joshua Black Wilkins

Inspired by Dylan, J.S. Ondara Spreads His Own ‘Tales of America’

Posted on by Editor

Six years ago just about now, J.S. Ondara landed in Minneapolis on a pilgrimage, lured by his love of Minnesota native son Bob Dylan’s music. He made his way north to Duluth, where Dylan was born, and Hibbing, where the singer-songwriter was raised. It was not quite what he expected.

“I thought I’d go to Hibbing and it would be a magnificent city with music coming from all over the place,” he says, now, laughing at his thoughts of the small town as the Emerald City. “There wasn’t much to find.”

We can forgive him his youthful fantasies. He’d never traveled like that before. He’d never seen snow before, let alone a Minnesota winter. He’d never really been away from home, and home was a long way from there — Nairobi, Kenya, where as a teen he’d fallen completely for the music of Dylan. But at just 20, he impetuously decided to trek to where his hero’s story began.

“It was all very romantic for me,” he says. “I just said, ‘Oh, I’m going to do this. It makes sense right now.’ It was all a very romantic choice, a thing I tend to do regularly in my life, make all these romantic decisions and not have any expectations out of it other than, ‘Let’s see how it goes.’”

That, uh, freewheelin’ spirit went pretty well for him. This month sees the release of his own debut album, Tales of America, on Verve Records. It’s a collection of moving, personal folk-influenced songs drawn from the journey he’s made and the observations along the way, produced by veteran Mike Viola (who as vice president of A&R at Verve signed him to his deal) and featuring appearances by such fellow Dylan acolytes as Andrew Bird, Dawes’ Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith and Milk Carton Kids’ Joey Ryan. The release comes on the heels of his first major tour, opening for no less than Lindsey Buckingham, and a subsequent European jaunt.

And while the Dylan influence is present, this is in no way an imitation or even homage, per se. With an almost jazzy looseness, often swaying around stand-up bass played by Los Angeles stalwart Sebastian Steinberg, there’s a closer resemblance to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. At the center is Ondara’s high, pure, finely controlled voice, an instrument unlike any of his heroes’, though you might hear some Jeff (and Tim) Buckley in it, at times piercing the heavens with an otherworldly falsetto, movingly unguarded on the haunting a cappella “Turkish Bandana.”

Hibbing wasn’t Oz, but he’s definitely not in Kenya anymore. And what swept him to this new life was, of all things, grunge and indie-rock.

“We really didn’t have much growing up,” he says. “Had food, a place to sleep and that’s about it. And a tiny little radio, about the size of my iPhone. That was all we had.”

Through that little radio came Nirvana, Radiohead, Death Cab for Cutie, transmissions from another world in a language the Swahili-speaking youth didn’t understand. It was magical.

“I was intrigued by the music and language, all these sounds,” he says. “I couldn’t make any sense of it. To me it was a spaceship to another universe.”

He tried imitating those sounds, though not knowing the language he sang gibberish — well, maybe not that far off with some of Kurt Cobain’s often hard-to-decipher mumbling. But it worked its way into him.

“I heard all these songs and developed a kinship for a long time, and used them to study English because I wanted to understand what Cobain was saying, or [Radiohead’s] Thom Yorke or [Death Cab’s] Ben Gibbard,” he says. “I was curious about the language and the spirit and that spurred me to learn English, and I built my vocabulary listening to these songs.”

Another song that caught his ear was “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” — the Guns ’N Roses version, which he assumed was an original by that band. It was only after losing a bet to a school mate about the song’s authorship that he discovered the music of Dylan himself. It was an epiphany.

“I wrote stories and poems, from a very young age,” he says. “I wrote about a puppy, about school, I wrote a lot about the sun for some reason. I was fascinated by the universe in general and wasn’t really receiving the answers I needed. So I would write poems and stories about it as a way to process it and learn about the world. But I never wrote songs. One reason I believe I was drawn to Dylan was listening to his records I thought, ‘These are poems with melodies! I could probably do this!’ I felt I saw a path for me. ‘Perhaps there is hope. I can take these stories and poems and put them in melodies and perhaps people could like them in a grand way. This is something people like? Great! Maybe I’m not lost in my path!’”

He soon set his sights on America, where he had a few relatives and friends scattered about, including an aunt in Minneapolis. But finding a way was rough.

“I started by applying to the University of Minnesota and looking for work opportunities in the state, but nothing bore any fruit,” he says. “As I ran into a wall and was running out of options, I was suddenly awoken, quite rudely, in the wee hours of the morning to be told that I had won a green card lottery and could move to the States. Turns out an aunt had applied for these green cards for a few of us and mine went through. I had no idea. The mischief of the universe!”

His family helped get the money together for the trip after he told them that he was going to become a doctor. That was a fib, he admits. Once settled in Minneapolis, he dove into music-making seriously.

“I picked up a guitar and learned a couple Dylan songs, a couple Neil Young songs, then would go back to those melodies and these poems I’d written, turn them into a melody, call it a song and then go out and try to play for people. That’s how it began for me.”

He hit up the open mic nights around town, started getting some small club bookings, “gradually, very gradually trying to get these songs in front of people.”

And with some money he’d saved from work via a temp agency, he made an acoustic EP that he put online. Soon a local public radio station put his songs in regular rotation. Word spread and contacts started to come in from the music business, both in Minneapolis and around the country.

Among those reaching out was Viola, a veteran musician (the band the Candy Butchers, as well as singer of the title song from the movie That Thing You Do) who had recently taken the job at Verve. The two hit it off right away.

“I had done meetings with others, but with Mike there was a connection,” he says. “I’d do meetings and mention favorite Dylan records and no one knew what I was talking about. Freewheelin’ remains my favorite. When I met with Mike I brought this up, the idea of trying to make a very stripped-down record like that. A few things happen, but not crazy, doesn’t take away from the stories. And I brought up Astral Weeks, which does the same thing. A few things on it that embellish the stories. Those two records. He went, ‘Oh yeah! Those are my favorite records, too!’ There was just chemistry I hadn’t had before.”

From there it was simple.

“It was the old troubadour style of making folk records,” he says. “You get into the studio — you wrote a bunch of songs and maybe get some people around you and play this, and that’s the record.”

The result is an album that portrays the wonder and delight — and also the struggles and heartbreaks — of his time in America, with a facility for language that escapes most native speakers. (An essay he wrote about his life, “The Starred and Striped Fairy of the West,” shows another facet of that.) The opening song, “American Dream,” is equal parts welcoming embrace and distancing suspicion, his poetic images boiling the national spirit to an intimately personal level, a dream world, as it were. That inner view is there throughout the album.

It all came naturally from his experiences.

“I wrote the words ‘I’m getting good at saying goodbye’ just a month after moving to America,” he says of the chorus of the somber “Saying Goodbye.” “They were just words at the time. I didn’t know what they meant. But after turning them into a song and singing them over and over, I can see that I was grappling with thoughts of the past and future. I could see that the totality of my past — being family, culture, upbringing, all of it — was stopping me from becoming not just who I wanted to be but who I’d be best at being, which is the true ‘self’ within.”

That said, he’s also found that echoes of his past can be heard in some of these songs, even if very faintly. He wasn’t a big fan of Kenyan music, traditional or modern while growing up, but it seems some of it crept in anyway. A few of the songs, notably the loping “Lebanon,” bear rhythms echoing those common in music of that region of Africa — the national benga or Nigerian highlife, Tanzanian taraab and Congolese soukous, all quite popular in Kenya. And there’s something ingrained in the vocals that even Ondara only heard after the fact.

“I was listening back to some of the songs and I can hear toward the end of some that I start to make some sounds influenced by my native language, which is not something I tried to do,” he says. “There is African influence there, but subconscious. The more I listen, the most I can track down those sounds.”

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)

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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

DISPATCHES: Brothers

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Photo by Rachel Fox

It is difficult even to discuss Punch Brothers. Best attempts at classifying the band by genre result in multi-hyphenated neologisms. Try hyperbolically overstating their proficiency, merely for effect, and you’ll still come up short. They’ve quite literally outgrown their instruments’ traditional sonic capacities, and often resort to banging around on all manner of unintended parts of the things to recreate the sounds in their heads. They’ve turned the traditional into a powerful and moving spectacle. They are masters, educators, and inventors. We would all do well to pay heed.

But this winter we found Punch Brothers at the end of their collective rope. They’d been hanging on to it for the best part of 18 months, touring constantly since before the release of their latest full-length, the rhetorically titled, Who’s Feeling Young Now? They, clearly, were not. And ‘Brothers’ had become a more apt descriptor by Thanksgiving of 2012 than they could ever have intended when they assigned themselves the moniker five years earlier. I have a brother. I have a wife. I even have a band mate. I have not spent as much time with any of them as the Punch Brothers have spent with each other, as they put it, ‘living in a hallway.’

The hallway is, of course, a tour bus. There are televisions, leather couches, game consoles, dvd players, a kitchen. As hallways go, it’s the top of the line. Musicians (like me) idealize the prospect of some day touring in a bus. But make no mistake, it is merely a top of the line hallway. At least eight people live in it 24 hours a day and there is nothing ideal about it at all. More than once, more than one of the band members volunteered that our joining the tour had offered a needed respite from the physical and emotional claustrophobia they’d grown weary of (I took it as a compliment). All of them spoke with a distant longing about the opportunity to pursue their vast other musical interests between the end of this Punch Brothers album cycle and the start of the next. They love each other deeply and desperately needed to be apart, finally.

It is no small feat, then, that all 5 members summoned nightly the genuine inspiration, indeed the revelation, necessary and intrinsic to their performance. A good deal of their show is improvised – actual real-life creativity happening before our eyes. Those parts never fell flat. Not ever. Neither did the well-orchestrated sections. Even the songs they played every night, ‘Flippen’, ‘Movement and Location’, ‘Rye Whiskey’, felt as though they’d only just been invented, yet somehow already perfected. I shared the audiences’ astonishment at the depth of the achievement unfolding before us.

What I was happy not to share, to keep all for myself (until now, I suppose), were those times before our own opening set when Chris or Critter would trade songs with us, ready to let us lead or follow as the moment asked; the end of each night when we’d share in a fine rye or wine, and they seemed more interested to know our story than in sharing their own; the moment after soundcheck when Chris, after declaring his love of late-night cocktail-driven critique sessions with those musicians he considers his peers, invited my critiques and then offered up his own in return – both of us alternating our blunt criticisms with effusive points of praise, of course; the moment in the airport before the flight home when I found Gabe eating the ‘best airport food in the country’ (he would know) and ready to share his disappointment in, and resolve in the face of, criticism that their ‘bluegrass’ group doesn’t adhere enough to the tradition it draws upon – he’s not interested in building a museum, thank god; and the moment when Critter privately proclaimed that virtuosity is a means, not an end, and that in the end, we’re all humbly aiming for what’s true and beautiful and you don’t have to play that fast to get there.

They didn’t have to invite us onstage to perform together during their encore, but they did. They didn’t have to go out of their way to praise our songs and our show the way they did, but they did. And they sure as hell didn’t have to invite us to crowd onto their fancy ‘hallway’ to celebrate after each show. But they did.

Before we met them, I wondered how on earth Kenneth and I, brothers by now in our own right, could presume to take a stage before Punch Brothers and attempt something resembling a flatpicking folk show. Who would dare? But the members that make up their band are, above all, powerfully generous musicians and people. That is what has held them together these months and years. That is what held us all together this winter. That, in the end, is the most impressive thing about Punch Brothers.

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Photo by Brendan Pattengale

Joey Ryan is one half of The Milk Carton Kids.  Their new album, The Ash & Clay, is out March 26. You can learn more about the troubadours at their website themilkcartonkids.com.