Joey Ryan waited 15 years for this moment. The day when someone wouldn’t automatically associate his folk group the Milk Carton Kids with all those sad images of missing youth splatted across grocery stores in the 1980s.
“That is so fucking cool to hear,” he says after learning that I thought the band name was just meant to be reflective of the pastoral, simple life conjured up on the duo’s seven albums, including their latest, Lost Cause Lover Fool, out April 24.
More from Spin:
- Michael Stipe’s Solo Debut Will Be Out This Year
- King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard Wraps Synth LP
- Deep Cut Friday: ‘You Can’t Talk to the Dude’ by Jonathan Richman
The name was in fact swiped from one of the first songs he and partner Kenneth Pattengale wrote, also called “Milk Carton Kid,” in which they symbolically describe the loss of youth as some kind of vanishing act. Still, the connotation has been hard to lift ever since.
“We almost changed our name when we signed the deal with our first label, Anti- Records, because that cultural reference was so strong,” Ryan admits. But the label’s president, Andy Kaulkin, pushed back. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, after a while people will just think of it as your band.’ And this is the first time I have confirmation that it has actually happened.”
It’s a strong start to our wide-ranging conversation, which Ryan comfortably engages in from the driver’s seat of his car. The shaggy-haired singer and guitarist is parked, of course, sitting idle outside the band’s rehearsal space in North Hollywood where he and Pattengale have been preparing for a private album release show at L.A.’s famed Hotel Café.
The coffee shop turned music venue off Hollywood’s main strip has long been a springboard for singer-songwriters, and it has a special place in the Milk Carton Kids’ story, too. It’s where the local talents first met in 2011 while both were working as solo artists. So, when they heard the news that the venue will soon close its doors to prepare for a move to a new location, they were hellbent on playing one last gig inside.
“We were there every single night for like five years,” says Ryan forlornly, remembering the time he got the call from owner Marko Shafer, suggesting he swing by to see the new guy Shafer just booked. “It was Kenneth. We met that night and, a week or two later, we ran into each other again. He invited me over to his house to play songs together, and we never played another solo show again,” Ryan recalls. “We were a duo from that day on.”
Within a few short months, the newly inked unit that thrived on simplicity (just two guys, two voices, and two guitars) had written enough material to release their first album, Prologue. They did so without a lot of fanfare, simply putting the tracks online for free, figuring people would find it easier. And did they ever.
The sparse folk harmonies on songs like “Michigan” soon caught on with tastemakers like NPR and American Songwriter, and tours with Old Crow Medicine Show and the Lumineers followed. So did interest from Anti- Records, which signed the act and released their next three albums, The Ash & Clay in 2013, Monterey in 2015, and All The Things That I Did And All The Things That I Didn’t Do in 2018. A new partnership with Nashville’s Thirty Tigers came in 2019 with the release of that year’s The Only Ones, followed by 2023’s I Only See the Moon and their newest record, Lost Cause Lover Fool.
In the middle of it all were plenty of highs and lows. There were appearances on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” as well as the late-night TV circuit, features in film projects like Gus Van Zandt’s Promised Land and Tina Fey’s “Girls5Eva,” several Grammy noms, and collaborations with everyone from Rosanne Cash to Sara Bareilles. But there was also Pattengale’s bout with cancer in 2018 and newfound responsibilities of starting families while working as musicians.
In 2023, the Milk Carton Kids had another pinnacle moment when creating their own event, the Los Angeles Folk Festival, wanting to bring together the voices behind the treasured musical storyteller tradition in a city often preoccupied with Sunset Strip rock deities and annual jaunts to Coachella. Over two editions, the event has featured luminous lineups with Emmylou Harris, Waxahatchee, Sierra Ferrell, and Valerie June, among others; and though Ryan and Pattengale put a pause on it this year while they release their anticipated new album, Ryan says, “I hope we can do it again.”
So, whether you call that magical meeting 15 years ago fate or destiny, it certainly kicked off an unbelievable journey for the Milk Carton Kids that continues unfolding. If you ask Ryan, though, he believes it was predetermined.
Not too long ago, he read a book called Powers of Two by Joshua Wolf Shenk that describes the kinetic nature of creative partnerships like the one he and Pattengale entered into all those years ago. “It posits this idea that the basic unit of human creativity is a dyad, the space between two people in collaboration,” he explains, citing examples like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak or Paul McCartney and John Lennon. “I think I was searching for Kenneth, without realizing it.”
Things really clicked when the two started putting their harmonies and guitar parts together for the first time. “It was totally effortless to sing harmonies together, in that kind of eye-opening, hair-raising lightbulb kind of a way. And underneath it was this tense musical struggle between these two guitars. I was very riveted and fascinated by it,” says Ryan, remembering that Crosby, Stills & Nash had a similar story about the first time they sang together in Laurel Canyon, mere miles from where the Milk Carton Kids live and work today.
(Credit: Erika Goldring/Getty Images for Americana Music Association)
That supergroup is one that gets brought up a lot in describing the Milk Carton Kids. Simon & Garfunkel, too, even if the Smothers Brothers is admittedly more of what they are going for, at least live with their off-kilter banter. “I used to think it was lazy to compare us to Simon & Garfunkel, because they’re probably the most mainstream famous harmony duo. I used to resent it,” Ryan admits. But when he listened back to Prologue not too long ago, he finally heard it. “I was like, oh my God, we do sound just like them. There’s something about our voices to where I can see why people latched on to it in that way.”
What the Milk Carton Kids bring forth is a similar exploration of the art of minimalism and the unexpected power it wields. Opting for nothing more than acoustic guitars and harmonized voices, like their elders, was a “conscious constraint” Ryan and Pattengale put on themselves in the beginning. “We wanted to see how much we can do just within this framework,” says Ryan, almost as a counterbalance to the sometimes over-produced works of contemporaries. “One of the great paralyses of modern music production is you can do anything and everything on one track at the push of a button. Deciding what you want your tools to be is quite paradoxical because you find out how liberating it is.”
On Lost Cause Lover Fool, that dynamic is more magnified than ever. A song like the opener “Blue Water” gets caught up in pensive moments of taking in nature and its grandeur, while “My Place Among the Stones” and “A Friend Like You” feel like a bouquet toss of essential life lessons from a close narrator in a private one-on-one conversation. With lyrics in the first person, the songs offer an intimacy and presence that have become commodities in a society that talks behind screens and largely focuses on the future.
“As the world is moving incomprehensibly fast, Kenneth and I were feeling this very human instinct to crave transcendence and the eternal,” explains Ryan, before turning even more philosophical. “The faster and faster that the world goes, the only way to transcend this sort of timebound existence is to really focus on each present moment and realize that eternity is contained within it. In other words, taking the small things and making them bigger. Because I think it’s literally impossible for the human brain to grasp the world that we find ourselves in.”
Many of the album’s themes are steeped in the kind of 2020s hindsight that’s become a focal point for modern folk, but then again, big topical swings have been on the minds of Ryan and Pattengale since the beginning of the Milk Carton Kids, long before it was “in vogue.” (Just listen to 2013’s “Promised Land” and tell us that’s not wildly prophetic.) In some ways, it took time for the modern folk scene to catch up to them.
“We first came along during the Mumford & Sons/Avett Brothers folk revival, which was awesome, except that we were so much quieter than all of that, and we never got bigger in our sound. We just kept doing quiet, sad folk music,” recalls Ryan, sensing a current sea change that they fit into better. “But this latest revival seems way more in touch with its sadness, which suits us very well. All the sad boys and sad girls on TikTok doing sad songs in their bedroom, that’s how we felt 15 years ago. That’s what we wanted to do, but there was no place to do it.”
Ryan remembers playing dive bars and having to ask bartenders to turn off the beer fridge because the hum was louder than their whole show. “Or we would bring folding chairs and people didn’t really know what to make of it,” he jokes. “There’s always been sad songs, obviously, but at the time that we came up, it was much more congregational. Everyone wanted to sing along and clap their hands. Thank God Phoebe Bridgers came along.”
Ryan proudly tells the story of how she used to attend the Milk Carton Kids shows in L.A. when she was a teen. He follows it up with a funny memory starring another new gen folk star, Noah Kahan. “We got to sing a Paul Simon song with him at the Americana Awards a few years ago. And we felt very old because when we talked to him for the first time, he was like, ‘Nice to meet you. By the way, ‘Michigan’ was my mom’s favorite song when I was in middle school.’”
Jokes aside, there’s a strong argument for the pathway the Milk Carton Kids helped pave for today’s moody ilk. If Bridgers and Kahan hadn’t found the duo through sneaking into shows or being introduced with the music at home, they could’ve just as well have been proud alumni of Ryan and Pattengale’s Sad Song Summer Camp—a three-day intensive program in upstate New York where songwriters get in touch with their inner tortured poet through the tutelage of the founders.
“The goal is that everybody has written a song that they perform, ideally in harmony and collaboration with other campers. We create a space where people feel safe and vulnerable to share their deepest and darkest stuff, and there are a lot of tears and a lot of lifelong friendships made in a very short process,” says Ryan of the program, which takes place again this July. He calls it the most rewarding week of the year for him and Pattengale.
“Before this camp, the main way that we had interacted with this community of folk music writers, performers, and fans was one-directional, by putting out our creative productions and then receiving attention for them,” he explains. “But now we’ve turned the whole thing around to become the teacher rather than the performer, and I can’t think of anything more fulfilling.” Somewhere in there is a joke about the Milk Carton Kids doing a body of artists “good,” but they’ve probably already heard that one a million times, too.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
