This February, we all get an extra 24 hours to enjoy – and for folk fans, your stars might be aligning this Leap Day as the Grammy-nominated folk duo from California known at The Milk Carton Kids will be playing the night away at Last Concert Café.
“Never played there,” says singer-songwriter Joey Ryan, one half of the duo alongside Kenneth Pattengale. But we’ve been coming to Houston since the beginning, at the Mucky Duck. Always one of our favorite stops.”
The notion of playing the Last Concert Café comes with a drip of irony, Ryan reveals. “I didn’t realize that. It might be our last concert, it’s the last one of the tour. But I hope it’s not our last concert.”
If the end for the fan favorite folkies was indeed nigh, Pattengale and Ryan have plenty to be proud of culminating in their 2023 release I Only See The Moon, which has been well received by audiences and their peers in the music industry. The album was nominated for the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album, though it did lose the award to Joni Mitchell’s At Newport (Live).
Looking back on his decade plus working with Pattengale, he’s amused by the kismet of their first encounters. “Been 14 years,’ Ryan states. “We were both unsuccessfully pursuing solo careers here in LA in the late ‘aughts. We met at the Hotel Café where Kenneth had a show – that was a great place for the singer/songwriter scene. The owner of the club Marco told me I had to come down and see this new guy, Kenneth Pattengale. So we kind of hit it off right away and with in a few days, he had invited me over to his studio/house to sing together. It was one of those moments that people talk about, but the first song we sung together we went: ‘Oh well, I guess our lives are going to be different now.’”
Together, they’ve released 7 full albums and had music appear on popular shows like Tina Fey’s Girls5Eva and the Martin Scorsese produced HBO drama Vinyl. In fact, the duo’s first two albums Prologue and Retrospect remain free on their group’s official website.
Despite their solid footing as a duo, even Ryan concedes that going through the pandemic without his musical wingman was daunting at first. “But in the end, all of the effects have incredibly positive,” Ryan said. “The first year was very difficult, just calibrating what life is without performing all the time, because that’s all we had known for the previous decade was being on the road and performing every night. We knew we wanted to keep our community together and to be honest, we were mostly thinking of the artists.
“We launched a web series called Sad Songs Quarantine Hour, which is an online version of the variety show we do here in LA at Largo nowadays called Sad Songs Comedy Hour. That was like remote collaboration and harmony singing with our friends and other artists around the country.
“But what that shed light on for us accidently was that we became more in contact with the fans of our music, folk music. We realized that they were having as hard a time with the absence of live music and we were. It really has changed the way we look at touring and performing. Which not to be trite or self important, but feels more like a service – which sounds trite and self-important.
“But it feels like we’re a part of a community that we hadn’t really realized before. That doesn’t just include the artist, but also fans of this left of center off the beaten path music. It’s a lot of really cool people: empaths, weirdos, storytellers, other artists. It is our people, and ironically, being separated from them for all that time made us realize how important it was for us all to be together.”
It was revelations like these that really helped propel Ryan to co-founding the Los Angeles Folk Festival, which lit up LA for the first time with over a dozen musical acts this past October. “I think that sense of community was strong in our mind around festivals generally,” he says. “We had had the idea for the festival before the pandemic, but I think ethos around it and the purpose and the guiding principles behind it once we finally got to producing it after the pandemic was guided by this feeling that it’s not just about community among folk artists, but internationally, amongst both creators and appreciators of this music. The first year, by our metrics, was a huge success. It felt like a very special night of collaborations and joy. So we are planning year two.”
The art form of folk music stretches back over 100 years and has turned great singer-songwriters like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger into legends. But perhaps surprisingly, this genre of music might play even better outside its homeland. “Internationally, maybe ironically or because it feels so quintessentially American, the appreciation for folk music is even more enthusiastic in our experience,” Ryan says. “The audiences go ape shit when we or other American artists like us show up. It makes it really fun to tour abroad. We joking refer to all our stuff as sad songs. Like we have song writing camp we call ‘Sad Songs Summer Camp.’
“For me, I think, they’re not always sad. But there is a soul bearing and human-ness to the approach of the storytelling that evokes tears a lot. Like when Joni Mitchell performed at the Grammy’s just now after beating us in our Best Folk Album category — and no hard feelings, Joni. But also Tracy Chapman, when they performed everybody cried. When Dua Lipa performed, everybody danced. So folk music makes you cry, and we jokingly call it sad music but I don’t think it’s sad. I actually think it’s actually the happiest and most inherently hopeful form of song writing. So when you take pain or tribulation and turn it into art, like what could be more inherently hopeful act than that? There is a catharsis behind the sadness of folk music, and they’ve always needed that. And maybe right now, I think they might need it especially.”
Ryan and Pattengale still have many years of music ahead of them, but even in their brief two decades of playing professionally, Ryan estimates they’ve seen a radical transformation in American music as an art form and as a business.
“In these 14 years together and more than 20 years if you count us working individually, the only constant has been change. So both of us started after the total collapse of the recorded music industry. Neither of us had ‘90s record deals and got used to having tons of money around and having fancy things. We know a lot of people that did and some of them can’t get past it, and some never did, and others have been very adept at putting that past behind them and adapting the new world.”
“I feel a little grateful that we never were around for any of that, we started when there was nothing. Streaming and all of its flaws and inequities is a miracle compared to what we had in 2009. Literally there was zero, the recording music industry as an industry had collapsed by 85%. Now I think it is actually close to the levels that we saw before Napster. Now how that money gets divided up is not perfect, but just the fact that there is an industry again is a new thing and that continually changes. It feels like live music has always been the same. Again, we never had any financial support, again, just because there was never any money around. It wasn’t even an option, it wasn’t like some people had it and some people didn’t. There was nothing.”
Ryan continues: “So we’ve always looked at touring as a direct relationship between us and whoever wants to come see the show. I feel like that has basically been unchanged. In a lot of ways, it feels like we’re doing exactly what we did 14 years ago – luckily in some bigger rooms. But the idea that we all sort of get together in a room for the time to hopefully transcend whatever the world outside is for two hours, that to me, feels kind of universal and innately human,” he concludes. “The core of that doesn’t change, hopefully.”
The Milk Carton Kids perform on Thursday February 29 at 8 p.m. at Last Concert Cafe, 1403 Nance. For more information, visit lastconcert.com. $36-344.
Vic Shuttee
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