Joey Ryan of The Milk Carton Kids Gets Personal on His Love for Kenneth Pattengale and ‘Monterey’

Stephanie Hernandez

The Milk Carton Kids began their journey to critical notoriety when solo artists Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale decided to join forces in late 2009. The two then began touring as a duo and penning their own unique take on classic Americana tunes, releasing their first two albums “Prologue” and “The Ash & The Clay” in 2011 and 2013 respectively. Now the two are back with their beautifully orchestrated third album, “Monterey.” In the midst of a nationwide tour in promotion of their latest venture, founding member of The Milk Carton Kids Joey Ryan sat down with Entertainment Voice to discuss the group’s journey, their approach to songwriting and why Simon and Garfunkel are important names to know in an airport.

You and Kenneth started “The Milk Carton Kids” back in 2011, how did you two meet and decide you wanted to team up to make music together?

We met in December of 2009 and since 2010 sort of cautiously but in a sort of accelerated fashion began to get deeper and deeper into our collaboration. So we would tour together but we didn’t have a band name or anything. I was touring more than Kenneth was as a solo artist, so he just started coming on my tours and we started doing my shows as a duo. He was more focused on recording albums, he had made something like seven solo albums and I had only made one or two but I had really focused on touring, so we really just started putting our lives together. It’s like dating!

Little by little getting closer to each other.

We started dating at the end of 2009, I’d say we probably moved in together in the middle of 2010 and towards the end of 2010, we decided to get married.

What a magical love story

Yes thank you! Then in 2011, we had our first two kids.

Yes, they were beautiful, bubbly children

And we gave them both away for free on our website.

God, that sounds so terrible! Just giving kids away on the Internet!

Well that’s what my wife and I do with our actual kids; we really like being pregnant and going through childbirth but not actually having the kids. We just set up an adoption website and just give away our kids, give the world all The Milk Carton Kids!

Great tangent, now taking us back, what were those early jam sessions like? How long did it take before you and Kenneth found your signature sound?

That happened almost instantly, like the first day. All those early times playing together took place on Kenneth’s front porch in Eagle Rock, California. I would go over there almost every day for a few weeks or months, and we would just spend the days arranging each other’s solo catalogs for the new duo. I think it was the first day, we put together my songs, Kenneth sang harmony and I played guitar and it pretty much sounded like how we sound now. I’d hope it’s a little more refined after five years and five hundred shows but the essence of it was there and that’s what sort of raised our eyebrows from the beginning.

How has your production and writing process evolved over time? What is it like creating music with Kenneth now vs when you first started?

The writing process I would say is – we write together in a way that tries to be as true to the process of writing alone as possible. So you know, we are as hard on one another as we are on ourselves and we almost never sit down in a room together with a blank piece of paper. I would say one or the other of us has to have an idea and then we will sit down and work on it together.

Well that is pretty unique because you can hold a level of independence to your work even in a collaborative setting.

Yeah and I think there can be this really, well the thing we both hate about “co-writing” is the idea that you would sit down and write a song just for the hell of it, just for the sake of writing a song. There has got to be some sort of initial impotence truer than that, than just the desire to write a song. There’s gotta be something on or the other of us has got to want to say and once that’s there then we can help each other with it. But there’s got to be a spark there that pushes us there.

Your style has been called everything from folk revivalist to acoustic indie rock – How would you describe “The Milk Carton Kids” sound in your own words?

Well depends who’s asking.

Yes that’s true (laughs), well I’m asking.

Well if you’re asking, as a sophisticated music listener and music journalist I would say you probably don’t need me to tell you because you could just listen and you would have the vocabulary and the knowledge to know where our music fits in with the rest of the folk tradition or the Americana theme that’s happening now in music in general. But like, if the flight attendant is asking me when I’m getting on the plane with a guitar and I have five words and I really don’t want to have a conversation about it I say we play folk music that is kind of like Simon and Garfunkel.

Interesting.

Yeah, because at that point they don’t know if you play electronic or funk music or hip-hop or what have you, so it always depends who’s asking. Very broadly, folk music, that is the most general categorization that I am comfortable with, then it is very easy to tell people we are a duo, there are two voices and we sing a lot of harmonies, then they usually go, “Oh! Like Simon and Garfunkel?” and then I go, well Art Garfunkel didn’t play the guitar but otherwise yes! But then reporters like to ask us, do you ever get sick of the comparison to Simon and Garfunkel? and I go no! I compare ourselves to Simon and Garfunkel all the time to flight attendants!

You recently released your third studio album “Monterey,” how would you describe the vibe on this record in comparison to your last two? What was your mindset going into this record?

I think the intention on this record in regards to the songwriting was to be as honest as possible in terms of a reflection of things that we are thinking about as we, were 32-years-old at the time sort of what we see when we look at everything from ourselves to our relationships to the society that we live in to the entire world around us. We wanted to try and say something about life as we see it on all those different levels, whereas the previous albums we tried to focus intentionally on being outward facing n our perspective. writing more politically writing on more social or societal conditions, issues and problems. And before that, our records had been a little bit more introspective. I think “Monterey” is a more representative collection of how much time we actually spend thinking about all those different things in our life. it is the portrait of the mind of a young adult in America in 2015.

From the performance side of it, the way that we made it the methodology behind it was to make it on the road, in the venues that we were playing. Recording in the daytime in the venues in which we were recording in each night. The thing about that, what we were trying to get at was capturing a bit more of the spontaneity and bit more of the inspiration that is allowed to sometimes get lost, from our recording to our live performances. So that was a pretty big part of our goal and mindset going into this album.

The Milk Carton Kids‘ Newest Album “Monterey” is available in Apple Music.