By K.D. Norris
When St. Cecilia Music Center announced last week the addition of The Milk Carton Kids to its 2018-19 folk series concert lineup, I remembered the duo’s brief appearance on the concert film “Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis” but, embarrassingly, realized I knew practically nothing about the duo.
Then, in researching the group’s latest release — All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do, which came out June 29 — I found out the new music was produced by Joe Henry.
That was all I needed to know.
The Milk Carton Kids will appear as part of St. Cecilia’s impressive and not-done-yet Acoustic Café Folk Series on Feb. 28, 2019.
“The Kids”, an American indie folk duo consisting of Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale, are from California, have been performing since 2011 and are what one reviewer called “absolute geniuses in close-harmony.”
Nominated in 2015 for a Grammy for Best American Roots Performance, Best Folk Album of the year in 2013, and winner of The Americana Music Association for Best Duo/Group of the year in 2014, the Kids have just started touring in support of All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do.
“Musically we knew we were going to make the record with a bigger sonic palette,” Ryan said in supplied material. “It was liberating to know we didn’t have to be able to carry every song with just our two guitars.”
And if you want to change our sonic palette, whether your a musician or a listener, there may be no better producer than Henry — in the last 10 years he has worked with the likes of the Madonna, Rosanne Cash, the Carolina Chocolate Drops (Rhiannon Giddens one-time band), Over the Rhine, Bonnie Raitt and Billy Bragg (one-time with Wilco); to just scratch the surface.
And Henry’s own musical work is not shabby either, as evidenced by last year’s Thrum. (Although my favorite is 1999’s Fuse.)
But we were talking about the Milk Carton Kids …
The Kids have proven in-demand collaborators, including musical partnerships with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Dar Williams, and Chris Hillman, as well as teaming with T-Bone Burnett and the Coen Brothers for the acclaimed concert documentary “Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis” — the concert documentary derived from the final Coen Brothers film “Insider Llewyn Davis”. In 2016, the band joined forces with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, Buddy Miller, and Robert Plant for the sold out Lampedusa: Concerts for Refugees tour.
The new project marks the first time that the acoustic duo, Ryan and Pattengale, have brought a band into the studio with them.
“We wanted to do something new,” Pattengale said in supplied material. “We had been going around the country yet another time to do the duo show, going to the places we’d been before. There arose some sort of need for change.”
The Kids’ trademark two-part harmonies “ride acoustic guitars high above the haunting landscape created by the presence of the band, as if Americana went searching for a lost America,” according to supplied material.
Produced by Henry, All the Things … was recorded in October 2017 in the Sun Room at House of Blues Studio in Nashville. Musicians who joined them there included Brittany Haas on violin and mandolin, Paul Kowert and Dennis Crouch on bass, Jay Bellerose on drums, Levon Henry on clarinet and saxophone, Nat Smith on cello, Pat Sansone on piano, mellotron, and Hammond organ, Russ Pahl on pedal steel and other guitars and Lindsay Lou and Logan Ledger as additional singers.
“By extending that language to a band and reimagining the boundaries around what acoustic-centered two-part harmony can sound like, All The Things That I Did and All The Things That I Didn’t Do carries listeners down a river and out into the open sea,” Pattengale said.
Can’t wait to catch up with the Kids, but, must admit, that title sounds like a line from one of Henry’s trademark unfathomable songs.
The new announcement of The Milk Carton Kids brings the St. Cecilia folk series to four concerts, with more to be announced: Pokey LaFarge on Oct. 4, The Lone Bellow on Nov. 29, and Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn Feb. 9, 2019.
Tickets for The Milk Carton Kids are $40 and $45. All tickets can be purchased by calling St. Cecilia Music Center at 616-459-2224 or visiting the box office at 24 Ransom Ave. NE. Tickets can also be purchased online at scmc-online.org.
