THE MILK CARTON KIDS
With: Katie Pruitt
Where: Capital Ballroom, 858 Yates St.
When: Saturday, Oct. 22, 8:15 p.m. (doors at 7:30)
Tickets: $47.90 from admitone.com
In the 10 years since Los Angeles duo The Milk Carton Kids last played Vancouver Island…well, a lot has happened.
Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale have risen from independent upstarts to two-time Grammy Award nominees and favourites in the contemporary folk and Americana movement, with several albums now considered beacons of the form. One of those recordings, Prologue, was reissued this month as a 10th anniversary, triple-LP boxed set, the recent arrival of which gave Ryan plenty to reminisce about during a phone interview Wednesday with the Times Colonist.
Recorded in 2011 during a five-day break, midway through a two-month tour, Prologue packaged the two former solo artists together as a singular unit. “It’s like looking through old pictures,” Ryan said of the reissue process, which required a deep dive of the band’s archives.
“[The set] includes a lot of recordings by us when we barely knew each other, when we were trying to figure out how to play together and how we sounded best together. It was kind of exhilarating spending all that time remembering why we gave everything up to work together in the first place.”
Pattengale has kept fastidious records of everything, Ryan said, including early demo recordings. But touring has been the primary focus for the group, almost since the beginning. They often record their own concerts, especially when they are working on new material, because it gives them a quick reference point. The electricity (or lack thereof) during a live performance never lies, Ryan said.
“The most transcendent experiences of our lives have been at concerts, usually when we are audience members. It’s a privilege to be on the other side of that equation and provide that for other people.”
Ryan and Pattengale visited Victoria twice in 2012, while on the tour to support Prologue; that same year, they also performed in Courtenay at the Vancouver Island Music Festival. They have yet to return, for reasons which are beyond Ryan. “In the early days of our touring, we were there a lot. I don’t know why we stopped. Maybe the ferry rides became too daunting after a while.”
The musicians both live in the Los Angeles area, with Ryan based in Sherman Oaks and Pattengale settled in Laurel Canyon. Those are two desirable ZIP Codes for such soft-spoken, down-to-earth folkies, but their easygoing approach to music should not suggest they are out of their element in the Hollywood capital. The Milk Carton Kids are represented by a management company whose roster includes Diplo, Sturgill Simpson, and Animal Collective, and a publicity firm that represents Mumford & Sons, Björk, and the estate of Tom Petty.
They aren’t resting easy, even with a heavyweight team in their corner. There’s a new Milk Carton Kids album due next year, capping a blazing four-year run of activity that includes two studio albums (2018’s All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do and 2019’s The Only Ones) and two 2020 live recordings (Live From Symphony Hall and Live From Lincoln Theatre), in addition to the Prologue reissue.
Amidst all the looking back, Ryan said The Milk Carton Kids found a way forward. There will be a new record from the band next year, their first studio effort in three years, and he expects the tour to support it will be their best to date.
“I used to evaluate things differently than I do now,” Ryan said. “I used to think of success as a measurable thing. We are a live band first and foremost, so how many tickets we could sell in any given city was the most quantifiable measure, and how sustainable your career was financially. But I stopped thinking about it in those terms. Now, I’m focused show by show.
“The point of doing this is to create that, dare I say, sacred space. And only people in a room together for 90 minutes can do that. Being able to participate in that is the purpose at the heart of why we started doing this in the first place. For me, a successful show is about what we can create in that moment on that night.”
