Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale are The Milk Carton Kids, whose gentle acoustic tunes are at once subtle and stunning. Ryan talked to Diversions Editor Allison Hussey about the band’s beginnings and development.
Diversions: How did you and Kenneth meet? I read that you liked his song “Memoirs of an Owned Dog.”
Joey Ryan: Yeah. I mean, who else sings a song that’s written by a dead dog? I’d never heard anything like that. When I walked in, I thought something different and exciting was happening, and felt the need to introduce myself, and that was it, really. That night was kind of a short meeting, but he wrote to me — or we ran into each other, I forget exactly — a couple weeks later, and he said that he’d been listening to my album. And he invited me to come over to his house and play some songs together, and we sat on the porch and traded songs. And to be honest, we’ve never really done anything different than that.
We just stand close together and play songs together like we did that first day on the porch. And that’s our whole band, that’s what our records are, that’s what our shows are. We haven’t really changed anything from the first day.
Dive: Were you expecting it to become a full-time collaboration?
JR: It was just something we started doing for fun. Although I do think from the first day, we thought that there was something between us that was calling attention to itself, that we weren’t really going to ignore it.
But we both had active but floundering solo careers going on, so there was a lot of work on the books. There were a lot of shows booked already and some tours booked, so we sort of gradually integrated each other into our own solo careers, and we started doing shows as a duo when one or the other of us had it booked for ourselves as a solo act.
But it took about seven or eight months of that before we decided that we really should just call it a duo and retire the solo careers and just focus on working together.
Dive: How did you settle on your name?
JR: That comes from one of our songs. There’s a song on our album Prologue called “Milk Carton Kid,” and there’s a particular way that the lyric is used which is kind of an unlikely metaphor. It’s a very dark metaphor; it’s a very dark concept to invoke — to invoke a concept of missing children. But the lyric is, “I don’t feel the pain I once did, one day it just vanished like a milk carton kid.”
The song is a meditation on coming of age, and it’s meant to be a celebration of the things that we’re actually happy to leave behind and the skin that we’re actually happy to shed as we become adults and as we develop some sense of identity that we can get more and more comfortable with and all the things that are the opposite of that — all the insecurity, all the awkwardness of adolescence and youth that we’re happy to see go. It’s sort of a celebration of those things, and all of those things that one day maybe you sort of look up and you realize that they’re gone.
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