55 Shows On The Road To Make An Entire Record

Given the immense success enjoyed by The Milk Carton Kids’ third album, The Ash & Clay — their first to receive proper label distribution, the first two having been released for free and more a calling card for their live show — it’s somewhat surprising that they would want to meddle with the successful formula for the follow-up. That record’s mix of strong songwriting, old-time instrumentation and soaring harmonies proved a massive winner in the Americana scene following its 2013 release, eventually scoring the duo — Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale — a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, as well as bringing home the prestigious Duo/Group Of The Year gong at the Americana Music Association Awards. 

Instead of allowing these successes to become a burden when it came time to record the inevitable follow-up, the friends decided to take the pressure off themselves and demystify the recording process by making it just another part of the daily itinerary whilst they were put on the road doing what they do best. The result is brand new long-player Monterey, a wonderful extension of the lineage that the pair have been creating which expands their palette without diluting their core appeal or authenticity.

"We did give ourselves a mandate for the way that we wanted to approach making the record which was to get away from the preciousness and overly singular focus."

“I’ve been enjoying our first proper vacation in five years. Not a vacation, but our first extended time off the road in five years,” explains the affable Ryan, before explaining why their recent wins didn’t add too much burden of expectation. “I was nervous that that thing would enter our minds, but it didn’t seem to — the consideration of the fact that there was a modest — I’d even call it meager — audience that we could count on to at least listen to our new album seems not to have entered into the process of making the album at all. Once Kenneth and I get into the room together and start fighting about songs pretty much all other considerations go out the window except for just getting to the point where we’re both happy with the thing.

“We did not give ourselves a mandate for what the songs should be about, but we did give ourselves a mandate for the way that we wanted to approach making the record which was to get away from the preciousness and overly singular focus in making the record; we decided that we would do it on tour, where each day recording the album was just another thing we were doing that day, in addition to travelling, in addition to playing a show and in addition to sound-checking. We knew that we wanted to be not so precious about it as we’d been in the past.”

The pair’s economic set-up is part of their charm — continuing to uphold the finest folk traditions — but this also happened to abet their recording sessions for Monterey perfectly.

“Our entire set-up is just four microphones — I guess when we play a show now we just use one microphone — but we used to use four, so in the studio we only use four microphones,” Ryan explains. “That puts us in the unique position of being able to record ourselves everywhere, and as long as we’ve invested in the proper equipment there’s not an inherent difference between us recording on a stage and recording in a studio. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a really small amount of equipment we need to lug around in order to set up a really high quality studio anywhere we go. The sound quality shouldn’t have suffered at all, in our opinion if anything it’s actually enhanced by the actual sounds of the rooms we were playing in, which was another part of the point — we were playing for the first time in some really beautiful theatres and churches, and it seemed a waste not to capture the sounds of ourselves in those rooms.”

Ryan explains that the album sessions also marked a new creative phase in their songwriting partnership, where’s it become a true collaboration in every sense of the word.

“We were writing on the road and we were writing together on the road and separately on the road,” he tells. “The goal was to make the entire album on the road, and we had 55 shows to do it, but we only got through half of the album in that amount of time. So we continued writing after that and then we spent some time in the Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville, which functions sometimes as a music venue — we treated that is it were our 56th show on the tour and our 56th stage to record upon. We still didn’t want to go into a studio to finish the album which we’d started on stages. 

“Our entire set-up is just four microphones."

“So we wrote the whole time – we wrote before the tour, we wrote on the tour, we wrote after the tour and we wrote together and separately. For the first time I think that there are a great many songs that one or the other of us started, and then the other one finished in a very significant way. Like on some of the songs some of the songs half of the lyrics are one of us and half of the lyrics are the other. I guess we’ve intensified what I thought could not be any more of an intense collaboration.”

Does Ryan enjoy this new creative approach?

“I do, yeah, I do,” he affirms. “One of the things we do when we write that way is that we make a point not to tell the other person what the song you’re writing is supposed to be about, and in that we each become interpreters of each other’s songs and are allowed to add to them based on that interpretation. I think it’s remarkable and a great feeling to interpret Kenneth’s song and add lyrics to it, in a way that makes him happy in a completion — that makes him feel, ‘Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say’. I know that for myself it’s an amazing feeling to show somebody half of a song and to have them finish it in a way that gets at exactly what you were trying to say without having told them explicitly what you were after.”

Having seen The Milk Carton Kids’ inaugural Australian tour the pair’s intense rapport was obvious, and it must be great having this morph into creative process.

“Yeah, we never get a break from it ourselves,” Ryan laughs. “The audience is allowed a little respite.”

The pair’s idiosyncratic approach to recording the new album also gives new meaning to the term DIY, with basically no outside parties being involved in the album sessions until remarkably late in proceedings. Sifting through the hundreds of hours of recorded sessions, for example, wasn’t outside the band’s purview.

"It’s an amazing feeling to show somebody half of a song and to have them finish it."

“Yeah, Kenneth as the recording engineer and mixing engineer took on the task of mining,” Ryan smiles. “We didn’t record all 55 days because some of the venues weren’t suitable to it, but I think we recorded 25 or 30 days for several hours on each of those days. Obviously in a studio you’d have somebody taking notes as the takes go by as to what might have been a good take and what would be worth looking back at, but we didn’t have anybody with us — it was just the two of us in the room the entire time — so he was really starting from scratch when delving into all of those sessions. It was an unenviable task. Also not very much of it was very good, because as I mentioned a lot of it we’d just written that day so they didn’t come together for a couple of weeks, so there’s a lot of days of us really learning songs in front of microphones instead of really recording them. I think what he was looking for was that first time that we actually sounded like we knew how to play the song. Which is often the best take, because you’re still discovering it but it sounds like you’ve been playing it for ages — it sounds like you know what you’re doing but it still feels new.”

It must take pressure off, one assumes, not knowing whether a given take is the take?

“That’s exactly right, and I’ve really been remarking about how much of an effect that has on your performances, thinking that this is not the one or doesn’t have to be the one,” Ryan concurs. “There’s nothing worse than that take in the studio where it’s getting late in the day and you’re, like, ‘Okay, we gotta get another song after this one and we don’t have this one yet so this take has gotta be it’. There’s nothing worse than that for me.”

Was this recording exercise because the duo found studios sterile or was it more a case of just something interesting and different to do?

“If I give the really honest answer, it was a lot of factors,” Ryan reflects. “It’s not that studios are sterile, it’s just that the way that we’d done it in the past was in a very short amount of time and we’d fallen victim to this sense of being under a microscope — the sense that every single note and every single nuance and every single inflection has this immense importance to it. I think that we tended to lose sight of the bigger picture, and just the feeling of the song, which is all we ever focus on when we play shows. I think we wanted to zoom out a little bit and capture the thing in broad strokes. Ironically, this record is think — at least when I listen to Kenneth’s guitar playing — is by the far the most nuanced and intricate of the records that we’ve made. Maybe it’s ironic that by not focusing on those things that those things are allowed the room to actually flourish. So there was that, and then the other thing is that there’s just a terrible lot of wasted time on our normally, and we figured, ‘Why the hell not make a record instead of wasting our time?’”

Of course The Milk Carton Kids’ music is far from being an exercise in style over substance, no matter how great they sound the band wouldn’t have gained so much traction if the songs themselves weren’t strong. The pair’s lyrics are an important part of the puzzle — does Ryan believe that there’s an overarching theme to Monterey?

"There used to be a romantically intriguing aspect to it, but now it takes an effort to see the positive."

“All of the talk of themes so far has come from the outside — has come from other people conjecturing as to what the themes are and might be — but I’m willing to look back on it to decipher whether there’s any lyrical through-lines, and I think there are but they’re definitely not intentional,” he ponders. “To me there does seem to be this sort of obsession with this duality that I think everybody has inside of them — but you feel it in a very pronounced way when you’re a transient, travelling person — and that is these contradictory desires both for movement and a sense of restlessness and a desire for newness and freshness, but also for a sense of place and a sense of belonging and a sense of permanence. I think the push and pull between those two polar opposite desires kind of runs through the album more than a majority of the songs.”   

Some of the words on Monterey are quite dark in places, a continuation of the themes prevalent on The Ash & Clay.

“Yeah, it’s always dark,” Ryan admits. “It’s always pretty dark. I hope that nobody thinks that we’re miserable people, because we’re really doing okay.”

When The Music catches up with Ryan the pair are in the midst of their first extended break from the road in five years — does the gruelling lifestyle he alluded to earlier wear them down after a while?

“If I’m being honest yes it’s tough, or it became tough,” he muses. “I never know how to say this without sounding unappreciative, but the 90 minutes that we spend onstage every night is the single thing that we love to do most in the world, and that’s why we travel all over the world so that we can do that every night. But if we could do that every night and stay in the same place, I think that we would do that instead. Do you see what I’m saying? And if I’m being honest I still do enjoy going to new places, but we’ve been to a lot of the places already now that we go, and we don’t get to see much more of a place each time we go there because you only get a few hours and you’ve got to play a show. So the travel itself and being away from our families, I would say that there used to be a romantically intriguing aspect to it, but now it takes an effort to see the positive in that side of things for its own sake. 

“It’s a means to an end — it’s a means to be able to perform every night, which by far is worth it. But I don’t recommend this much travel unless you really fucking love whatever it is that you’re travelling to do. That’s why I never understand truck drivers. When we tour we always end up at truck stops for one reason or another, and in the beginning I felt a kinship with them — we’re sharing the highway, we’re sharing the truckstops, we get to know the routes — then I realised that they’re just driving, they’re not doing anything at the end of the drive that makes the drive worth it. They’re just driving, and I don’t know how they do it. They’re like the unsung heroes of the American roads: they’re out there driving, and then they drop their thing off the back of the truck and then drive back. God bless ‘em.”