Fifteen years after quietly redefining modern folk music with the sparse beauty of Prologue, the Milk Carton Kids’ Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale remain committed to the idea that subtlety can still cut the deepest emotional swath. Across seven studio albums, four Grammy nominations, acclaimed songwriting workshops and the launch of the Los Angeles Folk Festival, they’ve steadily expanded their reach without abandoning the intimate chemistry that’s made them one of the most distinctive acts in contemporary Americana.
Produced be Pattengale, Lost Cause Lover Fool (Far Cry/Thirty Tigers) is the duo’s first collection of original material in three years. Built around nine quietly devastating songs that magnify both fleeting impressions and pivotal internal moments, the LP balances the Milk Carton Kids’ trademark minimalism with expanded arrangements and fleshed-out instrumentation that includes banjo, drums and choral backing vocals. Yet even as their sonic reach (somewhat) broadens, the duo’s guiding principle of restraint remains—and it may be the purest representation yet of what makes the Milk Carton Kids so subtly compelling.
MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland recently touched based with Ryan to discuss the freedom of recording in their own studio, fortuitous film placements and why mellow music still matters.
Lost Cause Lover Fool is your seventh studio album. How have you progressed musically—and perhaps even stayed the same—since your first album 15 years ago?
In some ways, we’re still chasing the same thing we were on Prologue, which is just trying to make our separate instruments and voices disappear into each other. The difference now is we’re less distracted by the idea that it needs to be limited to that—or that we need to achieve anything more than that. Over time, we’ve gotten more comfortable narrowing the lens, even when we’re adding more sonic elements.
How did the recording process for this LP differ from 2023’s I Only See The Moon?
Process wise, it was actually pretty similar. We learned a lot from making I Only See The Moon and the Christmas In A Minor Key album after that. Having our own studio to work in has really shaped our process and made recording much more integrated into our daily lives, rather than a singular, often rushed process. I will say that, with Lost Cause Lover Fool, we kept finding ourselves pulling things back toward the center. A lot of it came down to performance—capturing moments, being OK with them as snapshots of an emotion and moving on.
How has your own vision for the Milk Carton Kids changed since 2011?
At the beginning, the vision was mostly instinct. We stumbled into something that felt honest and then tried not to mess it up. Now there’s a little more awareness of what that thing is—but the aim is still not to make a spectacle out of it. If anything, the vision has become about restraint. Letting the songs exist without pushing them to announce themselves. Trusting that if we do less but do it carefully, it might land a little deeper.
TV and film placement is the norm for successful bands these days, and the Milk Carton Kids have had a lot of success with it over the years. What’s your secret?
I don’t think we’ve ever approached it as something to chase, but the few higher-profile opportunities we’ve had have been super rewarding, especially with Gus Van Sant on Promised Land early on. He saw us open for k.d. lang and asked us for songs for his new movie. So I guess one secret is: Play shows with k.d. lang. But generally, those opportunities have come when songs already live in a certain emotional space that a story needs. If there’s a secret, it’s probably just staying out of the way.
How do you see the Milk Carton Kids’ influence in today’s bands?
We like to flatter ourselves with the thought that we’re contributing to the idea that you don’t have to get louder to be heard, that there’s room for music that leans into restraint. We came up during a time when folk was trending toward something bigger and more percussive. If anything, we’ve just tried to hold a quieter line alongside that.
See the Milk Carton Kids live.
