If you don’t know, the Milk Carton Kids are an indie folk duo with Americana sensibilities. They’ve been on my playlist since I saw them on youtube on an NPR Tiny Desk concert. Kind of a Simon & Garfunkel for the folk revival era, string-plucking vocalists Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale are fascinating entertainers. Armed only with 50s-era guitars, smart writing, and boyish grins, the Milk Carton Kids are on my to-see list.
I wanted to share the 2014 NPR-produced show, “Live at Lincoln Theatre.” It’s a gem. Retro- and intro-spective melodic folk songs are interlaced with Joey Ryan’s Dryasdust commentary on their most recent album, including a typographical history, instructions on pronunciation, and a definition of “eponymous.” The definition is hardly needed for the crowd at the Lincoln Theatre. Joey Ryan claims that 75% of their fans are English majors, including one who is able to distinguish between a generic symbol and a ligature. What follows is a mini-lecture from the musician on the philology of the the ampersand.
Overall, worth sharing for word nerds and roots music lovers alike.
Do they explain why ‘Milk Carton Kids’? It made me think of playing the jug, somehow – though, come to think of it, I tend to treat emptying cartons as percussion…
(But I shall have to watch and find out for myself…)
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Not in that show, but in the NPR Tiny Desk show, they say they named their band after a character in a story they wrote.
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Thanks!
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Interim snapshot: I enjoyed the ‘sound’, especially the guitar playing, but trying to listen while doing dishes and getting dinner ready does not ‘do justice’ to a ‘proper hearing’ (!) That is not such a surprise – ‘big’ instrumental works (or even familiar choral works) are more likely to ‘succeed’ (‘survive’?!) in such circumstances (across the room, against splash and sizzle). Beyond that, I wonder, when I can hear and attend properly, whether I will wish for subtitles, or, better yet, the lyrics typed out – for your comparison with Simon & Garfunkel and reference to “smart writing” justly indicate these are ‘art song’ folk songs, which seem to take some following fully to ‘get’ (my first impression anyway: I want to get better acquainted with the definitely poetic elusive reclusive Nobel Laureate, with texts before me, too!)
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“art song” folk songs is something different, though I don’t know if it is all poetry (Bob Dylan excepted? No, I don’t think so. Some of his music is just credible doo wap). Most any pop song, though, will sound dumb if you read it aloud in a really serious voice.
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Interesting to try to think of song-lyric as distinct from poem-set-to-music (where providing the text in the former case is a sort of courteous helpful concession, an aid to comfortable following of the whole thing, words and music together) – and i wonder where the fascinating phenomenon of metrical text set to different tunes fits in (and, so, different texts to the same tune, too)?
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