Milk carton kids sea of roses7/5/2023 ![]() ![]() “Nobody’s sui generis anymore,” she says. Rosanne Cash recognized the duo as altogether original. Their vocal performances were more akin to Simon and Garfunkel, their stage banter reminiscent of the Smothers Brothers. People in my profession, prone to drawing comparisons, would drop names in those days like Welch and Rawlings, though I suspect this was primarily because of Ryan and Pattengale’s balanced guitar work. Underpinning it all was The Milk Carton Kids’ quietly devastating lyricism, which they delivered on a bed of Pattengale’s flurried fretwork and Ryan’s well-moored rhythm guitar. “It’s almost like when a song is so sad, you have to have something to make the pill go down, so to speak,” says sad song master Emmylou Harris. But there they were, in their suits, delivering the heartbreak songs, peppered with their Who’s-On-First-style back-and-forth banter. The Milk Carton Kids weren’t reinventing the wheel, then, so much as building a new vehicle atop it.Īnd anyway, not many folkies can say they launched their career and landed on stage at Newport just two summers later. Even they were pulling from a long tradition of bootlegging that boosted the careers of everyone from Bob Dylan to the Grateful Dead-a tradition that was led by fans and eventually became something artists tapped into themselves. ![]() Thus, the sub-corporate, non-dollar-driven distribution of music had already been proven to have legs by the indie folkies who came before. Twenty years earlier, indie-folk icon Ani DiFranco rose to prominence not by selling CDs as much as shucking cassettes that people then copied and passed around dorm rooms. “But, really, we wanted whoever had the desire to listen to be able to do so.” “We joked to our fans they could ‘choose whichever option they thought correlated to what type of person they thought they were,’” Pattengale remembered. As though a song is nothing more than a widget whose production can and should be streamlined. It came a decade before Spotify CEO Daniel Ek suggested artists who want to make a decent living from their music should simply make more of it. The decision to separate music from its own commodification was as rooted in the tradition of “folk” as anything.Īfter all, the duo’s free-if-you-want-it download of Prologue came a decade after Gillian Welch predicted, “We’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay” on her Time (The Revelator) album. While many in the music media found this to be somewhat of a gimmick, I found it delightfully folky. zip folder with the MP3s and a PDF of the album art and liners, for free. If folks wanted to skip all the paper and plastic, they could download a. They printed CDs, which they sold for actual money at their shows, and a limited run of vinyl. The Milk Carton Kids chose to exist in the in-between. Others were pushing vinyl, which seemed like a comical throwback at the time but has since proven timeless. Some artists at the regional Folk Alliance gatherings in those days were selling their music in dozen-song sets on thumb drives. Exactly how an indie folk band could reify their music for their fans in that moment between the dominance of the tangible and that of the digital, was still somewhat of anyone’s guess. Back then, Apple’s music program was a behemoth bit of software you downloaded onto your machine and filled with songs that you had either purchased from their store in MP3 format or uploaded from a CD you had on a shelf in your living room. It’s hard to believe now, but those were still the days before Spotify’s dominance. Once at their microphones, they moved through a set of heart-rending originals from Prologue, an album they’d released for free online almost two years earlier, the power of which had landed them a slot at North America’s most storied folk music festival. But the singer-songwriters seemed jovial enough, ready to take the stage under the shade of the tent. I felt a pang of pity for Ryan and Pattengale’s underarms, pressed below so much suit and tie, in that heat. Farther, Newport Harbor, the Atlantic, beyond. Over the fort walls, a mainstage and field crowded with people. ![]()
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