Kevin Bronson on June 28th, 2018

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Over eight years and four albums, Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale were one of the best tag teams in folk music. As the Milk Carton Kids, they were nominated for a Grammy, named the Americana Music Association group of the year and earned comparisons to Simon & Garfunkel and the Everly Brothers. As a live attraction, their sublime harmonies, witty banter (à la the Smothers Brothers) and sibling-like rivalry sold out concert halls everywhere.

Then, Pattengale says, “There arose some sort of need for change.”

Their new album — titled, deep breath, “All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do” — comes as a result of many life changes. Pattengale had a cancer scare, moved to Nashville and watched a long relationship end. Ryan, a father of two, now works as a producer on the public radio show “Live from Here with Chris Thile.” And since the Kids released 2015’s “Monterey,” disharmony has rattled the American political and cultural landscape.

So after a distinguished career as a folk duo, Ryan and Pattengale have turned the page: “All the Things …” is a full-band record, and one with the emotive sweep that full-band records can have — one that reaches for the America in Americana. Produced by Joe Henry and releasing on Friday, the album features Brittany Haas on violin and mandolin, Paul Kowert and Dennis Crouch on bass, Jay Bellerose on drums, Levon Henry on clarinet and saxophone, Nat Smith on cello, Pat Sansone on piano and Hammond organ and Russ Pahl on pedal steel and other guitars.

“For eight years, we never played with anybody else … until last year,” Ryan told the crowd at Arroyo Seco Weekend on Saturday in introducing the new songs, adding, wryly, “We also found that some of our older songs we thought were shitty were fun again with five people playing with us.”

For devout followers of the Milk Carton Kids, the record will feel at once like a fresh start and a career summation. “There was a time I spoke the truth / but my younger years were wasted on my youth,” Ryan sings on “Younger Years.”

||| Stream: “Younger Years”

That new earth was being tilled was obvious immediately when, earlier this year, the first song from the album, “One More for the Road,” was released. It’s over 10 minutes long, with (gasp) guitar solos.

Buzz Bands LA caught up with the duo prior to their performance at Arroyo Seco to cover as many things about “All The Things …” as possible on a busy Saturday afternoon. We found that Ryan and Pattengale say a lot of things with a straight face.

Buzz Bands LA: You’ve worked with (producer) Joe Henry before. How did he react when you guys told him you wanted to make a 10-minute song?

Kenneth Pattengale: He didn’t say no, but he didn’t say yes.

Joey Ryan: He was very skeptical.

Pattengale: And it became a highlight. There’s really only two sections of the song. When we went into the studio, Joey and I played them the intro and then played them one verse. We told them we’re gonna do that and then two more verses, and then I’m just gonna play for 10 minutes, so nobody play an A or an A-flat. We tried it a second time, but by then everybody had too much information and it seemed too phony and orchestrated.

That first time through made the album then?

Pattengale: Yes, it was a one-take, 10-minute song that the brilliant marketing minds at our record label thought should be our first single of 2018.

||| Stream: “One More for the Road”

Did anybody along the way try to talk you out of it?

Ryan: We’ve always wanted to break into the festival scene. The High Sierra festival — we always wanted to play that, but you can’t do it unless you have a seven-minute guitar solo.

Pattengale: To his own credit and fault, Joe would probably be happy to hear Jay Bellerose drumming for two weeks. So I think he was happy to hear Jay drum for 10 minutes.

Ryan: So was I.

Were the songs written pretty much the same way you wrote songs to be presented as a duo?

Pattengale: It was … but we have this new album in duo form and it’s kinda not very good. It’s different from the other album in that the songs are pretty good but the arrangements aren’t very interesting. We intentionally left a lot of space and room — we hit the bullet points of what had to happen on the arrangement level and the emotional level, and assumed that some of the other information would be contributed by the other members. But as far as music and words, it kinda came together the same way it always did. (Pauses for effect) Which is that I do 90% of it and Joey does 10% of it.

Ryan: That’s not what the publishing agreements say, though.

Pattengale: There was a difference in knowing that we weren’t going to do it as a duo, because, and I think this is true of both of us, one of the reasons we wanted to have a band was because we have a few lanes that we go in as a duo. And as we start to write a song, you think, ‘OK, which lane of the duo is this one going to be in?’ Which ends up being a limiting thought. Casting that aside, I felt liberated.

Ryan: We didn’t have to think of anything as just a two-guitar, two-voice song. It could be anything in the world.

Did you find yourselves falling into an overall concept for the album?

Pattengale: It’s always a reflection of the present for the both of us. When you write songs, they have to be true. And unless you have a really good perspective of your own work, the best way to make that happen is to write about something that’s immediate. I think we’ve always done that, and here we are, seven years later, Joey and I, with a lot of shorthand between us [in terms of] what we do artistically and prosaically. Of course, we’re both seven years older, with a lot of stuff having gone down.

||| Stream: “Big Time”

Pattengale: It’s sort of a funny thing when you look back at your own career — we have some albums that are quite inspired on the songwriting front and we’ve got others that are less inspired on the songwriting front as they are on the aesthetic front. I think a few years from now we’ll look back on this one and think we were in a pretty good sweet spot when it comes to writing songs that had some emotional veracity to them.

The title suggests it should be somebody’s last album …

Ryan: It’s not self-referential in that way, but it does refer to what I see as the over-arching theme of the album, which is not something that was premeditated … but that a lot of the material came from somebody who’s just on the other side of something that’s ended.

Pattengale: It’s like the recapitulation scene that happens in every Alfred Hitchcock movie. You sum up what goes down for the last two hours… but there’s always another movie. Until “Topaz” and then he dies.

Ryan: So we’re gonna keep going until Kenneth dies.

Pattengale: Actually, we’re going to be like Alfred Hitchcock. Every one of our albums is going to be a recapitulation of our lives up to that point.

It sounds like a lot of inventory is being taken.

Pattengale: There is, but the inventory references the narrators in the songs, not the band. … There’s also a track the title comes from — the last. The ending line of each verse …

Ryan: Which makes it very much a recapitulation song. There are a few other times on the record where something just ended, and the song is from the perspective of recapping it, trying to make sense of it — political stuff and personal stuff.

||| Stream: “I’ve Been Loving You”

After all these years of performing as a duo and having to carry the stage as just two, is it daunting playing with a full band? Does it feel like you’ve just started something brand new?

Pattengale: Artistically it is illuminating. Financially it feels daunting (laughs).

Ryan: And yes it feels like we started something brand new, 100%.

Pattengale: But it feels good. It’s liberating. We made the album this way, and if there would have been any moment of fear, it would have come during that. But making the album happened in such a natural way, and we were happy with the results, it’s been more excitement than it is fear. So we have kind of a crib sheet for putting the band together. We know what we’re going for.

We spent a week in Nashville last month, just in a room figuring it out. There are always growing pains, but there were growing pains even near the end of our tenure as a duo. There are always gonna be times when you say, ‘Hey, do you have to do it that way? Can you take another look at that?’

There’s a commonality in vision and language among these players from the outset, because of the kind of musicians they are. They’re all very smart and generous and melodic. They’re friends and good people, and all that adds up to not too much anxiety. For us, it feels more like an adventure than anything else.

||| Live: The Milk Carton Kids headline the Theatre at Ace Hotel on Nov. 6, joined by the Barr Brothers. Tickets on sale Friday (Presale now with code FIREWORKS).