Instead, they move to become a single, shadowy persona within the frame of Prologue –like young twins cast to tag-team one demanding role in a terse-but-tender film by Elia Kazan, haunted and hounded across a lonely landscape in search of the love that might provide their collective character a fleeting taste of both redemption and self-recognition.Īnd it isn’t only their singing voices that build this hall of mirrors for me: their songwriting and string work wind around each other like coarse briar at the base of a flag pole, confusing the mind as to how exactly it is fixed to the ground, while clearly keeping its banner raised high above the thorns, streaming if frayed.
So now has proved the case with Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan, The Milk Carton Kids: I listen and, try as I might, forget to hear them as distinct collaborators in song and story.
I was embarrassed when this mishearing was initially pointed out to me but had I been on the other end of that inadvertent deception I would have thrilled to it: the notion that a nameless Other might have been rendered so persuasively in song that the artists themselves disappeared fully into its arc and service. Honest: I heard it all as if coming from one central figure who had a voice all his own, and that neither lead singer in the band could wholly claim or account for. Before meeting them, I had been given their most recent album by way of introduction and I will confess here that upon first listen I became so seduced by the singular character that emerged from the songs, that I failed to register that there were actually two very different singers giving rise to him. Many years ago, in a moment of professional crisis, I took up for a spell with The Jayhawks, an earnest band from Minnesota with whom I shared a tour, a dog-eared sensibility, and the lack of sufficient patronage that might’ve kept us from sleeping triple in the double beds of hard-lit motel rooms scattered throughout the land of the Great Lakes.
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