Description
The Milk Carton Kids – All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do – Milky Clear Double Vinyl Record
The Milk Carton Kids had built their reputation around two voices and two acoustic guitars when they made All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do. For this 2018 release, Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale brought a full band into the studio for the first time, opening their songs to arrangements that no longer had to be reproduced by the duo alone. The close harmonies remain the immediate point of recognition. Around them, producer Joe Henry creates a larger musical environment that allows the writing to move through grief, doubt, and reflection with new shades of color.
Recorded in Nashville in 2017 with engineer Ryan Freeland, the album draws on an ensemble suited to quiet detail as well as broader gestures. Brittany Haas, Jay Bellerose, Russ Pahl, Pat Sansone, and Levon Henry are among the musicians contributing to its expanded palette. Violin, pedal steel, keyboards, reeds, and percussion give Ryan and Pattengale more choices about how a song can develop. The arrangements leave their vocal relationship intact, letting the familiar blend sit inside textures that can feel spacious, restless, or gently supportive depending on the material.
The record arrived after significant changes in the musicians’ personal lives and a break from their established touring routine. That background helps explain the questioning tone of “Nothing Is Real” and the wider unease of “Mourning in America.” The writing moves between private experience and a less secure sense of the world outside it. Even when the language points toward loss, the performances retain a sense of conversation. Ryan and Pattengale’s intertwined voices give these songs a shared perspective, allowing difficult subjects to be approached with restraint rather than theatrical emphasis.
“One More for the Road” is the clearest measure of the album’s ambition, stretching beyond ten minutes and allowing an instrumental passage to occupy a scale unusual in the duo’s earlier work. Its length makes room for the expanded band to become part of the storytelling. Elsewhere, the concise “You Break My Heart” and the reflective “Younger Years” show that the project still values the shape of a traditional song. Moving between those different proportions gives the record room to breathe without asking every selection to carry the same weight or use the same arrangement.
The closing “All the Things…” brings the long journey back toward a quieter setting, its bowed-bass texture providing a gentle final frame. This milky clear double-vinyl edition contains the full twelve-song album, including that extended central performance. It documents a meaningful change in the Milk Carton Kids’ approach: the vocal partnership remains the foundation, while the surrounding musicians broaden the ways their songs can be expressed. Listeners drawn to contemporary folk and carefully arranged Americana will find an album that makes its larger scale serve the intimacy of the writing.
Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic
Track Listing
Just Look at Us Now
Nothing Is Real
Younger Years
Mourning in America
You Break My Heart
Blindness
One More for the Road
Big Time
A Sea of Roses
Unwinnable War
I've Been Loving You
All the Things…
