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The Milk Carton Kids – Holiday Tour 2025 w/ Humbird

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Founded in 2011, The Milk Carton Kids — Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale — swiftly emerged as a major force in the American folk tradition, blending ethereal harmonies and intricate musicianship with a uniquely powerful brand of contemporary songcraft. Their 2013 debut The Ash & Clay marked their national breakthrough, earning them their first Grammy Award nomination for Best Folk Album. Another Grammy nomination followed in 2015 for Best American Roots Performance with "The City of Our Lady" from their acclaimed third studio album, Monterey, and their 2018 album All The Things That I Did and All The Things That I Didn't Do received a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Their most recent album, 2019's The Only Ones, garnered extensive praise, with Rolling Stone highlighting that "Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan get back to the beautiful basics with The Only Ones," while NPR's "World Café" noted that "even though Joey and Kenneth are not related, their voices together create a sibling-like harmony…the duo has a strong sense of respect and reverence for the musical traditions that they've grown from.

The Milk Carton Kids were nominated for "Best Folk Album" for their new record I Only See The Moon at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards. This marked the group's fourth Grammy nomination.

I Only See The Moon is out now to critical acclaim on Far Cry Records in partnership with Thirty Tigers.

"Both of us have now lived enough life to understand that maybe one of the purposes we were put on Earth for is to sing together, to write songs together, to make music together," notes guitarist/vocalist Kenneth Pattengale. "It has truly provided a direction for our lives." Ryan adds, "It's like a successful marriage in that there's always been enough there between us collaboratively in the way that we work together, sing together, play together. It's a very special thing. And I don't think we ever took that for granted."

The Milk Carton Kids

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Artist Bio

Grammy-nominated harmony duo The Milk Carton Kids released their third album, Monterey on May 19, 2015. A refreshing alternative to the foot-stomping grandeur of the so-called “folk revival,” an understated virtuosity defines The Milk Carton Kids and their new album. The two years since the release of their last album, The Ash & Clay, have been significant ones for the group. In addition to a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, The Milk Carton Kids won Duo/Group of the Year at the Americana Music Awards in 2014. Their featured performances and interviews in T Bone Burnett & the Coen Brothers' concert documentary, "Another Day/Another Time,” brought the band its widest audience and their 55-city North American tour last year sold out months in advance. Cultural purveyors from Garrison Keillor to T Bone Burnett to Billy Bragg have hailed the duo’s importance among a group of new folk bands, both expanding and contradicting the rich tradition that precedes them. Yet while some of the band’s many accolades reference a specific genre, the duo quickly transcends those tags with clear inflections of jazz, classical, even the dark lyricism of modern “alternative." This past year, The Milk Carton Kids were asked to pay tribute to Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris — Cash on the Joe Henry-produced remake of “Bitter Tears,” and Harris with their standing ovation performance at the tribute concert “The Life & Songs of Emmylou Harris,” among luminaries including Kris Kristofferson, Mavis Staples, Alison Kraus, Iron & Wine, and Harris herself. If Cash and Harris taught us that American music is meant to be taken at its expansive word, without confines or borders, The Milk Carton Kids appear to have taken the lesson to heart.

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