eTown Live Taping with The Milk Carton Kids and Courtney Hartman

Doors: 6 p.m.
Show: 7 p.m.
All Ages Welcome
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About The Milk Carton Kids:
On their seventh studio album, Lost Cause Lover Fool (due April 24 on Far Cry/Thirty Tigers), The Milk Carton Kids offer nine songs that, more than ever, invite listeners to lean in close and linger inside the small moments the record quietly magnifies.
When Los Angeles–based singer-songwriters Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan first emerged in 2011, they did so with a sound as unassuming as their “marketing” plan. They recorded their 10-song debut, Prologue, with just their two guitars and two voices.
They posted it online as a free download, sending the link to friends via email. Even amidst the foot stomps and hand claps carrying folk into the mainstream, hundreds of thousands of people managed to find Prologue in that first year. From the beginning, The Milk Carton Kids were more interested in precision than volume.
“We were very conscious back then of trying to make our two voices sound like one thing,” Joey recalls. “And we wanted our guitars to sound like one instrument too.”
That instinct toward unity and understatement became the foundation of a career that steadily expanded without ever losing its center.
Fast-forward fifteen years, through chaotic world events, a global pandemic and its aftermath. Through Joey’s two children and Kenneth’s move to Nashville then back to LA, his bout with cancer. The pair went from darlings of the Americana Music Association Festival to hosting its annual awards show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.
They started their own Sad Songs Summer Camp, helping songwriters dig deeper and darker through an intense workshopping process. They also founded the Los Angeles Folk Festival, spotlighting musicians and comedians in the broader folk community. (In its first two years, the festival has featured performances by Emmylou Harris, Waxahatchee, Sierra Ferrell, Willie Watson, Valerie June and more.)
Along the way, the duo has received four Grammy nominations and their songs have been featured in numerous film and TV projects, from Gus Van Zandt’s Promised Land to Tina Fey’s goofball comedy series Girls5Eva. They’ve collaborated with a who’s who of players from Joe Henry and Rosanne Cash to Sara Bareilles and Josh Ritter.
Through all of it, The Milk Carton Kids have remained committed to a deceptively simple idea: music can help turn down the volume on a chaotic world and make room for what matters most.
Lost Cause Lover Fool is the clearest distillation of that idea yet. With roots-leaning arrangements and a deep trust in space, the album expands the duo’s signature minimalist sound while somehow making it even more focused.
“This album is, at its core, a collection of songs about transformation,” Kenneth explains. “About the shifting terrain of consciousness and the stories we build to understand who we’ve been, who we are and who we’re becoming. Each song takes a single moment, sometimes examined with microscopic closeness and sometimes viewed from a great distance, and lets it expand until it becomes an entire world. By enlarging small feelings until they’re inhabitable, the record looks for eternity not in the sweeping or monumental, but in the intimate specifics that usually pass too quickly to notice.”
The record opens with “Blue Water,” led by the lonesome pluck of a banjo. Handled with restraint, the instrument feels less like traditional bluegrass and more like morning light cast across a stretch of grass. Lyrically, the song captures a fleeting image: a man walking along a river, thinking about the child who once lay on his chest and now shares his worried mind. It’s a moment so slight it could easily be dismissed, except that it holds an emotion as universal as it is brief.
That instinct to pause, to hover, to honor passing thoughts runs through the entire album. The songs on Lost Cause Lover Fool live in interior spaces, where the act of noticing becomes a kind of devotion.
The title track drifts through an unsettled internal monologue, its narrator caught between confidence and doubt as memory and worry begin to resemble one another. “Sometimes I’m tough / Sometimes I’m not enough / Sometimes I think of you,” Kenneth sings, as the song circles its thoughts without resolving them. “A Friend Like You” recalls a road trip through Texas and New Mexico and the particular ache of sharing space with someone when the most important things remain unspoken. “Blinded and Smiling” compresses joy, love and mortality into the instant it takes to snap a photograph, reckoning with how quickly even the happiest moments slip into the past.
“Young Love” closes the album by wondering what ever became of a long-ago companion. As melancholy as that question might be, in The Milk Carton Kids’ hands it feels quietly illuminating, as though the riverside walk where the album began has led back into a clearing. The past may be painful to revisit, but letting the mind wander through it can also bring perspective and grace.
Musically, the duo continues the subtle expansion of their palette. There’s banjo, drums and choral backing vocals, all pulling toward a unified center. Even as their arrangements grow richer, the goal remains the same.
“As we're adding more and more layers,” Joey says, “we're still drawn to the idea of a sound where the pieces give themselves up to the greater whole.”
At just nine songs, Lost Cause Lover Fool resists excess by design. Its brevity is not a limitation but a philosophy. A quiet argument for mindfulness, economy and attention. In an age of constant noise and endless content, The Milk Carton Kids make a case for staying small, staying present and listening closely. It’s what they’ve always done.
Lost Cause Lover Fool doesn’t strain for relevance or make a spectacle of itself. It simply pauses long enough for the listener to step inside. It reminds us, gently but insistently, that the smallest moments are often the ones that last.
About Courtney Hartman:
Courtney Hartman’s newest album, With You, invites listeners into a room of friends, inside a circle of care and generosity. The record is a full pendulum swing from Hartman’s 2021 release, Glade, an album she recorded mostly alone while living in a barn on the same Colorado property where she grew up. With You was written, funded and recorded with a wide community of friends and musical collaborators. The album was co-written with other mothers in the music industry and recorded with those who upheld Hartman through her own journey of becoming a mother.
The songs began in the quiet and isolation of a heavy season for Hartman. She and her husband were in the middle of gutting and rebuilding their small 1930s home in Eau Claire, WI, when they found out they were pregnant. “In the months that followed, a string of unexpected challenges arose,” she describes. “We experienced a peeling away in our life. My husband fell off a ladder and couldn’t walk for multiple months. He lost two jobs. I was dropped by my booking agent. We totaled our car.I had planned to make an album in the fall, but we ended up needing to survive off the money I’d saved to record it.”
During a writing retreat at Everwood Farm, Hartman felt a nudge to set aside the songs she was finishing to record and instead write through the journey of becoming a mother. “I was resistant,” she said. “It wasn’t something I wanted to write about or share publicly. Pregnancy was the most miraculous and wild experience of my life, but it felt vulnerable and uncomfortable to write about.”
But she listened, laying down her plans for that initial album to continue writing. “I didn’t realize it until later, but writing about what was happening in my body gave my heart something to pay attention to other than the chaos of our life in that season.”
At eight months pregnant, with no working kitchen, Hartman would sing while washing dishes and tools in the bathtub, circumventing her wide belly to reach over the edge. “I’d sing-yell over the sound of the water to keep myself from spiraling,” she remembers, laughing. “Maybe it helped.”
They finished up the essentials just a few days before their daughter arrived. And in the early hours of labor, Hartman wrote what became “Softening,” the song that begins and ends With You.
The summer after her daughter was born, as Hartman navigated the newness of motherhood and bouts of postpartum depression, she began making a list of mothers who had continued a life of creative work amidst caregiving. Her list spilled over the page and she began reaching out, inviting these women into the songs she had begun. “I can see now that I was looking for women a few steps ahead of me in the journey, to take my hand and show me that I would make it through.”
Sarah Siskind, Dawn Landes, Ana Egge, Tift Merritt, Kristin Andreassen and Emily Frantz Marlin of Watchhouse became Hartman’s co-writers alongside musical guests Rachel Sermanni, Ruth Ungar, Michaela Anne, Sarah Elstran, Liz Eldridge and Sarah Krueger. “It was clear what a wide net of mothers there were, present and past, to lean on and learn from,” said Hartman. “There were many others I watched from a distance — Allison Russell, Sara Watkins, Aoife O’Donavan, Abigail Washburn, Leslie Feist and Anaïs Mitchell — knowing that I could make it through because they had.”
With her album budget spent on groceries and bills, Hartman knew she would need financial help to record again. For the first time in her career, she turned to her community-at-large, through crowdfunding. “Asking for help like this was one of the hardest things I had ever done,” she said. “But 557 friends, family and fans came alongside me to help bring With Youinto being. I’ve never felt more humbled or more supported.”
That support allowed her to record With You with her musical community in Eau Claire. “I wanted to create this music with friends who had walked alongside my family, seen us on our lowest days, cooked us meals, pounded nails into our floorboards and brought light into our lives,” she said. Hartman gathered at Brian Joseph’s studio, hive, with her local musical companions Sean Carey and Ben Lester and her former bandmate Zoe Guigueno. They spent two weeks together, recording music during the day and sharing meals together in the studio meadow at night. A long list of musical guests joined in through both careful planning and some serious serendipity.
“The two records I listened to incessantly that year were Watchhouse’s duo album and Phil Cook’s All These Years,” said Hartman. Cook came through town to be with family and stopped into the studio early one day. He and Hartman sat in the control room improvising together and then recorded “Hindsight.” Later in the week, Watchhouse was playing a local festival and spent a few hours at the studio, singing together in the live room on a rainy summer morning. Together they tracked “Can You See,” a song Hartman had finished writing with Frantz Marlin a few months earlier. “Both of those sessions were done in a single room, eyes on each other, headphones off,” she remembers. “The songs came about with such ease.”
In its essence, With You is about the transformative power of care — the choice to stay beside each other even in seasons when the walking is labored and slow. As Hartman writes in the title track: Go easy now / learning to move again / see how the burden shifts / breathing alongside you / moving in rhythm with you. Hartman hopes this album provides a sense of companionship. “I want these songs to bring a lightness into someone’s day, to celebrate the often-invisible work of caring for one another,” she said. “And I want you, the listener, to feel seen.”