The Milk Carton Kids are a Grammy-nominated duo who have released 6+ records. We talk about defining what success looks like on your own terms, setting boundaries to open doors, record making, and plenty of tangents and laughs.
The Milk Carton Kids are a Grammy-nominated duo who have released 6+ records. We talk about defining what success looks like on your own terms, setting boundaries to open doors, record making, and plenty of tangents and laughs.
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All music written, performed, and produced by Aaron Shafer-Haiss.
[00:00:00] Aaron: Hey, and welcome to today's episode of the Other 22 Hours podcast. I'm your host, Aaron Shafer-Haiss.
[00:00:05] Michaela: And I'm your other host, Michaela Anne. And since this show is in its infancy, I'm assuming you're a new listener. So thank you for checking us out.
[00:00:13] Aaron: This is called the other 22 Hours podcast because we like to focus on the time that we're not on stage the other time in the day that's maybe outside of the public eye, and ask our guests what they do to keep their inspiration and their creativity up.
[00:00:24] Michaela: Between the two of us, Aaron and I have almost 25 years of experience in the music business. I've spent the better part of the last decade putting out records both on my own and with labels touring the world and building an independent career.
[00:00:38] Aaron: And I started making records in high school with friends and then spent a lot of years on the road with different bands and playing gigs around whatever town I was living in as a sideman. And now I find that being in the studio and producing records and writing music for TV is what keeps me going.
And so essentially through all this time, Michaela and I have really realized there's no one right way to build a career around your passion.
[00:00:58] Michaela: And in an industry that can feel out of our control, everything's left up to luck, who you know, being in the right place at the right time, and constantly changing, we wanted to focus on what is within our control.
[00:01:11] Aaron: And so with that in mind, we decided to have our friends on to have conversations about creativity, head space, and things that we do to create sustainability in our lives so we can sustain our creativity.
On today's show, we have the Milk Carton Kids, which is our first show with a band with more than one person.
[00:01:28] Michaela: Yeah, and we've known Joey and Kenneth for a long time and gotten to tour with them as well.
So it was really exciting to get to talk to them and hear firsthand how they have been evolving and learning how to sustain this life as a musician, not only individually, but together as a duo.
[00:01:48] Aaron: So inherently, I think we talked a lot about boundaries.. We talked a lot about knowing yourself and knowing what you want and what you want to get.
[00:01:57] Michaela: Yeah. And how to stay centered in that regardless of what is pulling you from the outside and what pressures may be coming from outside team members and how to know when those people might not be the best team members.
[00:02:10] Aaron: And so with that, please enjoy our conversation with the Milk Carton Kids.
[00:02:14] Kenneth: Our banter is, you gotta get the extra juicy.
Should we, should we come from a higher angle
[00:02:19] Michaela: You guys can just like lean in together like this.
[00:02:22] Kenneth: Oh yeah.
[00:02:23] Michaela: Oh.
[00:02:23] Kenneth: Look, it's the RE 20 versus SM7 family. It's studio hair, under the headphones.
[00:02:30] Joey: Headphone hair.
[00:02:30] Kenneth: None of us could have perfect a quiff as Aaron Shafer-Haiss.
[00:02:35] Aaron: Hey, you know, this is called dropped my kid off at daycare seven hours ago and I'm on my third cup of coffee, hair.
[00:02:41] Kenneth: There you go.
[00:02:42] Joey: Geez. Does that make you anxious to have that much caffeine?
[00:02:45] Aaron: I'm at the limit. If I had another one, that'd be it. I'd be just right over the edge of the cliff.
[00:02:50] Kenneth: Didn't you see, he just offered to make coffee for all of the Cayamo Cruise?
[00:02:55] Aaron: I did.
I think I'm probably gonna make more than our show fee is doing it as well. I'm trying to get Crema on board to it to give me a few bags of coffee.
[00:03:03] Kenneth: Oh yeah. Make people pay. Get a sponsorship. That's smart.
[00:03:06] Joey: Are you a coffee snob? And I mean that in a best possible way. And a And a self-declared coffee snob
[00:03:12] Aaron: Yes, absolutely.
[00:03:13] Joey: So, what do you drink?
[00:03:14] Aaron: Right now we're having Intelligentsia, It's like a single origin South American.
[00:03:19] Joey: What do you do? Pour over you. A Chemex.
[00:03:21] Kenneth: Don't laugh. This is a
[00:03:22] Joey: you. coleta.
[00:03:23] Kenneth: This is what keeps you sane off the road, Michaela the entire point of your deal.
[00:03:27] Michaela: We have an espresso machine.
[00:03:29] Aaron: Yep.
[00:03:29] Joey: Okay, you go espresso.
[00:03:31] Aaron: Yeah. it was a, that was the first pandemic purchase we made, and it was great.
[00:03:36] Joey: Me and Kenneth's wife got him a really nice espresso machine for Christmas last year.
[00:03:41] Michaela: Nice. Do you do it every day or is it just a special treat?
[00:03:45] Kenneth: Mm-hmm. Oh, no, it's on a timer. It's a dual boiler, like from Italy. It's a whole proper deal.
[00:03:50] Aaron: Oh yeah.
[00:03:51] Joey: This was definitely a go in together on it kind of a gift.
[00:03:55] Michaela: Yeah. That's not what we have. We've, we've got the budget
[00:03:58] Aaron: one.
[00:03:58] Joey: Yeah.
[00:03:59] Aaron: definitely punches above its weight though, I'll tell you that much. Yeah.
[00:04:02] Joey: All Alright. That's a good product review right there. Yeah.
[00:04:04] Michaela: Okay. Well thank you guys so much for being willing to do this and to chat with us.
[00:04:09] Kenneth: Oh yeah.
[00:04:10] Michaela: We like to start the episode just kind of setting the tone that and setting the preface we wanna talk about the things that we don't normally talk about when we're out doing interviews, promoting our music.
So the stuff that you guys, especially being a band and being in the music business for so long, how you have evolved and learned to care for yourselves to keep your creativity first and foremost, and not just get caught up in the business of trying to gain more.
So how you sustain your creativity and care for yourself in that manner. And you guys are first duo that we've interviewed. Everybody's been individuals. So I'm curious - a lot of our conversations with individuals are about their own relationship with themself, but with you guys, how much you have to do that then interpersonally with each other.
Is this something that you guys talk about through your relationship?
[00:05:12] Kenneth: Oh yeah, it's a decade of back massages.
[00:05:17] Aaron: You gotta keep the bank account full.
[00:05:19] Michaela: We can actually vouch that that's not a joke,
[00:05:21] Joey: That's a lot of Thera guns involved.
[00:05:25] Kenneth: I prefer the bear hands to the Thera gun, but I'll take what I can get.
[00:05:28] Joey: Not a big bear hand guy myself.
[00:05:30] Kenneth: Yeah. Now the main thing honestly was like 13 years ago when I was in my late twenties and very much drunk and very much spending 24 hours a day trying to like empire build and manifest this career that I would go to sleep every night dreaming about, Joey showed up and said, hey, we can't work more than two weeks cuz I gotta get home or my wife will divorce me.
[00:05:55] Joey: Which is not something I p lanned in advance. That was something that was emergent from our schedule. Like we started working a bunch, and then after a little while it was like, oh, once that third weekend rolls around, everything goes to shit.
So that was the first in a long series of boundary setting that we've been, you know, I think we're actually in a really good place with that type of thing. As of only the last couple years, like after 10 years I feel like we both understand each other enough.
And also like a lot of the self-care that you're probably talking about with other artists, maybe we started to feel responsible for that side of things on each other's behalf. But it took a long time.
[00:06:43] Kenneth: Or just, as you suggested, one of the nice things about being a duo is that oftentimes things get tackled from both sides. And there's a perspective that, if either of us were alone, we wouldn't necessarily default to.
And so I bring up Joey's immediate role from the outset as something that, like me, in that time of my life, with the kind of person I was, would've never even observed that kind of boundary, let alone try to maintain it or honor it.
I look back on that and feel like I received a real lease on life there.
[00:07:21] Michaela: Did you have any pushback at the time? Like do you guys, when you have boundaries like that, is there ever disagreement or needing to come around to it, or is it just an instant, like, okay, you set that rule, then we will respect that?
[00:07:34] Kenneth: Play pretty well now, right? There's one big fights. There was a giant in 2014.
[00:07:39] Joey: We've had our share of giant fights, but they haven't been about the boundaries in terms of like, how much work needs to be done or even what type of work.
Yeah, I think, it's pretty clear when someone is setting a real boundary. And neither of us is particularly histrionic about saying like, I'll never do this again. And then like going back on it.
We take it seriously if we're setting a boundary and it's after careful consideration. And so it, that hasn't been, that hasn't been our problem.
[00:08:09] Aaron: You guys each had solo careers before Milk Carton Kids, right?
[00:08:13] Kenneth: Yeah. It's generous if define it way.
[00:08:16] Aaron: Were either of you in bands? Like, is this, is this, you're kind of first like,
[00:08:20] Joey: The bands were always our name.
Kenneth had spent a good deal of time actually, like putting a band together behind himself that had an identity and was great, like a musical identity, and was really good.
I was playing with whoever would play for a hundred bucks a night at The Hotel Cafe, which is a lot of great musicians who I'm still friends with to this day and who you guys probably know and who play with everybody still, but like, I didn't have creative vision in mind for like what my solo project would sound like beyond just writing the songs in my bedroom.
[00:08:54] Kenneth: Well, but also in that iteration you were like the boss. It's not like you were
[00:08:58] Michaela: You weren't communally making decisions.
[00:09:01] Joey: Totally. But so were you of your band, but your band had like the same people all the time for years and you had a vision for you, the what you wanted them to do more than just like show up and know the charts.
[00:09:11] Kenneth: Yeah, but we were both like little lords of our own tiny kingdom that we were making. We weren't like having to listen to the pedal steel players say, I want the front seat,
[00:09:21] Joey: Well, there was no touring, so there was no front seat. Everybody showed up in their own car. Right. And paid for their own parking.
[00:09:28] Kenneth: Although you did a whole vast amount of like worldwide touring.
[00:09:33] Joey: I did touring but never with any, that was, I couldn't afford to bring anybody with me on a tour that was just like, in my Volvo.
[00:09:41] Kenneth: But you were, like you went around the world with Jay Nash, did he teach you a few things about being sane and healthy on tour? Or did he just
[00:09:48] Joey: No. He taught me how to like, like that was the, that this staying sane and healthy on tour is already a level of privilege and achievement that would say I was not even aware of or, trying to achieve. Before we met, any touring I did was like, how do you not sleep outside for $40?
You know?
How do eat a truck stop every day and not, you know, die or rupture your insides in some way. Like, where are the bananas in the truck stop?
That's what I
[00:10:22] Michaela: Yeah.
[00:10:23] Joey: learned touring with Jay Nash and Amber Rubarth, who are like my, you know, that you like go through battle with these people and they're like my close friends. But we weren't like, how do we take care of ourselves? It was like,
[00:10:34] Michaela: Yeah.
[00:10:34] Joey: how do you physically get to the next place?
[00:10:36] Michaela: Early on you're just surviving and you're just trying to like sacrifice whatever you can to be able to keep playing shows. And I think that weeds people out? Like some people then it's like, fuck this, I'm not gonna tour. If it doesn't get to a level of more comfort soon enough.
But even when it gets to a level of comfort, I think there's still then a whole load of ways that touring can be negatively impactful on your life as a human on the day to day. And So like those conversations when you're in this for 10 plus years and what you learn like boundaries of, I can't be gone for more than two weeks because that messes everything up at home. And if my home life gets messed up, what's the point of any of this? And also like finding, you know, the little things of like choosing to eat well on tour as much as you can, or committing to exercise or like not partying all the time.
I was thinking about like my younger days of touring, the show ends and then it's like now you drink and party. And I was like, all the touring I've done this past year, it was with you guys and Joe, and we were like, there's no hang. It's like the show ends and get out as fast as possible. Maybe people are having like one drink or something. And I was like, the one hang that we had was we went to an aquarium.
[00:12:01] Kenneth: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is daytime hangs.
[00:12:03] Joey: Well, you had your baby. We have babies and booch.
[00:12:08] Kenneth: Yeah. You can't party with the baby
[00:12:10] Joey: We got kombucha and babies now. No part, definitely part of it is just getting older part of it is if you're still doing it when you're as old as we are, that means it went well at some point , and you didn't quit. So at some point you turn the corner and you're like, oh shit, I am gonna be doing this indefinitely.
Which is like its own form of making it, you know, when you're trying not to sleep outside and you all you've got is $40, you're like, I hope that someday I don't have to wonder if I'm gonna quit.
And so like you get over that hump and then you're like, all right, shit. Now this might be like 30 years if all goes well, how am I gonna do this for 30 years rather than just like, get through this week?
So one thing that we have going for us is that Kenneth is some sort of a Yelp prodigy.
Like, we'll be in the ruralest of Iowa and Kenneth will somehow locate the co-op market where you can go and get like beautiful deli sandwiches with like the local produce
I think probably most people on that same routing are just like, it's Carl's Junior day, I guess..
[00:13:22] Michaela: Right?
[00:13:22] Joey: Yeah. know? And like you
[00:13:24] Kenneth: Or canned tuna from the gas station in Oklahoma.
[00:13:28] Aaron: Oh have a strong, no tuna in the van policy, kind of across the board I don't care if you hired me and I'm a side man. There's no tuna in the van that can wait outside.
[00:13:37] Michaela: Or sardines. We have a beloved keyboard player who she always packs a can of sardines and we're like, really?
[00:13:44] Joey: Yeah. In terms of canned fish a, I'm a smoked oyster proponent, but I have 'em in the green room, which is, I feel like about to get banned by Kenneth on account of the scent. But they are delicious.
[00:13:56] Kenneth: Green room's fine. It depends on what green room you
[00:13:58] Joey: Green room is different than the van, but yeah, for a while we were getting 'em and Kenneth was, making a lot of noise about it.
[00:14:05] Michaela: So what are some other boundaries that you guys have set and learned that are, have been helpful?
[00:14:11] Kenneth: Oh, someone told me, and I can't remember who, so maybe now I become that someone, Kenneth Pattengale once said that when you get home from tour, unpack your bags.
[00:14:20] Joey: That's really good. I don't do that.
[00:14:22] Aaron: Yeah I don't..
[00:14:23] Kenneth: And not even, you probably unpack some of them, but you leave the stuff you know that's gonna go back in your thing. Like unpack the whole thing and put the suitcase wherever you store it for like when you're not going on a trip.
[00:14:35] Joey: Oh, I see what you mean. I do that. It just takes me three days.
[00:14:38] Aaron: Yeah. I'm either like when I walk in the door, or it'll be like a week, two weeks, or year two or a month. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:46] Kenneth: But psychologically it's huge.
[00:14:48] Joey: You can tell how deep your post tour depression is by how long it takes you to get fully out of your suitcase.
[00:14:53] Kenneth: But I find it's like that's just a totem for like so many other things that also are, I feel like, relate even to non-musical things where just the small kinds of housekeeping and small little ways that you advocate for yourself and your own space and your own creature comforts, without being full ooc d or without being unreasonable are, I don't know, the kind of place setting activities that give your brain a little bit more peace.
There's a number of facets of my life where it's very clear that like whatever has happened, subconsciously, concurrent to my, present existence actually carries like a lot of weight and has really significant impact on one's mental health and on one's experience.
And that there's a whole other story going on behind the scenes that often I have not been aware of. That one day it pops up and says like, oh, this has been going on for a year and you haven't been thinking about it, but now it's time to deal with it.
And I feel like the more you know, exercise you're doing as far as those small little things that are keeping house helps just contextualize all of that energy to be something that doesn't end up overwhelming.
[00:16:06] Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that resonates with me. Again, I relate it to Looney tunes, like running off a cliff and not falling until they look down. Like, that happens to me all the time. I'm like, clear off the cliff, and then I'm like, oh, wow. I'm completely burnt out.
But it's also a seed of why we wanted to start this podcast is because we saw so many people that had been touring for years and grinding it out and doing things that were really uncomfortable, hit the pandemic, and like, once the shock of like, everything is shut down, kind of settled, people are like, "oh, wow. I can like, take care of myself and I can be healthy and like, wow, what we were just doing for the last decade is crazy."
But we're seeing now that everything's opening back up, that people are just rushing right back into like the same habits and all. And we want to same thing, like. remind people like, "Hey, unpack your suitcase when you get home."
[00:16:58] Joey: That's really interesting. I feel like so far I'm proud of the two of us for, so far having learned, like taken real lessons from that phenomenon, which definitely happened to us, and as we sort of set up our new album cycle and map out what all the touring is gonna be , I think we're being pretty good about sticking to the boundaries that we realized we were gonna need and making it, you know, setting ourselves up for the next two years to be something that feels really good and is really rewarding and like there's a lot of work to be done, but also I think we know what parts of the work we love and get like deep fulfillment from and what parts of it suck.
And sometimes you gotta do some of the stuff that sucks, but like maybe making sure that is always in service of some part of it that you love. So that. So far I think we're hopefully not gonna fall into the trap of just rushing back in because everything is open.
[00:17:56] Kenneth: Yeah. Earlier this year we were on a conference call figuring out the routing, and Joey goes, "yeah, so I think what we, this looks good, but what we really wanna do is like eight shows and then take three months off and then another eight shows." And I went,
[00:18:10] Joey: I think I said six weeks by the way. That three months, that period gets longer. Every time Kenneth tells the story.
[00:18:15] Kenneth: I said uh, hang on guys let us call you back. And then we hung up and I said, joey, what the hell are you talking about? Three months off?!?
[00:18:23] Joey: Oh, that's what we agreed to. That's what we said.
[00:18:27] Michaela: Well, I remember on the tour where I was supporting you guys last year, you guys were planning or about to do like a UK/EU tour, and it was like the day you guys found out about this last show that would've put it over the edge for the third weekend.
And I remember like witnessing you
[00:18:45] Joey: And it was Father's Day weekend.
[00:18:46] Michaela: Yeah. And really being like, no, we can't do this. And then I think you guys ended up not doing the tour at all. Right?
[00:18:54] Joey: That's true, yeah.
[00:18:54] Michaela: Yeah. Is that something that was just inherently in you to have the value of like, these are my priorities regardless of what the consequences might be or what people might be telling me I need to be flexible on?
Or is that something I had to work towards like. . I feel like I'm someone and there's a whole load of reasons why, but both Aaron and my brother have said that I'm like a dog chasing a tennis ball, which is not very nice, but it's also not untrue.
[00:19:24] Kenneth: Yeah.
[00:19:25] Michaela: where I'm
just like,
[00:19:26] Kenneth: should your husband call you a dog. Just....
[00:19:29] Michaela: Yeah.
[00:19:29] Aaron: It was a learning experience.
[00:19:31] Joey: No, just in the way that the dog chases the tennis spots of it's,
[00:19:35] Kenneth: Yeah. Yeah. You're not helping Joey.
[00:19:37] Michaela: It's fun and exciting, but also exhausting to be partnered up with somebody who's always like, oh, that thing, sure, I'll do that. Oh, that thing. And running all over and not having boundaries. And I think often that has been detrimental. So I'm like, when people are like, no, this is what I know is going to be in the long term better for me, regardless of what carrot is being dangled in front of me saying that I need to be able to do this, like, When talking to your agent and team, and when you say like, no, I don't wanna tour that much, how hard is that?
Or is it not hard? Is it
[00:20:13] Joey: You know, I, I've real, I have a short thing. Good. Real quick is I like to frame it differently for myself, I don't mind talking about it as like a boundary or things that I need but there's like an inherent language of guilt in all that stuff where it's like, the implication is you should be doing all these things, but in some way that you can't because it'll lead to bad things or whatever.
And there's also the implication that maybe if you were like tougher or a different type of person that you could do all these things that you should be doing. So what helps me is thinking about it in terms of like, what do I want to do? I wanted to be home up on Father's Day and the idea of playing another show at the end of a UK tour - now I wanna be home on Father's day, but like, I also wanna play on the Jools Holland Show in London. So the fact that it was just another show on tour also factors into it.
But it wasn't necessarily a boundary for me. It was just like, do I wanna be home on Father's Day? Or do I want to add another, relatively inconsequential show to a tour that is not like a high impact thing.
So, framing it in terms of like, what do you really want to do? Then you can start to think about like, what's rewarding for us? Like what do we get our, highs from, our peak experiences from? Try and chase down as many of those things as you can throughout the year.
And some of those are music related and career related. Some of those are business related, like smart things to do for our career. Some of 'em are just creatively rewarding and some of them are family oriented and some of 'em are like self-oriented. But if you can figure out what you really wanna do, what you love doing, then it doesn't feel like I'm setting a boundary to protect myself. It feels more like I'm pursuing, I'm still chasing the tennis ball. It's just that not all the tennis balls are like shows that I want to do. .
There's other tennis balls to chase.
[00:22:03] Michaela: There's more in your life than your career.
[00:22:05] Joey: Sure. Yeah.
[00:22:06] Kenneth: Well, the other thing that comes out of that, which I think is so important to remind people is that the people that work with you aren't necessarily one, they're not necessarily right about what they're suggesting you do. If anybody's ever telling you that you have to do something in order to achieve x, Y, z, I will be the voice of reason to say again here that, especially in music, that is not true. Superstars have been made in all sorts of ways and there is not a game plan that actually gets there.
And to clarify the terms of engagement, I think literally all the way down to straight up amateur level musician, to find the courage in whatever your own little universe is to say, like, here is what I want to do and here's what I'm willing to give up for it. That's kind of where the conversation should end.
And if you're working with somebody who is not very encouraged or inspired by that because they want you to be working more, they want you to be doing something different, blah, blah, blah, I would suggest they're the wrong fit for you to be working with. They should be listening to what you're putting out before trying to exact their kind of vision because they're not really tuned into the long term of what's going on if they're behaving that way..
That was one of the things I learned from my wife. She's very much like you Michaela. And then even maybe a few levels further, which is once, not only is she like eager to say yes to anybody who, you know, finds value in what she does, but the minute she does say yes, she goes like, so far above and beyond what's necessary to satisfy those requirements. Whether or not it's out of an instinct to try to please people or to do your best or to stave off some insecurity, whatever it is, she like gives way too much. And on the other side of it, in my position, when you see it happen, it takes so much out of her and it's wired into her nature that there's so many times where I'm like trying to shake her being like, don't feel like you have to do this because..
[00:24:14] Joey: His wife is a great artist whose stage name is Vera Sola and everybody should go listen to Vera Sola.
[00:24:20] Kenneth: Yeah, she's terrific. But she'll even, you know, a conversation will happen and she goes like, oh fuck, we're not gonna see each other in April. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And she says like, well they they need me to tour in Europe in April. And I'm like, they need you to like, you're in charge! What are you talking about?!
And we've never been able to bridge that gap because she feels beholden to the people that work with her out of a sense of responsibility that's totally real and totally valid. But to whatever extent anybody can like, give give themselves the authority to remember: no, you, like you're in charge.
Most people that you work with in the music business are working on commission. And that to me is always a very healthy reminder of how the balance of power goes and what the direction of authority is. They're taking a percentage of what you do. You're the person making the decisions. You're the person doing the work.
[00:25:14] Joey: Michaela do you feel not pressure, but like you put pressure on yourself to, you know, oblige your team when they bring you opportunities. And like if you say no, then people, they'll be disappointed or disincentivized or whatever, to keep bringing you more opportunities?
[00:25:30] Michaela: Yeah, I have long operated in that way. I've long operated with the mindset of like, don't say no to anything. And I think again, a lot of the motivation behind this podcast and these conversations we're having is because of all the conversations we're having with each other and our friends and are just, I'll speak only for myself and not for Aaron, but I'm in like a place of, obviously I became a mother for the first time, I had a lot of personal stuff happen with my mother. My relationship to my career and the pandemic, everything happening. I'm in a time of transition where I'm really evaluating what I've done to this point and how much I have given my power away to people I've worked with, or to people who've offered opportunities to me, out of a place of I think fear and desire of getting things. So thinking that those opportunities will expire. And also feeling like you don't have any leverage until you're at a certain level. But I don't know what that level is.
And that's what, like I've been really realizing because even having the, confidence to say, "Well, I don't wanna do that, so therefore I'm not gonna do it and you work for me," can be hard for some people because..
And I also often wonder if there's gender that plays into this , for women feeling like you kind of are already like in a lower level of power because..
I've heard so many times of like, "oh, we already have enough women on the roster", or "we already have enough women on the festival", so you already kind of are feeling like..
Getting people to work for you or getting opportunities is so hard, so you wanna please as much as possible because they could go away. And until you feel really confident about, "if I lose this person, I'll find a new one because I've got an audience to back me up I have a lot of value. That's tangible data, money driven value," versus, "no, I have value because I'm a good artist who works hard and I have potential and I'm great to work with."
It's harder to kind of stand in that strength. So I, think about a lot of that stuff now and making decisions based not on, because I hope it's gonna get me something, but more about what feels right and feels healthy and good and not anxiety driven and threatening.
cuz I also think I've just had so many conversations with people who have the things that I've wanted at a higher level: are selling more tickets, have, you know, all the tv, whatever, and they're not necessarily any happier or less anxious.
And that's a another catalyst for this. I was talking to so many friends this year who on the outside seem like they're doing so well. And then I talk to them personally and they're like, "oh my God, I'm having such a hard time. This is the hardest year," financially or personally or emotionally or whatever.
So now my whole approach is like, okay, I'm trying to learn how to live a life intentionally about how to have a good life that includes a creative career, and not, "I will do anything to try and build my music career."
Cuz I don't think it's the answer. I don't think success as we kind of superficially judge it of being on a bus and having a full tour schedule, I used to think that was the goal and now
[00:29:08] Joey: don't get a bus. Oh yeah, don't get a, whatever you do, don't get a bus. . Yeah. That's when it all goes downhill.
[00:29:15] Kenneth: It's true. That's definitely true..
[00:29:18] Joey: Yeah. No, I feel you though. I relate to that a lot.
[00:29:21] Kenneth: The only thing that makes me think of when you're talking is for God's sakes, everybody get off the internet. Holy hell.
[00:29:28] Aaron: Yeah.
[00:29:28] Kenneth: Just get off the internet.
[00:29:30] Aaron: Well, it, Do what you can to keep a good perspective. I mean, Kenneth, I like what you were saying about like basically giving yourself permission to say no, or giving yourself permission to focus on what's right for you. You know, I see a lot of people that are earlier on in their career, or maybe not so early in their career, but like having their first experiences with like a really credible agent or manager or label or what, and they feel subservient to that person.
I think maybe it's because we're all trying to build careers around a passion, which is a really crazy thing to do. You see these people that can very tangibly offer a next step in your career and more opportunity and more sustainability to be able to create more and do more of what you want, that I think it's really easy to inadvertently give all your power to that person.
[00:30:19] Joey: Yeah.
[00:30:20] Aaron: And feel subservient to them. When in reality you are the boss. They would make no money if it wasn't for you.
[00:30:27] Kenneth: Yeah. The other thing that's helpful to me or has been helpful for me personally, even though this is kind of like a therapy 1 0 1 deal, and also annoyingly kind of taps into the self-help tropes of the day, but it is something I've experienced, is that so much of my career was spent not actually actually experiencing what was happening in the moment because I was constantly occupied with my actions. Helping to get me to the next step, whatever that is.
And to me, it was I guess the biggest, the one two punch change was getting cancer and then the Covid pandemic. And funny enough, cancer wasn't enough to pull me back into the moment.
But once our job was taken away from us, and we started to tour again, it was somehow immediately easy to enjoy standing on stage with Joey, making music and be grateful for it.
Which again, I credit the cancer experience to providing half of that for me because I don't know if I would've had the context to even understand that , while Covid happened. But the combination of those two reminded me again, a very simple way. Like, "oh, this is the whole point of what's going on."
And when I think about the last 10 years of our career, the amount of cool things that I've done, and when I think back on them, I didn't watch the show, or I was out in the alley smoking a cigarette, or I didn't talk to so-and-so because I was like, I don't know, I was chasing a girl. Like whatever all of the things are, it's been another real healthy reminder to like, when you're doing something cool, hang out and be in it.
And that even helps to contextualize when you get the email from somebody saying like, "do you wanna do this?" Immediately now I think about like, well, do I actually wanna go and experience that?
And that's a different thing than 10 years ago when I would receive the email and think like, oh, is this something that helps me get towards that goal that I've planted up in my brain?
[00:32:31] Joey: Is it something you want to have done?
[00:32:33] Kenneth: And that's kind of huge. And it's hard to remember because it's not even just this business. I know plenty of people in life whose lives operate that way, that aren't in music or aren't their own bosses or whatever, you know?
That's why, that's why there are social cliques and that's why there's gossip and that's why there's infidelity and, all these things. Cuz people are, constantly acting on elements in life that aren't very present and aren't very rational.
And it's a good reminder, especially with it's all so chaotic to be like, "no, what's actually real? Yeah. And what's not."
[00:33:08] Joey: I love that. Here's another thing that's a little self-helpy, which is kind of the same as that, which is every time you say yes to something, you're not just saying yes to that thing, you're saying no to something else cuz you're committing your time and yourself to doing that thing.
So I love saying like, don't be afraid to say no. But I also, whenever we say no to something, it really helps me to think about, not what I'm saying no to, but what am I saying yes to? Like, why do I wanna say no to this thing?
It's because I wanna do something else instead. It's because I need that, either I need that time to, let's say it's we're saying no to a career thing, because I need that time to be devoted to my family or to myself because I wanna do this other thing for my career.
And it really helps me, like if I'm talking to our team and they say, "oh, should we go do this thing?" it helps me to think about it like not just saying, like, no, I don't want to do that, but saying like, "no, you know what we should do is not work that week, but, next month let's look at doing something like this or have some other idea for the next month. And be like, that'll be the plan.
You know? Cuz sometimes when there's just a flow of incoming things and you feel like all you can do is say yes or no and like and respond to everything, it can be really helpful if you're trying to take control to be like, here is what we wanna do. Like here is this strategy. Which I feel like we've been pretty good about for this upcoming album cycle for ourselves is We want to do this many shows in the US and these are the types of shows we wanna do."
Like for us, we're really enjoying smaller shows with a standing audience and cheaper tickets, cuz we have this really broad audience and we can play these theaters with $45 tickets and a certain segment of our audience is more likely to come.
They're older, they're quieter, you know, the old folkies, who we love and adore and identify with so much. And we've just played to that side of our audience for so long that we're like kind of really into this, to playing in rock clubs where everybody's gonna press up against the side of the stage and we play our same sad songs, but people kind of go ape shit.
And like, we actually make a bit less money doing that. But if we come home from a couple weeks of doing that, we're all energized and like excited and it feels great.
And so, you can call that strategy, or you can call that just doing what you wanna do , but it requires saying no to like, some of the theater shows that come up and get offered to us. Some of 'em are still doing, but like, having a or some clarity for what you do wanna do, helps you say no ,to the things that don't fit into that.
So you're not just always responding.
You know, and we want to go to Europe, and we want to go to Australia. Okay so we have these boundaries, right? But like it's fucking far to go to Australia. So maybe we push some of our boundaries to make sure we go to Australia. Cuz I also really believe that it's okay to have goals. It's okay to want to get to the next level, but make it fit in with your whole life, right?
So if we wanna go to Australia, we're gonna maybe have to be gone that third weekend, but it's once every two years and it means that we're gonna build in some real time on either side of that tour and know that we're saying no to things that come up on either side of that, because that's a priority.
We wanna go to Australia, we want to be in Australia for personal reasons and also for career reasons, to build that up.
And like Kenneth said, what do you really want, and what are you willing to sacrifice to get it? I don't think you have to sacrifice nothing. Sometimes you have to be willing to sacrifice a little bit,
But if it's in service of something you really want, then that helps clarify like, what, you're really willing to give up for it.
[00:36:48] Aaron: That's really cool. I think I inherently think of boundaries as keeping things out. Being kind of closed off and thinking of when you say no to something, what are you actually like, creating space for kind of makes it like a channel in a way. And that's a really cool,
[00:37:01] Joey: Yeah. That really helps me.
It's actually something I've learned from Kenneth, cuz Kenneth has always had a little bit of a, I felt at different times in our careers, you've always had like a specific idea for what we should do that's based on what our band is specifically. And you've always had a good instinct about the ways that we do and don't fit in to various models or formulas for success.
And there's a whole industry out there that's ready, if you have any amount of success, they're ready to plug you in to the STUFF that is there.
And it's really helpful to remember, like what is unique about you both creatively and personally and like, a lot of us are not really candidates for being plugged in to some mainstream formulas for musical success.
And recognizing that and realizing that you have to sort of not just say no to that, but also figure out a way that you are gonna take what you do that's unique and who you are that's unique and build something compelling and cool and fun and rewarding around that.
You know, it makes it more like empowering or fun to have boundaries rather than just being like, things that you can't do.
[00:38:13] Michaela: Boundaries aren't limitations.
[00:38:15] Kenneth: Right. Also, everybody get off the internet. Telling ya.
[00:38:20] Joey: It's just as simple as that it really is.
[00:38:23] Kenneth: As the only like woman on the phone call Michaela, I'll let you set me straight on this spontaneous train of thought, but through various....
[00:38:33] Michaela: Oh, as only woman you'll let me chime into this?!?
[00:38:36] Joey: Oh
[00:38:37] Kenneth: Yeah, yeah. I'll allow you.
[00:38:38] Joey: You already, You already fucked it up. Kenneth .
[00:38:40] Kenneth: I chose my verbs carefully. I didn't say I'd let you, right?
[00:38:43] Joey: You did.
[00:38:44] Kenneth: said please.
[00:38:45] Aaron: I'll edit that out.
[00:38:46] Kenneth: no, No. no. Leave it in.
[00:38:47] Joey: As soon as he's done talking then you can have a turn.
[00:38:50] Michaela: No,this is gonna be the sound bite for social media to advertise your episode.
[00:38:56] Kenneth: Great, yeah that's all fine.
[00:38:57] Joey: I'm gonna let you talk. I'm gonna let you finish.
[00:39:00] Kenneth: No, this will, I don't, whatever. You guys can all set me straight when this falls outta face.
[00:39:07] Joey: You guys?! Can we please not use
[00:39:09] Michaela: Okay.
[00:39:11] Kenneth: So, through an entire lifetime, I've railed against girlfriend's, friend's narrative about specifically wearing makeup. And at my suggestion of opting out of makeup in real life, the possible upsides always being pushed back by specifically like the idea that there are are certain societal expectations, specifically with women, especially with regard to how they make up their face, that if you decided not to do that, there's just a whole host of shit that you would possibly forsake or give up or like you not meeting men's expectations or society's expectations you like immediately blackball yourself from being able to take part in, I don't know, reality.
And, I've never felt the courage or the ability to say that with authority outside of just offering an opinion. Except, now that we're in the social media age, I feel like all genders are being thrust into this same thing.
And especially independent musicians. When I say everybody get off the internet, anybody who hasn't yet achieved their career goals, the first five things they'll say are the exact same things that like every past girlfriend has told me about, like, not making up their face before going out of the house.
Like, you can't do this, or the promoter's not gonna like, pay attention to you. You have to be intentional about the way that you wanna express your image to the world. You know, each one after the other. And I feel like now finally, we live in a world where I can say, I can just offer my opinion finally without the caveat that I'm not entitled to it, which is bullshit.
Just fucking take it off. Just log out. It straight up doesn't matter. It's not going to affect your life. You're imprisoning yourself if you buy into it.
[00:41:13] Joey: And also everybody check out our instagram for, we're announcing a new single in a couple weeks. It's @TheMilkCartonkids. No, that's another great one. Smash that Follow button.
[00:41:24] Kenneth: That's another great one, anytime I offer this, somebody says, well, you have somebody that like, does, your Instagram. You can do it. And again, I will call bullshit.
It, it would all be fine.
[00:41:37] Michaela: I don't know. I have mixed feelings about it.
One, I agree. I think social media is extremely negative for many of us. For many people. I really worry about what it's doing for teenagers and kids. I worry what it does to my mind and everybody that I talk to. And yet I also think it has some really positives, the way that you can connect with people.
I could write a very long list of all of the positive things that have come from spending time on Instagram and Twitter. People that I've connected with or met, or relationships I've developed, whatever. But, and I would probably say unfortunately, I do think you need it in promotion.
I mean, if the Milk Carton Kids was a brand new band today, not, you know, having 10 plus years of the success and fan base that you've built, what would that look like to try and start Booking shows at the Skinny Pancake in Vermont and trying to get people out and not have social media to try and spread the word?
[00:42:45] Joey: I don't know. We did do it slightly before social media, so maybe it's just is different now. But I am in the middle too. I think it would be fine to get off social media. I also think it's not inherently a horrible, terrible thing, and I like to think about it the same way of the boundaries.
It's like why are you on there? You know, the huge lesson for me from the pandemic is that like, I feel a real awareness now that fans of our type of music, of our genre of music and of relatively unknown bands, non-mainstream bands like ours, are real community. With each other, and with the bands, and with the venues in their communities.
Like, I'm not actually that tapped into it in real life as a music fan, other than we go to Largo all the time and there's a good community around there, but we're like, we're backstage.
But, so I don't know that I've really been like a diehard music fan in the way that fans of our community are. And when they, when the music was taken away from us, it was taken away from them. And like that really came back to us in a big way over social media when we started doing videos or whatever. And just hearing from people who, being a fan of music, like this is their whole life. And their friendships are based around it, their social calendars are built around it. And they like when we make videos.
So I think about our whole career a little bit differently now in terms of like, we're taking part in this sort of community and ecosystem of people who play music and collaborate on music and venues that present music who we're in partnership with. And the fans who come to see music who are like not normal people. Like this is not people going to see like a Neil diamond concert in Vegas because that was who was playing. Like, these are people who like unknown bands like us are like fucking into it and they need it.
And so we're, I mean there's a little, I hate to say it like this, but I. Try to tap into a little bit of a, like a service minded thing where like, I, for the first time felt good, maybe, that we were providing something to the world that make actually made people feel good, made people happy and was like worthwhile for that.
And to go even further into a risky thing, like you can do that on whatever medium. YouTube Instagram. You can put out a 30, 45 second video or two minute video of yourself performing whatever that's like, I've cried at YouTube videos of a beautiful performance. Like I've had a transcendent musical experience of someone playing in their bedroom and like trying to achieve that is something worthwhile.
So, I don't know, trying to like put a, put that positive spin on it what can you do with it?
[00:45:35] Michaela: Yeah. And I think you have to know what, how you're affected by it. Kenneth, I remember when I first started hanging out with you years ago, you were like, I don't go on the internet. And I remember you sharing, and
[00:45:46] Joey: Like to read comments.
[00:45:47] Michaela: Yeah. That you were just like I can't, I don't like to look at it, so I just don't go on there.
[00:45:52] Kenneth: Well, this is where I was gonna get to cuz I... everything that you all just said is perfectly wonderful, and valid, and you're talking to a guy who is still on the internet. I go on every day and I quite enjoy it.
But I do think that there should be a massive firewall that you erected right in front of yourself that keeps you from believing any of your responses. Unless they're like genuine emotional responses for something that improves your character or something that connects you to your feelings. Outside of that, the screen is lying to you. And I think that it's all based on this weird, tricky social thing that taps into all of our folies as human beings, the same way that it did in an analog way.
That if you were in a, a room with people gossiping and you can't actually hear what the person across the room is saying but it gets to you what they're purportedly saying and you have a reaction to it, it's just not real. And whatever you can do to filter that out or not have that affect your day is really important.
Yeah, there were years where I couldn't, I think it was either a tiny desk concert or something. That went on there and there were just hundreds of comments of people arguing about whether or not I stole the guitar stylings of Dave Rawlings, as if he like invented the guitar and how to play it.
And it was such a bummer. And that was also like, nevermind were there people saying really awful things that were hurtful, but even the like literal legions of people coming to my defense trying to counteract those people meant nothing. Cuz all I could see was the stuff that was critical, which by the way, I get it.
Those people, they hear it and then I sound enough like Dave Rollins to them, that they're gonna be weirdly protective over some, person they've never met. At least they're coming from some reality.
I can't imagine what happens, like the first time we had toured, I don't know, 800, 900 shows, headline shows, and then we do a collaborative tour with us and Sarah Jarosz, and we put a post up and the first 10 things that were said were just these like kind of fat middle-aged white dudes, which I could see cuz their picture was right there next to their comment. Literally the first 10 things that anybody said were just comments on how Sarah Jero looked.
And I was like, whoa, we've done 800 shows and like promoted 800 shows and never was the first thing I read somebody talking about how me and Joey looked. It was always this kind, you know, old person saying, ah, this is the next, iteration of Simon and Garfunkel.
And that happened and I was like, whoa, this is different. And then,
[00:48:38] Joey: Well, there was the time on our first tour when we played at the uh, Doug Fir Lounge in uh, Portland, the very first poster we made was up in the bathroom and somebody graffiti'd on it with marker, and it said whatever with the hair.
[00:48:52] Kenneth: Right.
[00:48:53] Joey: That's, true. That was early on.
[00:48:54] Michaela: And you're, You're never gonna forget that.
[00:48:58] Joey: There was so much of our hair on that first poster. I will say Kenneth had hair as big as mine and it was all just blown out.
[00:49:05] Michaela: I rememberthat poster, which is probably why I referenced Skinny Pancake, because I remember seeing that poster Skinny Pancake.
[00:49:11] Kenneth: Oh, yeah, Yeah.
[00:49:12] Joey: Well, they weren't as snarky in at the Skinny Pancake bathroom as they were at the.
I never minded all that stuff, but I do understand, like
[00:49:20] Michaela: For women for sure. And I don't know, Kenneth, were you did, when Were you prefacing all of that to allow me to make a comment about makeup too ?
[00:49:28] Kenneth: Well, if you keep it short.
[00:49:31] Aaron: I think he just I, I think they just stopped talking. So the runway's clear now.
[00:49:35] Michaela: Okay. Okay.
[00:49:36] Kenneth: Yeah.
[00:49:37] Michaela: But yeah, for women, it's just like, it's a whole other, your physical appearance, what you look like, if you're wearing makeup or not, if you look like you're trying to be sexy or not, if you're too sexy, if you are sexy. It's just like, it's absurd. It's dumb. But it's just like, that's what people think is fair game and what we're supposed to talk about.
[00:49:59] Joey: How do do you deal with that?
[00:50:03] Michaela: I mean, I feel like I have a pretty good, I started playing shows by playing a lot of bar gigs. So I would play like three hour sets of country covers. And I feel like that was really good training ground to like figure out how to like, deal with insulting comments from people when a lot of times they have no idea that they're insulting you.
Like it's not intentional. So I often feel like I try to not make it super tense, but not try to like avoid making them uncomfortable. Like, I try to make it clear in some gentle teasing way how fucked up it is. What, you know, what you just said to me.
Sometimes there's like such a shock from it, it's hard to ever have a comeback.
But yeah, I remember my last record, two records ago, Desert Dove, I have a song called If I Wanted Your Opinion, You Would Know, but the cover of the album, I'm wearing like a tiny skirt and tiny top where I'm like, my midriff is showing. And I got so many comments, especially from older, radio DJs and stuff of like, "so do you think uh, you know, you're kind of a feminist and you have this like feminist message, but the fact that you like look sexy, does that counter, like, does that cancel it out? Like how do you do that?"
And I just remember being like, oh, because if you're a woman who believes that you should be listened to or be independent, then clearly you should be hideously ugly. And I even at that time had a very close friend of mine reach out and ask me like he called me and was like, I'm really nervous to ask you this Michaela, cuz I'm afraid you're gonna bite my head off, but like all your photos lately, are you like trying to be a sex symbol?
And I was like, well, I just have so many questions for you in return. Like, what should I look like in a photograph? Should i?, I
[00:51:53] Joey: I just wanna say, I've been trying to have us be sex symbols for this entire 10 years Sure. and is not working. But we've never gone for a midriff.
[00:52:03] Aaron: Yeah. Michaela's actually using this opportunity to launch a consulting business. So we'll give you the info at the end. Yeah.
[00:52:08] Michaela: Specifically for male middle-aged folk bands,
[00:52:12] Kenneth: Great . Desirous of achieving sex symbol status.
[00:52:15] Joey: She called us middle-aged.
[00:52:16] Michaela: I was gonna see if you were gonna get upset about that.
[00:52:18] Aaron: But you got comments from women too, right?
[00:52:21] Michaela: Oh, yeah. On the tour with you. I had, with you guys, I had a this woman came up to me and was like, you look different on this other cover. Like, I guess you look more motherly now. That's what she said to me.
And she was like, I guess you...
[00:52:35] Kenneth: People are fucking insane.
[00:52:36] Michaela: But my point is like, as a woman, you can't win. If you don't. You're gonna get demolished for not being attractive enough if you don't put effort in. If you put effort in, it's the wrong effort. You're trying too hard, you're showing too much skin. I'm like, do I wear a bag? You could look sexy with a sweatshirt or your mid, basically, it's pointless to even really try to have a comeback because
[00:52:59] Joey: Right.
[00:53:00] Michaela: it's bullshit.
[00:53:01] Joey: So what do you do?
[00:53:02] Michaela: I don't even know. I think I just say like, I think I laugh a lot. . I try and have comebacks.
[00:53:11] Aaron: You're very talented at saying like two words, like Oh yeah. And having it say like a whole statement.
Between that and your look they're pretty much like, oh, got it. Yeah. I'll take that shirt
[00:53:22] Michaela: and Yeah. Cuz it, it varies. It ver over the years, it varies so much between like, genuinely curious, that is, insulting and to also like sexual harassment of, you know, I've had a guy at a merch table like out loud wonder how long it would take to unbutton my skirt.
And I'm just like, what the fuck is wrong with you?
[00:53:44] Joey: I'm constantly shocked at how dehumanizing people can be in their interactions with people that they perceive in any way to be like a performer or, and with women it's magnified at 10,000 times.
And you know, whether it's like just offering your opinion at all on his guitar, playing on your appearance, on our hair. And like, I am aware, although I can't really internalize it, but I'm aware that the difference is that the thing that women face is this sort of just constant water that we swim in. It's sort of always there. And when it happens to us, it feels like a surprising little story that we can tell. which is like, I think is a qualitative difference.
But the thing that, that I'm starting to not really be surprised by anymore is like, people don't, just don't think of you as like a person. And so I, I I for a little while now have just written off everybody's opinion about everything because they are not thinking of you as an individual.
They think you're like some product in the ether that's there for them to like review. Like it's on Amazon. I like this better than I like that.
Including saying it right to your face. Like it doesn't stop just because you're at the merch table. Like they still think that you've, that all of us, have offered ourselves up as a product to be reviewed and it makes them say whatever the fuck they want, and it, not think of artists as people.
It comes from that and then you mix in the like, you know, just sort of ingrained societal misogyny and it gets like potentially dangerous. helps me to remember sometimes that like, they just don't think of you as a person in that moment.
They think of you as some sort of product.
[00:55:42] Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. And being, I guess the non front person on the conversation here the way it appears to me is almost like these people have spent so much time with your music, having your voices in their ears. So much time, you know, probably reading about you, all of that, that like, they a re so familiar with you that they have no awareness that you guys are actually strangers. You know, boundaries. There's no boundary. They're like, oh, I know you, you're Joey and Kenneth. Your hair is weird.
[00:56:09] Joey: I had a turning point with the sort of relating to. Fans, like on an individual level and what helped me with the internet and people on the internet, comments from people.
One time somebody wrote to us, I had made a joke about a miscarriage on stage. My wife had just had a miscarriage, couple of them, and I forget exactly what we said, but it didn't feel like that big of a moment and.
I honestly can't remember what we said, but it didn't feel like that big of a moment.
[00:56:42] Kenneth: It was really funny.
[00:56:43] Joey: It probably wasn't. I probably just said to the word a miscarriage in reference to something.
And anyway, a woman in the audience wrote that she had recently had a miscarriage and she was incredibly hurt and distraught that I had said whatever I had said. And because I, we had, this was like a year period of our life where we were like trying to have our second kid and we were, kept having miscarriages, and it was really emotional and hard, and deep depression and probably my, one of my ways of dealing with it was to try and joke about it.
But she wasn't ready to hear that cuz she had her own thing. And so when she said that, I felt really bad cuz I know how serious it was and still was for us in that moment. And that if somebody wasn't ready to make light of something like that, that could be really fucked up and hurtful. And may probably ruined her night and her experience of seeing us.
So I wrote back to her like sort of explaining all that and apologizing and saying like, I'm really sorry. You know, we've been going through a lot with this exact thing and I, I didn't mean to say something that would be upsetting to you.
You know, I'm sorry. I hope it didn't ruin the show, whatever.
And she wrote back, "Oh my god, famous people never respond to me on the internet. That's so cool."
[00:57:55] Michaela: Oh god...
And
Oh God
[00:57:56] Joey: was like.... I, I don't even, I still haven't even processed what to say next. Like, that's just where the story ends. I haven't analyzed it yet.
But that made me put up a big wall from then on, about like, even when people feel like they're being real, vulnerable, like seeing everything in a real human way, it might not be happening that way. And we're not even famous.
I hope that goes without saying,
[00:58:21] Michaela: Well, this reminds me of, there's like a story of, when like Taylor Swift put out her re-release and All Too Well. No. Maybe it wasn't All Too Well. Maybe it was. So then all of the Taylor Swift fans were like freaking out about Jake Gyllenhaal again. And they were attacking John Mayer.
And there's a story where like they were like DMing and tagging John Mayer, just being really mean to him. And he responded, and was just like, "Hey, I just want you to know there's a human on this other side." I'm probably getting this wrong, but there was some interaction where they were like, "Oh my god, John Mayer is this massive celebrity. How did he respond to this."
And he's like, "I have Instagram on my phone and I look at the messages and I just wanted to remind you, like, I know you're emotionally caught up in this, but like, I'm a person and I see this stuff. just wanna let you know. Hope you have a good day."
[00:59:09] Joey: Yeah, I remember that. I think that's a battle that can't be won.
[00:59:13] Michaela: Yeah. Yeah. Hummanity.
[00:59:14] Kenneth: Except by getting off the internet .
[00:59:16] Joey: Except by getting off the internet or figuring out how to just mentally insulate yourself from it somehow.
[00:59:23] Michaela: Yeah. But we want people to be on the internet because we want them to listen to this podcast. .
[00:59:27] Aaron: Hey. Nice plug. Well done.
Well, I'm gonna do, a, calling back to you guys saying that you've been able to keep that present kind of calm head space that we all developed more or less during the pandemic. It was in relation your touring schedule. Has that changed your guys, I mean your, for those that are gonna be watching this on YouTube, you're obviously sitting in a studio right now.
Has that changed your creative process as well? Do you guys create differently on, on this side of the world? Shutting down?
[00:59:57] Michaela: Yeah have we even talked about creativity?
[00:59:59] Joey: We haven't. And I I was kind of hoping you would and kind of hoping you wouldn't because well, I don't know.
The biggest thing is we took forever to make the album, which was beautiful and great.
[01:00:10] Kenneth: Yeah. But also we did, well, I've done this a lot producing people over the last eight years, but never really took it to heart myself, which is do the best you can and then get on with it.
[01:00:21] Michaela: Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm.
[01:00:22] Kenneth: And this was for me an internal process long before it was ever poisoned by any outside influence. But I always had the instinct to ring things to death, because was something that I had in my mind, and you had to, really had to work hard to get it. And if it wasn't there you'd have to keep working hard.
And, as I got older, and maybe more talented, or maybe had a better sense of self, or had more accomplishment, it would become more and more clear. That gap between what you wanted and what you could do was just a part of reality that you had to accept.
That's maybe one of the burdens of being an adult, or even a human being, is not being disappointed by the thing that you are. You know, In relief of the things that you want to be .
And so absolutely on the other side of the pandemic, but also I think just like now on the other side of 40, or the other side of being 10 years into a band, it's a lot easier to try to lean into the things like, do your best. Try to cast it in a good light, and then maybe go, some veggies?
[01:01:28] Aaron: Yeah. You said, ringing all the life out of it, which is so easy to do in the studio, I think. And something that I tell people that I'm working with in a production sense. Is that done is better than perfect.
Which is a really scary thing to say when you have a lot of ambition. You're talking about somebody's art. Cause it sounds like you're saying lower the bar.
And to me, it doesn't mean that at all. It just means like, I tend to focus on things that are really small that if I zoom out and look at the piece as a whole, the song as a whole, the album as a whole, what I'm really focusing on is pretty inconsequential. And it doesn't really affect work of art as a whole.
And then that got me thinking about records that people classically say are, you know, perfect records, whether it's a Steely Dan record or a Michael Jackson record or whatever it is. And realizing like, oh, I'm sure there are plenty of places on those records that the people that made those records are like, "oh yeah that didn't come across right."
But the way that we perceive it, not knowing what their initial intent was, is that it's flawless and it's amazing.
[01:02:33] Kenneth: Well, and all this crap is so fetishized to death. And the biggest fetish that I think is most harmful is this thing that keeps people feeling like in the end that they didn't do good enough.
And so many of the stories are about overcoming that. Whereas your anecdote, Aaron, is, blows a perfect hole in that. When you see the story told or the pictures of like Jimmy Iovine spending days trying to get the right drum sound on a Tom Petty record together.
It's like, this is such bullshit. Because that was right after they told you that Jimmy Iovine just started learning how to be an engineer and a producer and, like, of these people then spent days literally learning how to do the thing that they wanted to do.
It's not because they sat there like flogging themselves, that they achieved some perfection. It's that they didn't know how to do it. if homeboy knew how to do it, he just would've put the knob in the right spot and then it would've taken five seconds. .
But instead, and it's like anytime I'm producing an artist and they're like,
[01:03:34] Joey: You're saying it didn't take 'em that long they were good, it took 'em that long cause they were bad?
[01:03:37] Kenneth: Yeah, they were bad. They were just figuring out how to do it. Cuz every time like... The amount of times where I've started a record and somebody goes like, "well, so the first half a day we're gonna do like getting tones and getting sounds", and I'm like, "whoa, stop right there. If we're spending time getting tones and sounds you're working with the wrong person. Go find somebody who wants to learn how to make music with you and do all of that. We just hired three people that will get your tones right out of the box and if you want a different tone, bring a fucking different drum or pick a different guitar, or don't change your strings or whatever. It's not that hard. You've been like buying into the whole deal way too much and nobody's got time for that."
[01:04:18] Joey: But the fetishizing goes on in the other direction too.
[01:04:21] Kenneth: Oh yeah. The cutting live on the floor.
[01:04:23] Joey: Yeah. Like, you know, Bob Dylan's band didn't know the chords when they started playing or whatever.
[01:04:28] Michaela: Yeah.
[01:04:29] Joey: You can fetishize it both ways. And I don't know, I see this thing both ways too because we just made our album and we got done with it after a three week period in a studio that was already three times longer than we had ever spent trying to make an album.
And then we scrapped three quarters of it and started over, like writing new songs because we felt like it wasn't good enough. Now that sounds like some Jimmy Iovine, Tom Petty shit to me. But really there's validity to both things cuz the other side of it is like, you know, we had to go back to everyone and say like, the album's not done and, it's probably not gonna be done for months longer. Even though we already just spent all this money and all this time trying to do it. And that release date that we talked about is not gonna happen. And we need more money, and everything.
That was a big kind of courageous thing I think too. And I was just looking back at all of our lyric notes and stuff and remembering what those old songs were, and like we could have easily put out that record. And that would've been a middling Milk Carton Kids record. And everyone would've been like, "oh, it sounds like the Milk carton kids."
And I really do believe that we made a way, way better record. We wrote way better songs. The songs that we rerecorded with a different approach, I'm just way more proud of what we did and happy with what we did. And it took, it was a real pandemic lesson of like, a deadline is artificial and take your time to get it right.
Now sometimes you can also overdo it and ring everything out of it. it's hard to maybe know which one you're doing or, are you obsessing or are you actually editing and making progress? But
I think it could go both ways.
[01:06:12] Kenneth: Well, the balance I think is important. Pointing out is. Yeah, for sure. There's a specific one. It's first the reminder, like we're in a world where like the thing we do is three minutes long or maybe five minutes long. Sometimes seven if you're being greedy, or whatever.
But like, that's the deal. And it shouldn't take that long to make something that long. And if you lived in a world that literally was another era 50 years ago, and Patsy Cline goes and cuts Crazy, like that's gonna happen in three hours or less. That's how it happened.
And obviously before that, which is like marvel of modern history that I'm sure has been shot into space for generations in perpetuity to glean its magic.
There obviously was like a lifetime of a person that led up to that moment. There was probably, I don't know the story on it. Maybe there were months of pre production. Maybe it was, maybe it came together in an afternoon co-write. Who knows?
The point is to actually make the thing, shouldn't take that long. It's three minutes tops.
And, from our record, from the one that I'm most proud about is the title track on the record, is a song that I wrote seven years ago and we've recorded four different times for albums. And my point is like, I've always been very precious about that song.
At no point did I ever spend too much time ringing the life out of it. It's like, for the first two years it had completely different lyrics. Every time it was performed, I was like, that's not what I want. And every now and again, I'd re revisit and try to do it, and I'd fail and then I'd put it aside for a while and I'd come back, oh, there's really something to that.
And then at some point I changed the lyrics and liked that. And we tried at various points to record it. Our last record we got as far as like having recorded it, it was in sequence. And at the end, just something felt wrong. And I had to write an email to everybody saying, we're pulling that track off the album.
And everybody goes, oh, that's a great track. And I'm like, yeah, it's not right.
And then we did it for this one. But sure enough, you know, like the thing that you hear? It took two hours to
[01:08:16] Michaela: But it, yeah, but I had a long road to
[01:08:17] Kenneth: Because it's three minutes!
[01:08:19] Aaron: Right.
[01:08:19] Kenneth: And this one even has, this one has 25 strings on it, and it was like a whole production and a whole deal and whatever. But it took two hours to record.
That's cuz we had to get the 25 people to like play it all together. In the end it took three minutes to record cuz it was one take.
[01:08:35] Aaron: So my question though is did it take two hours or did it really take like eight hours? Cuz it was the fourth time you recorded it before it finally worked?
[01:08:42] Kenneth: No, well the answer is it took seven years
[01:08:44] Michaela: Yeah.
[01:08:45] Kenneth: Plus all the other shit that came before it for me to even arrive at that point to write it. But some people could argue that I didn't even write that song, that it was like beamed down from the stars, through me and,, whatever. You know, I'm gonna take credit for it cuz I wanna get paid for it.
[01:08:59] Joey: And I'll take the other half. This is why the conversation for me is a little bit difficult, cuz this is where it's actually just, if there's not like a hard and fast rule. It's just about taste and vision.
Kenneth had a vision for what that song could be, and it wasn't about how many hours or years he was gonna work on it. Like when it was done, it was done.
The last song on our album happened in a day. Like, written, recorded, done the same day. I was just writing songs yesterday with Katie Pruitt, and she's a person who Kenneth and I have sat with her and like worked on songs before. And I was with her yesterday, and she's a person who I think has impeccable taste and is a really good editor.
She's a person I would never tell, don't overthink it. Cuz every time I've ever heard her make a change to one of her things, it was an improvement.
I think it's about taste. Like if you keep working on something, hopefully it's because you have a sense that it's not done or not there or not right. And then how are you gonna tell somebody no, you're overthinking it versus no, that's just really isn't what your vision was. Yeah.
[01:10:03] Kenneth: But if it's into hour three and you're still moving the knobs and it's not like getting to be what you want.
[01:10:08] Joey: Now you guys are talking about engineering
[01:10:09] Aaron: Get off the mic. Yeah.
[01:10:10] MCK wide: Yeah.
[01:10:11] Joey: Well, I believe in that too. Taking a break and coming back to it.
[01:10:14] Aaron: Yeah. One thing that I'm hearing that's kind of been a theme throughout our whole conversation here is just like, is knowing yourself. Knowing what you want, whether it's with your touring career, with your team, with the song that you've written, music, knowing what is good enough, you know?
And I yeah, like good for you in the best sense. What is good for you?
[01:10:32] Kenneth: It's also just balance.
[01:10:33] Joey: Dude, I love tying shit up in a bow. And Aaron that was so satisfying.
[01:10:38] Kenneth: I'll just, that's dragging on further.
[01:10:40] Joey: That's what my therapist does. I talk for an hour and she goes, you know what I hear? The theme of what you're saying is this. And I'm like, fuck, that's what the $200 is for.
Yeah.
[01:10:48] Michaela: Then she's like,
[01:10:49] Kenneth: Yeah.
[01:10:49] Michaela: we're at time.
[01:10:49] Kenneth: Like touring. Joey talks to once every three months. Some good that does. So listen, are you ever in life having too much fun?
And when you're having fun, a little voice in your head goes, God, I should really leave before I have too much fun?
[01:11:06] Michaela: Yes.
[01:11:07] Kenneth: Yeah. always listen to that voice. Get the hell out of there.
[01:11:12] Michaela: I was like, Yes, constantly.
[01:11:14] Kenneth: Yeah.
Does that ever happen when you're on the internet? Because because you should leave.
[01:11:19] Michaela: Oh yes,
[01:11:20] Kenneth: Get off the internet.
[01:11:21] Aaron: Yeah. Most people just swipe past that voice. Gotta go.
[01:11:25] Joey: Yeah. I'm gonna go back to what Aaron said, I like the whole solution to solution to everything is if you can know yourself enough to know what you really want.
And then like Kenneth said, once you know what you really want, it's easy to figure out what you're willing to sacrifice to get it. It won't be too much, it won't be too little. You'll have balance.
[01:11:46] Michaela: Beautiful.
[01:11:46] Aaron: Well,
[01:11:47] Kenneth: Also no disrespect to people who don't know what they want.
[01:11:50] Michaela: Yeah. It takes time to find it or, or,
[01:11:52] Kenneth: 17 year olds or arrested arrested 23 year olds.
[01:11:55] Michaela: 30 or 36 year olds who just want a lot of things. So don't always know what to focus on.
[01:12:01] Joey: People are still young, like 36. You've got your whole life ahead of you.
[01:12:05] Michaela: Not middle-aged
[01:12:07] Joey: by 40, if you don't know what you want, then yeah, no, you're you're fucked. That's it.
[01:12:10] Aaron: Well, thank you guys for spending your morning or early afternoon with us.
[01:12:14] Joey: Thank you. Our pleasure and love to talk to you.