Audience master recording

CDR

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DVD 1833; lineage: Oktava MK-012 > Naiant Littlebox > Korg MR-1 DFF 1 bit / 2.8 mhz. Mastered at 24/96 wav in WaveLab 6.0 with iZotope Ozone 5.0 dithered to 16/44.1. Converted to FLAC in CD-Wave Editor. Recorded and Mastered by Bill Koucky

KEEP YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM
The Foreword to Prologue by Joe Henry

Many years ago, in a moment of professional crisis, I took up for a spell
with The Jayhawks, an earnest band from Minnesota with whom I shared a tour,
a dog-eared sensibility, and the lack of sufficient patronage that mightíve
kept us from sleeping triple in the double beds of hard-lit motel rooms
scattered throughout the land of the Great Lakes. Before meeting them,
I had been given their most recent album by way of introduction; and I
will confess here that upon first listen I became so seduced by the
singular character that emerged from the songs, that I failed to register
that there were actually two very different singers giving rise to him.
Honest: I heard it all as if coming from one central figure who had a
voice all his own, and that neither lead singer in the band could wholly
claim or account for.

I was embarrassed when this mishearing was initially pointed out to me;
but had I been on the other end of that inadvertent deception I would have
thrilled to it: the notion that a nameless Other might have been rendered
so persuasively in song that the artists themselves disappeared fully
into its arc and service.

So now has proved the case with Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan, The Milk
Carton Kids: I listen and, try as I might, forget to hear them as distinct
collaborators in song and story. Instead, they move to become a single,
shadowy persona within the frame of Prologue ñlike young twins cast to tag-team
one demanding role in a terse-but-tender film by Elia Kazan, haunted and
hounded across a lonely landscape in search of the love that might provide
their collective character a fleeting taste of both redemption and self-recognition.

And it isnít only their singing voices that build this hall of mirrors for me:
their songwriting and string work wind around each other like coarse briar
at the base of a flag pole, confusing the mind as to how exactly it is
fixed to the ground, while clearly keeping its banner raised high above
the thorns, streaming if frayed. It is a flag that flies on behalf of no
clear territory, though, as much as it waves to commemorate some missed
opportunity; as if a particular time itself had been the foolís destination,
fading immediately upon arrivalÖleaving sand in the shoe, love in the
rearview, and a hand bereft of the hammer that had almost forged something
(God save us) permanent.

Their individual aspirations aside ñJoeyís or Kennethísó I should say I donít
wish for it to be different, donít wish for my confusions between them to be
abated. I prefer disorientation when it comes to music. I live to be deceived,
and would far rather be seduced than have anything explained.

As for this unnamed fella, then, who weaves hurt-but-hopeful through these
songsÖheís got something he needs to tell me, I think. And only because he
speaks to me from the moving shadows, his face half hidden, will I truly be
able to recognize his story as my own.

Joe Henry
24 June, 2011

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