It’s fifteen years since Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan, two boys from Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, let slip their debut album. “Released” is not the right word, for Prologue (2011) was posted quietly online as a free download, the link sent to friends. Fame and fortune weren’t the goal – it was another f-word: folk, in a pure sense. Simple, quietly affecting music-making with authenticity and honesty at its heart. “We were very conscious back then of trying to make our two voices sound like one thing,” Ryan recalls. “And we wanted our guitars to sound like one instrument too.”
The San Francisco Chronicle described the album as "bittersweet and beautiful”. NPR picked one of its ten tracks as Song of the Day. North American tours followed and, come the third album, Monterey, the music world was taking serious notice. In 2014, they joined Joan Baez, the Punch Brothers and other name folkies for a concert to mark the release of Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers movie about the Greenwich Village folk scene (hated by most of those who here actually there), and two years later played with Baez, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and others on the Lampedusa fundraising tour. In 2023, they founded the Los Angeles Folk Festival.
All pretty remarkable and distinguished, and proof, if proof were needed, that there is an audience for carefully wrought, well-sung, quiet-sounding music that comes from the heart and speaks to all our hearts in these noisy and troubled times.
Lost Cause Lover Fool, the duo’s seventh album, is a keeper. Nine songs, all but two (“Sad Song” and “Ribbon”) written by Pattengale and Ryan whose voices entwine and harmonise like early Simon and Garfunkel over guitar, banjo, and drums. It’s a rootsy album with a warm and intimate feel, the songs about “transformation. 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”. California boys they may be, but the feeling is of the misty Appalachians, despite the songs’ references to points west and the cover image.
It’s a beautiful set of songs, slow-paced, and reflective, and you can’t help but be drawn in. Nothing flash, just honest-to-god beautiful music. It works every time. Check it out.
