THE MILK CARTON KIDS

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 might’ve 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.