The Milk Carton Kids announce CD, tour

Joe Henry produced the set from Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan. The disc features a band, a major change.

The centerpiece of the disc is "One More For The Road," a 10 minute-plus musical excursion through folk, jazz and psychedelia.

The Milk Carton Kids also announced tour starting April 25 in Milwaukee with some dates supporting John Prine.

The duo underwent a number of big changes in the time since their last recorded outing, 2015's "Montere." Ryan is now the father of two children and works as a producer on Live From Here with Chris Thile. Pattengale's relationship of seven years ended. He is now producing records in Nashville, and he survived cancer.

"We wanted to do something new," Pattengale said. "We had been going around the country yet another time to do the duo show, going to the places we'd been before. There arose some sort of need for change."

"Musically we knew we were going to make the record with a bigger sonic palette," said Ryan. "It was liberating to know we didn't have to be able to carry every song with just our two guitars."

The music was recorded last October in the Sun Room at House of Blues Studio in Nashville with Henry (Solomon Burke, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Carolina Chocolate Drops) and engineer Ryan Freeland (Ray Lamontagne, Bonnie Raitt).

Helping out were Russ Pahl (Kacey Musgraves, Blake Shelton) on pedal steel and other guitars, bassists Paul Kowert (Punch Brothers) and Dennis Crouch (Gregg Allman, Johnny Cash), Wilco's Pat Sansone on piano, mellotron, and Hammond organ, drummer Jay Bellerose (Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Elton John, Willie Nelson), cellist Nathaniel Smith (Sarah Jarosz, Abigail Washburn), Levon Henry (Blake Mills, Nico Muhly) on clarinet and saxophone, Live From Here with Chris Thile favorite Brittany Haas on fiddle and mandolin as well as Lindsay Lou and Logan Ledger lending additional vocals .

The track listing is:
Just Look At Us Now
Nothing Is Real
Younger Years
Mourning In America
You Break My Heart
Blindness
One More For The Road
Big Time
A Sea Of Roses
Unwinnable War
I've Been Loving You
All The Things That I Did And All The Things That I Didn't Do

Tour dates are:
April 25 - Milwaukee, WI - Riverside Theater * -- SOLD OUT
April 27 - Chicago, IL - Chicago Theatre *
April28 - Champaign, IL - Virginia Theatre *
June 22 - Tucson, AZ - Fox Tucson Theatre
June 23 - Pasadena, CA - Arroyo Seco Weekend
June 25 - Denver, CO - Denver Botanic Gardens
June 26 - Salt Lake City, UT - The Commonwealth Room
June 29 - Solana Beach, CA - Belly Up Tavern
June 30 - Sacramento, CA - Crest Theatre
Aug. 19 - Lyons, CO - Folks Festival
* Supporting John Prine