L.A.’s Milk Carton Kids bring their lo-fi neo-folk home on Oct. 1

Thursday’s homecoming show for Los Angeles’ neo-folk duo the Milk Carton Kids rings especially poignant for singer and songwriter Joey Ryan.

Until he and singer-songwriter Kenneth Pattengale formed the duo after meeting in 2009 at Hotel Cafe in Hollywood, Ryan had been pounding the pavement around L.A. as a solo act, without much to show for his efforts.

“I remember one show I did at the Viper Room, and it wasn’t actually in the Viper Room, but in the bar downstairs,” Ryan said over lunch Monday in Echo Park, speaking on behalf of himself and his bandmate, who was traveling during one of the regular breaks they schedule between tour dates.

“I was supposed to go on at 8, and when it was time for the show to start, the only people in the room besides me were the bartender and the sound man, who were the same person,” Ryan said. “By about the third song, my best friend showed up, and then it was just the three of us.

“This show,” he said of Thursday’s performance at the 1,600-seat Theatre at ACE Hotel downtown, “is the biggest theater we’ve played as the headlining act. Knowing that it’s going to be full is huge for us.”

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Much has happened for the pair just in the last two years that made that transition happen.

Turned on to their music by a mutual friend, superstar Americana music producer T Bone Burnett enlisted Pattengale and Ryan for his 2013 all-star concert “Another Day, Another Time” in New York, celebrating the folk music tradition at the heart of the Coen Brothers film “Inside Llewyn Davis,” for which Burnett produced the music.

Ryan spoke proudly of a comment Burnett made about the Milk Carton Kids in an interview, lauding their delicately crafted songs and utterly unforced, low-wattage delivery. “He said something like, ‘You could miss hearing them if someone in the room is talking, but they’re going to take over the world.’ ”

On the heels of their experience performing alongside the likes of Elvis Costello, Joan Baez, Marcus Mumford, the Avett Brothers, Conor Oberst, Rhiannon Giddens, Jack White and other roots-music luminaries, Milk Carton Kids were named the top duo of the year in 2014 by the Americana Music Assn.

In August, they were invited to play at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn., where Pattengale now lives part time, along with New York. Ryan, who is married and has a son who is almost 2, just moved from Laurel Canyon to Sherman Oaks.

Their previous album “The Ash & Clay” scored the twosome a Grammy nomination in the folk album category, and their latest album, “Monterey,” was released in May to generally enthusiastic reviews. Uncut magazine described it as “utterly gorgeous.”

What “Monterey” brings to the table is an often-exquisite group of deeply personal songs about heartache, disappointment, loss and the resilience of spirit that can be the result of such experiences.

“It’s a very sad album,” Ryan conceded. “But we love to cry at movies, we love to listen to sad songs, and somehow we feel better when we do.”

Blues music fans in particular have long known of the cathartic power of thematically downcast music, and two scientific studies in recent years in Japan and Germany have quantified the benefits of sad music for those who need such validation.

If that is indeed the case, “Monterey” has plenty of good feelings in store for those who hear the delicate intertwining of Ryan and Pattengale’s voices and the tasteful guitar work, a combination with echoes of Simon & Garfunkel during their reflective “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme” and “Bookends” period, circa 1967-68.

In “Asheville Skies” they conjure a reverie of expectations gone sour as they sing, “Could hope have sprung eternal on darkened, dreary roads?”

Disillusionment and rejuvenation live side by side in a verse from the title track that’s poetically concise as it is powerfully imagistic: “Beneath the sky / The night betrayed / Rescued by the Milky Way.”

“Freedom” is among the album’s most powerful, and most politically minded songs, though once again, the ideas contained in it are skillfully ambiguous:

Underground, out to sea
Bodies come to rest in peace
Fighting for the right for more
That’s what freedom has in store

“That song came out of my frustration with the way the word ‘freedom’ seems to have been deliberately twisted rhetorically,” said Ryan, who majored in psychology UC Berkeley, focusing on neuroscience as a way to delve into the myriad mysterious workings of the human brain.

“Setting up ‘freedom’ as an alternative to ‘equality’, setting up ‘freedom’ as an alternative to ‘safety and security’,” he said. “The idea that we could be less free if there were no guns — that’s so perverted.”

The way Ryan and Pattengale collaborate as songwriters “isn’t a matter of getting out of each others’ way, it’s getting in each other’s faces,” he said. “We fight over songs — but in the way you always fight for your own song to be the best it can be. We never expect anything less than that from each other.”

All three of their albums feature almost exclusively two singers and two acoustic guitars only — and that’s by design rather than economic necessity.

“That’s been the whole aim: to see what more can be said with two voices and two guitars,” Ryan said. “Presumably at some point we’ll exhaust those possibilities. Then I guess we’ll have to get a kick drum and start making some money.”

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