On an early September evening, across the U.S.A., a million little girls -- and quite a few boys, too -- gasp suddenly, struck by a fleeting spasm of pain. The origin of this mysterious discomfort? Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family, who has just expressed a sentiment so profane, it reverberates across the psychic network of children nationwide.
Rennie Sparks hates The Little Mermaid.
Rennie and her husband, Brett, are finishing dinner at an unassuming southwestern chow palace in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Conversation turns to the misconception, fostered by some reviews -- the ones that liken the Sparkses to the Addams Family rather than the Carter Family -- that the duo's songs are depressing, creepy, or even harmful to mental health. "It's a weird attitude that people have lately, that sadness or anything dark could actually hurt you," observes Rennie. "Like an unhappy ending could make you so unhappy you might die."
"If The Little Mermaid had the original ending..." begins Brett.
"Don't get me started on The Little Mermaid," snaps Rennie. But it's too late. In Hans Christian Andersen's 1836 fairy tale, she notes, the sea princess suffers grievously. She surrenders both her tongue and her tail to pursue a landlubber who not only tosses her over for another, but, in doing so, dooms the mermaid to dissolve into sea foam. (Well, unless she fatally stabs him and bathes in his blood, as her sisters beg her to do. No dice.) Not so in the 1989 animated musical. In that version, pretty Ariel and the Prince get married, and raise a litter of sea monkeys.
"The impulse of Disney is to take that sad ending away from kids, so they don't experience any pain," Rennie laments. "But that [original] story makes you realize that even though you are mortal, you can have this great love, and make a meaningful connection to the world, even if the world doesn't love you back. That's an important message. Whereas now they're saying that, unless you marry a prince, that's it. And that's really hollow, because there is no happily-ever-after. Eventually, you have to deal with the fact that both you and the Prince are going to die."
In Handsome Family songs, people die. When their debut album, Odessa, appeared on Chicago's Carrot Top Records (home of all their studio full-lengths) in early 1995 -- a year before Nick Cave's Murder Ballads hit college radio -- some stations raised a stink about "Arlene", in which a woman is bludgeoned to death. On their latest, Singing Bones, the body count includes a battlefield littered with corpses ("Fallen Peaches") and a prospector who perishes in the desert, listening to "The Song Of A Hundred Toads".
Rennie and Brett Sparks have been making music as the Handsome Family for nearly a decade. She writes the lyrics, he composes and records the music. Brett renders Rennie's words in a restrained, even baritone that throws her often startling images and narratives into even sharper relief. They both play an assortment of instruments: guitar, banjo, autoharp, melodica. Over the course of six albums, they have won praise on both sides of the Atlantic (the British market has been particularly receptive) for their intimate artistry.
The Handsome Family know how to spin a captivating yarn. No "happily ever after" required.
These days, the Sparkses live and work in a modest, two-bedroom pueblo-style house built in 1938. It sits a few blocks off Albuquerque's main drag, Central Avenue, better known as historic Route 66. The decor features a giant tapestry of deer frolicking in a forest (purchased at a roadside flea market in Scandinavia), a cow skull and a horse jaw, and a pair of Van Gogh-like paintings by Rennie's grandfather. Two cats, Foot Foot and Mr. Pink, scamper across a coffee table Rennie fashioned from an old door.
The backyard, once barren, has started to shape up nicely. Cacti are especially plentiful. "I need plants I can forget about," demurs Rennie. Bluejays fly up to the house to eat the peanuts she offers. Big nature lovers, the Sparkses. Beasts and birds figure prominently in the Handsome Family's album art and Rennie's lyrics. In the kitchen, an extensive collection of dog food cans, each bearing the face of a happy pooch, beams down from atop the cupboards. They are contemplating a move outside of Albuquerque proper, to nearby Cedar Crest, a more rural setting, complete with coyotes, mountain lions, and bears. (Oh my.)
Singing Bones is the Handsome Family's first proper album since they left Chicago two years ago. (In the interim, they released a concert disc, Live At Schuba's Tavern, and a rarities set, Smothered And Covered.) "We'd always thought about moving back here, but we figured it would be career suicide, because of the lack of hipsters," cracks Brett, who had lived in New Mexico previously. It wasn't. In fact, the change of address helped breathe new life into the making of their sixth studio full-length.
"There's not as many songs about snow," laughs Rennie, when pressed to describe how the move shaped her words. "I spent twelve years in Chicago, shivering." Gold, light, sunsets and the mountains -- all key features of the southwestern landscape -- pop up frequently in her language on the thirteen new selections. "When I was in Chicago, I was really obsessed with the forest, because that seemed like the antidote for were I was," she adds. "Now I find that I'm thinking about the ocean a lot. The desert reminds me a lot of the ocean, when you look across it. That's probably why I put the sea on the cover."
For Brett, who grew up in Texas, New Mexico, and Nevada (his father was an oilman), the decision to integrate hints of regional culture into the music was more calculated. "Far From Any Road" is peppered with mariachi brass, and "Gail With The Golden Hair" invites comparisons to the standard "South Of The Border". "I very consciously wrote two songs on this record that were overtly southwestern," he admits, "probably just because I felt it was expected of me to do so."
But coming out west effected the genesis of Singing Bones in less obvious ways, too. For the first time, they were able to set up a proper home studio -- it doubles as the laundry room -- which afforded Brett sonic opportunities the Sparks' Chicago loft never did.
"I was always finishing these goddamn records in summer, trying to do guitar overdubs," he remembers. "It would be so hot out, and you'd put a condenser mike up to the guitar...and then a bus would go by outside." Consequently, he ended up recording a lot of parts directly into the computer. "Now I have this really controlled, hermetically sealed environment, so I could record really small sounds, like claves and castanets, or saw."
He also taught himself to play pedal steel for Singing Bones. "The hardest instrument I've ever played," he remarks twice in one evening.
Originally, Brett envisioned Singing Bones as more of a band-oriented rock 'n' roll record. Going into writing, he had been listening to Lucinda Williams' Essence, Bob Dylan's Love And Theft, and The Band. All the drums on the new album are live, for the first time since 1996's Milk And Scissors. But as with most Handsome Family albums, Brett found it tough to stick to the original, overarching plan, and the music he concocted ultimately didn't call for as much electric guitar as he'd anticipated.
What was different was number of outside participants. Brett recruited old friends from the region to play mandolin, dobro, trumpet and bowed bass. With the exception of Brett's brother Darrell, guests were a rarity on Handsome Family records made in the Windy City (though Jeff Tweedy and Andrew Bird can be found listed in the small print on a couple of them).
"In Chicago, unless I really trusted or knew somebody, and it was a really good friend, I was always very reticent to get people to play with us," Brett says. He was also reluctant to invite others into the Handsome Family fold, "because when I did, people would be like, 'Am I in the band now?' That was very common."
Brett and Rennie met in 1987, at New York's Stony Brook College. Rennie, who grew up on Long Island, was a senior; Brett was in his first year of graduate school, studying music history. The night they met, Brett was waiting for another girl. "She never got the chance," chuckles Rennie. The two clicked immediately. They married a year later.
"It all seemed so meant-to-be," she says, looking fondly at her husband of fifteen years. "You seemed so familiar, from the first second I met you. I was like, 'There you are. I've been looking for you.'" On their first date, Rennie invited him out to dinner. There was a seafood place she was dying to check out. When they pulled up, she realized it was just a carpet store with a nautical name. "From a certain angle, it looked like a really nice seafood joint," she insists.
Before they hooked up, Rennie had never listened to country music. Her tastes skewed exclusively toward punk rock, she says. "The noisier and angrier, the better. I was an angry kid, and wanted to break things. Anything you could kick a hole in the wall to was good music."
The path she would follow, however, was not without precedent. "My parents grew up in New York and went to NYU in the '50s -- where they claim they never saw a beatnik -- and had a lot of folk records," she explains. When she was little, they would play Kingston Trio and Burl Ives platters to lull her to sleep. "Even as a kid, I listened to the lyrics of every song," she says. In retrospect, she notes, playing "Tom Dooley" repeatedly to an impressionable tot was bound to shape her psyche. On some deep, dark level, her aesthetic was already seeded.
Brett, on the other hand, had spent his youth devouring classical music exclusively. Then, in the late '70s, he started snapping up early releases by Elvis Costello, Devo, and Talking Heads. "There was something in that music that was just as important, and intrinsically artistic, as classical music," he says. Later he started investigating Hank Williams and Bob Dylan, though he was loath to own up to the latter.
"He was a dirty hippie," jokes Brett. "When you live in New Mexico, hippies are easy to hate. I used to wear skinny ties and a suit, every day, just to divorce myself, as far as possible, from the hippie subculture." When he met Rennie, he was playing in a rockabilly band. At parties, he'd slap Carl Perkins or Charlie Feathers on the stereo. "It was my personal vocation to subject people on Long Island to country music."
But it wasn't until the two relocated to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Rennie studied creative writing (she has self-published a collection of short stories, Evil), that they began to delve deeper into the timeworn traditions of Appalachian folk and classic Nashville from whence they forged their own sound. "There weren't many record stores," says Brett. "So I went to the library, checked out all the country records they had, took them home, and taped them." Then he moved on to the Folk section, where they discovered Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music. They duped that in its entirety, and photocopied the booklet as well.
On weekends, they'd go to flea markets in neighboring Ypsilanti. "They called it Ypsitucky," remembers Rennie, because the town was full of blue-collar southerners who had migrated north to work in the auto factories. There would be hardcore pickers, playing traditional mountain music, at the flea markets.
"We went up to this old guy in one booth," Rennie recalls, "and asked, 'What should we listen to?'" He sold them a copy of the Louvin Brothers' 1956 masterpiece Tragic Songs Of Life. "We got it home, and it changed everything." Growing up disgruntled and depressed in the suburbs, Rennie had thought only furious, brutal music could speak to her. "But then you hear music like the Louvin Brothers, that's so emotionally candid, so comforting and nourishing, and you never want to listen to the Misfits again."
They couldn't stay in Michigan, though. "We were the bad element in Ann Arbor," jokes Rennie. In 1989, after she finished school, they made a road trip to Chicago. "We stayed at this hotel that was nine dollars a night, cockroaches everywhere. We sat on the bed, drinking whiskey with the light on because every time we'd turn it off the roaches came out. But we were young, and thought, 'This is cool!' We went outside, and there was this old lady, screaming, 'You fuckin' jag-offs!,' and chasing us down the street. And, somehow, it was all so charming." They decided to stay.
A few years passed before the Handsome Family was born. Between day jobs, the Sparkses hung out in decrepit corner bars, where scary old men in crumbled hamburgs barked jokes about splashing whores with battery acid. They ate a lot of cabbage soup. Brett continued making music. Eventually, it was decided Rennie would play bass in his band.
"I wasn't going to get involved in the songwriting at all," she recalls. It still hadn't occurred to her that writing lyrics could be executed with the same care as crafting prose. But one day Brett asked for some assistance, and Rennie leapt right in.
"I was working for the Sears catalog at the time," she reveals. "I had to write about women's underwear. Things like, 'Lace, the world's most romantic fabric, now in the easy care washability of polyester!' These really short, vivid sentences." She learned to distill a lot of information into a few succinct lines. "When I started writing lyrics, I was like, 'I can do this. This is what I do all day.' I have an MFA in writing, but I learned more working for Sears than in any writing workshop."
Jeff Tweedy, who has invited the Handsome Family to tour with Wilco on two separate occasions, was an early fan of Rennie's way with words. "Rennie adds very specific details to her lyrics that compel you to believe: These are real situations, this really happened, i.e. you can't make this shit up," he writes, via e-mail. "The weird thing is you get this same sensation when they're about poodles and milkmen. Totally authentic."
Back then, the Sparkses didn't take the Handsome Family too seriously. "It was something to do between drinking and throwing things at each other," quips Rennie. Today, neither of them is particularly fond of Odessa. "It's not that bad, for a Chicago indie rock band," Brett shrugs.
During the making of its follow-up, 1996's Milk And Scissors, Brett suffered a mental breakdown. "I lost my mind," he says, bluntly. "I went polar, in the wrong way." He started weighing himself down with crosses, and sporting an eyebrow pencil moustache. During the manic swings, his brain teemed with ideas and insights. "It was like an acid trip. All my nerves were firing at once, like God had his extension cord up my ass."
He didn't sleep for days, and would wake Rennie up throughout the night. One day he came home from Bed, Bath & Beyond with several hundred dollars worth of pillows. "I had really gone beyond," he cracks. His emotions see-sawed wildly. On September 9, 1995, Rennie checked him into a mental hospital.
Brett spent two weeks under medical supervision. He started taking lithium, and was released. He quit drinking for four months and, like many newly medicated artists, worried his creative abilities had been crippled. But he kept taking his pills. "I didn't like the way the drug made me feel," he allows, "but I sure as hell didn't want to go back to the fucking nuthouse. That was horrible."
The band finished Milk And Scissors. Although the guitars still rocked on tracks such as "Winnebago Skeletons", the sound had shifted audibly toward classic country. The disc included the first of many vintage covers, in this case a crusty rendition of "The House Carpenter" that drew on Clarence Ashley's 1930 recording.
A host of folks outside Chicago got their first taste of the Handsome Family when Jeff Tweedy asked them to be the opening act on Wilco's Being There tour in 1996. "It's un-fucking-believable that we opened for Wilco after Milk And Scissors," says Brett, astonished to this day. "We sucked."
The size of the audiences occasionally cowed them, too. "In Austin, Texas, I turned to Rennie during the show, and said, 'I can't make it.' I was having a full-blown panic attack, onstage. I don't get stage fright, but all this medication was fucking me up. By the end of that tour, I would just crawl to the back of the van and curl up in a fetal ball."
As a live act, they still had some maturing to do. Tweedy recalls: "On the first tour they were a fairly ordinary band. Standard configuration: bass, guitar, drums...playing extraordinary songs with world-class lyrics."
He invited them out on the road again a few years later, circa Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album. "By the time we did the second tour, they had a drum machine and an overall stage demeanor that matched, finally, the genius inherent in their music," Tweedy observed. "They seemed way more comfortable with who they are. Off-color banter between a husband and wife (Rennie offering to blow people after the show for quarters) offset with songs depicting murder and mental illness achieves a balance rarely seen on rock stages."
About the '96 shows with Wilco, Rennie reflects, "It was our very first tour of the U.S., and the beginning of our band moving from being a weekend hobby into being the center of our lives. Unfortunately, as a band moves from hobby to full-time, not everyone sticks around for the ensuing life of motels and highways." At the conclusion of the three-week trek, drummer Mike Werner, who had been with the band since its inception, resigned.
"I don't think he enjoyed playing the newer songs," says Brett, noting that they didn't offer many opportunities for him to shine. "It was, 'Here, play this plodding beat for four minutes, and don't change.' And we weren't making any money." (Werner received a whopping $15 at the end of the tour, Rennie recalls.) Werner already had a successful career as an illustrator; "it didn't make any sense for him to go on tour with us," Brett acknowledges.
Werner's departure underscored the uncertainty of the group's future. "I was freaked out," says Brett. They thought the Handsome Family was kaput. "But we had some shows booked that I really wanted to do. So we tried to do them as a duo, with guitar and bass. And since our tempos sucked, we played along with a Casio keyboard."
To their surprise, the stripped-down lineup worked. They bought a drum machine, and decided to press on.
With Werner gone, the Sparks were left to their own devices when it came time to start work on a third album. "Through The Trees was very different," say Brett. "We were on our own then. Whether we liked it or not, Mike was our foil." In the past, they had tempered certain inclinations in deference to their drummer. "If he didn't like it, we might not do a song," Brett says. "We weren't into being dictatorial."
Through The Trees was recorded primarily in their living room. Despite the drum machine, added emphasis on banjo, Rennie's autoharp, and other traditional timbres made for a more Spartan, organic sounding affair.
Through The Trees was released in 1997; the Handsome Family didn't think anyone would listen to it. They were wrong. Critics ate it up. In England, Uncut named it the year's best new country album. Back home, a Chicago Sun-Times critic singled it out as one of the ten most important albums ever made in the Windy City.
Their fans loved it, too. To this day, people ask Rennie when she plans to write a follow-up to what many consider the Handsome Family's masterpiece, the fractured love song "Weightless Again", which features the immortal lines: "This is why people OD on pills/And jump from the Golden Gate Bridge/Anything to feel weightless again."
Such success blindsided the Sparks. They were uncertain how to live up to the acclaim, and the expectations that accompanied it. They spent three years making the follow-up. "You don't know what to do after making a record that everybody likes so much," says Brett. Ultimately, they did what any artist who has struck gold with a certain technique would: They changed direction.
"In The Air was the most artificial, totally studio-concocted mess that I'd ever done," Brett says of the band's 2000 release. "I was really influenced by Radiohead's OK Computer, the way they used a combination of digital and analog technology. I was into not censoring myself, and putting as many noises as possible on there, without paying any attention to the implications." He would spend days at a time arranging synthesized strings or overdubbing vocal lines.
In retrospect, Rennie thinks the baroque touches were appropriate. "In The Air is all about the air, the sky, things flying around. It seemed perfectly natural to have fake strings in there," she contends. Regardless of the extra "lip gloss," as she calls Brett's enhancements, the disc was well-received, even landing the Handsome Family an appearance on NPR's "All Things Considered" radio program.
By the time they geared up to record again, the Sparkses knew they would be leaving Chicago. They were spending up to eight months a year touring, and couldn't justify paying the exorbitant rent on a loft they stayed in only sporadically. The result, their 2001 album Twilight, reflected their impending departure for the southwest.
"Twilight is obviously a record about living in Chicago, and leaving, and why we left," says Brett. The record is full of conclusions: The extinction of "Passenger Pigeons", the farewell parade of "So Long", and "Peace In The Valley Once Again", in which flora and fauna overtake the ruins of the last shopping mall. It is also the first Handsome Family album to list their mailing address as Albuquerque.
The final song on Singing Bones is titled "If The World Should End In Ice". It's a companion to the sixth track, "If The World Should End In Fire." Brett originally envisioned it in a Stephen Foster vein, then it mutated into a Salvation Army band march. Until one day, he muted all the fake brass, and was left with just an a cappella chorus of his own multi-tracked vocals. He left it that way.
When the chilly end comes, Brett sings, he will let the blizzards cover him, and remember the red robins hunting the singing crickets in the yard, by the twinkling light of the first evening stars. Stars that will keep on shining long after he has frozen to death.
Happily ever after, indeed.
Seattle-based writer and entertainer Kurt B. Reighley has written for way too many magazines, including Details, Rolling Stone, and Interview. He is saving up for his first autoharp. Honest.
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