The Handsome Family @ Pickathon, August 2007. Photo by Gary Whitehouse
I knew that, for the most part, Rennie Sparks writes the lyrics and Brett Sparks the music for The Handsome Family’s songs, a sometimes surreal blend of dark humor, grim pathos and gritty murder tales. But I was curious about how they worked – which came first, the lyrics or the tunes? So that was the first question I asked them when we sat down backstage after their afternoon set at the Pickathon Roots Music Festival.
It must be a question that they hear frequently, because they were ready with an immediate reply. “I do the words first,” Rennie said.
“But I do most of the shopping,” Brett said. Then they got slightly more serious.
“It’s actually pretty much the classic Tin Pan Alley paradigm of lyricist/songwriter,” Brett said. It’s not as common a way of working now as it once was, and Brett tried to come up with some contemporary examples, settling on Bernie Taupin/Elton John and Kathleen Brennan/Tom Waits.
They’ve turned out seven “studio” recordings since their first, Odessa*, in 1995. All but the first two were recorded with Brett and Rennie playing almost all the instruments and doing nearly all the singing, in their home – first in Chicago, then since 2003’s Singing Bones in Albuquerque. Those first two albums and accompanying tours included a drummer, but since 2001’s Through The Trees they’ve used a laptop-based drum machine – nearly always on tour, and often on their recordings, although Brett or his brother Darrell play drums on the CDs. And although Brett makes a big show of hating the laptop when he’s using it on stage, backstage he admitted it’s easier to work with than some human drummers, and is much easier and cheaper to travel with.
The way it works, he said, is that they have five-minute segments of the beats to each song on the hard drive, and they put together their setlists in Apple’s iTunes software; by hitting the auto-repeat button, he ensures that it keeps playing if for some reason their song lasts longer than five minutes; except sometimes, like this day, he forgets, and it segues immediately into the next song on the list. It made for some fast transitions and a quickly flowing show.
Writing songs together, recording them together, traveling and singing them together … I asked whether they don’t sometimes want a break from each other. I don’t know why I expected them to tell me, a virtual stranger, about their marital and creative tensions or lack thereof, but they didn’t. “Everybody gets tired of each other,” Brett said. His parents recently visited them at home, he said, and he was “ready to kill my dad” by the time they left.
“It’s worse if you’re in a band and you have to leave your family behind,” Rennie said. Especially on long tours to Europe and the U.K., “which is where we earn our bread and butter,” Brett said. This kicked off a couple of tangents, one in which Brett mused about the greater popularity of some Americana acts in Europe and England than in the U.S., and another fairly long story about their first post-9/11 tour. It was shortly after the attacks on the U.S., and they played a “Beyond Nashville” festival at London’s prestigious Barbican. Many of the big-name acts had cancelled in the wake of 9/11, so the Handsomes and other second-tier acts got the headliner spots – theirs had been scheduled for Emmylou Harris. Talk about exposure!
Both also sang the praises of the British folk scene. They fondly recalled a night backstage at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire venue when Eliza Carthy and a bunch of other Brit folk stalwarts did an impromptu run-through of “John Barleycorn.” “I was crying,” he confessed. “They really understand what folk music is all about.”
That also means that English audiences have a deep gut feeling for when music is coming from an authentic place, or whether a performer is just regurgitating something he or she doesn’t understand or care about. “They really sense if something’s not authentic,” he said. “In our case, we were lucky, and they liked it.”
Rennie wasn’t sure about their reception in Ireland, though. “In Ireland, they laugh at every one of our songs, even the really sad ones,” she said. “They think it’s all comedy.”
In the fall of 2007, they’ve been invited to play and sing with Charlie Louvin in London for a BBC program. They’re thrilled to be on a bill with one of the duo who, with brother Ira, created such immortal country songs as “Knoxville Girl.”
“The Louvin Brothers pretty much sealed the deal for me with country music,” Brett said. “They are hugely influential on my music.”
Another idol is Danny Barnes, another performer at this year’s Pickathon, whom Brett hopes to enlist to perhaps co-produce the next Handsome Family album. No word on when that will be recorded.
