Rennie Sparks of The Handsome Family: “Art is Just Like a Little Spoonful of a Dream”

The Handsome Family are limited-edition. They are off-centre, bottomless, on the surface, and skewed. They create music that has been described as country-noir, bluegrass, Americana, gothic, murder ballad, alt-country — the list goes on, but you get the picture. Rennie Sparks, as a fiction writer, provides the words. Brett Sparks, as someone who has studied the art, provides the music. If you don’t know them, the most recognisable example would be the track “Far From Any Road,” which was the theme tune for last year’s HBO crime drama, True Detective.

“I guess lately we like to play ‘Far From Any Road’ because everyone seems to know that one. That’s the one that everyone gets their cell phones out to record.” Rennie told me. “It’s amazing for a band that’s been around for 20 years to have something new and exciting happen.”

The band formed in 1993, and in 1995 their album Odessa was the first of a steady sequence of releases over the intervening years, during which they’ve played in Belfast maybe half a dozen times. Last year, while in Belfast, Rennie told a story about the couple wanting to swallow a load of pills just to see where the journey would take them. But she decided to check her emails first, and there she found an email from HBO, about using their song for that show, True Detective. I remember Brett butted in, “so check your fuckin emails, every 5 minutes folks. Check your emails.” This was just one, in an ongoing litany of inter-song discourses, which come from that hard-to-reach part of the brain that a regular-sized feather duster wouldn’t reach.  Where do these stories come from? Are they spontaneous?

“I have an active imagination, for better or worse. There are a lot of things that come out of my mouth that I regret saying, but I get nervous and things happen. I think that’s okay, you know. I just couldn’t stand the thought of being somebody different on stage than I really am. I just want people to get to know me. They are there to meet me, and I’m there to meet them. So I just try to be natural.”

Does she get nervous on stage? She answers with a small laugh “I get nervous leaving the house to go to the grocery store. In a way being on stage is easier because at least we get a set list. I don’t have a set list for the day.”

“Last year there was a women’s group doing a bunch of Lou Reed covers when he died,” she says. “So I wanted to do a Lou Reed song. I actually met Lou Reed and I have some stories about meeting him, and I thought these people would love to hear that. I had really beautiful things to talk about. I was trying to play this song, and I never play by myself, but people just talked right over me.” She slightly lengthened the word “talked,” to make sure I got the picture.

She continued. “At one point I was thinking, ‘but I knew Lou Reed’. But nobody wanted to hear, nobody was interested. It just never occurred to anybody to actually listen to anything I was saying on stage. It was just background music to drinking.”

Rennie lives, and works, with her husband, Brett. How’s that? “Hell!” But it’s not so bad. It’s good to work with somebody that I care about. It would be awful if I had this writing partner that I just didn’t have that much in common with. We have our life together as well, and one probably draws on the other, but they’re separate. So if we’re arguing about a song it doesn’t mean that we’re angry with each other; we’re just frustrated about the work.”

How do they differ? “He’s a man. I’m a woman. There are a lot of differences. From top to bottom there are very few things that are similar. People do ask us if we’re husband and wife or brother and sister, which I find very disturbing. I’ve never wanted to marry myself. I was always looking for someone else. I always say if I could have married a grizzly bear I would have, but it’s not legal so …”

Their songs have often been covered by the hugely talented musician, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird. Last year he released an album of Handsome Family songs called Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of…

So what does Rennie think of his covers? “I wouldn’t really call them covers; they’re more like reimaginings because he teaches us things about the songs that are really surprising. He kind of finds new ways into them. It’s been a really lovely gift; it’s like someone came and redecorated my house in a beautiful way while I was out shopping.”

The Handsome Family are masters of the murder ballad. Indeed the first song they wrote together, “Arlene,” is a case in point. Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “The Body Electric” questions the long history of the murder ballad, and looks at the unfolding story from the other side; from the angle of the murdered woman. Has Rennie ever written a murder ballad from the other side? “I’m sure I have. I’ve written lots from the view of people who are dead or dying for sure. I would say our point of view is from the murdered, not the murderer. I also don’t think that there’s some voice that needs to be heard necessarily, because I think the point of murder ballads is not so much some patriarchal triumph. I think it’s always about beauty, and the loss of beauty, and how all things that are perfect will be destroyed.”

Would she consider any of their songs to be protest songs? Her response is beautifully deadpan. “I think my songs are all about shopping. “ I laugh, she doesn’t really laugh, and then she continues. “I think in America especially, that’s the thing that’s destroying us, that we can’t stop thinking about shopping. It’s become this drug that’s distracted everybody from everything.” (Her voice gets higher on “everything”).

“You know everything is crumbling all around, and you know our eco-systems are falling apart, but we’re all just thinking about another pair of sneakers. It’s unbelievably distracting to people, and it works because everyone just thinks “hey we’ll just go back to Walmart and we’ll be fine. Things wrapped in plastic are incredibly distracting.”

So the irony in her songs is a protest? I’m met with more deadpan. “I suppose so, I don’t know. I’ve never been one to say things literally. I think I show things, and try to make people feel things, but for me, yeah, any other pursuit besides thinking about more stuff is a good way to keep going. Hopefully our songs could lead people back to remembering that they are animals on the planet full of living things.”

Did these things always matter to her? What was she like as a child? “I was a very depressing child. I always noticed the spiders in the room and the snakes crawling in the grass. I was really obsessed by the end of the world, and I was surprised that nobody else seemed to be acknowledging the fact that the earth was in trouble and that building more and more missiles was a bad idea. But I’ve been proved wrong so far.”

“When I was younger I had to come to terms with the fact that no one seemed to be acknowledging that we are mortal. It’s like ‘yes we’re all gonna die’, but that just ruins everything if you’re going to keep bringing up death. But for me that’s the only way to enjoy life – to understand that it’s going to end. Just spending the whole time saying the end isn’t coming, is really counter-productive.”

It sounds like she stresses a lot, like she always has. What sort of dreams does she have, and does she ever use them in her writing or art? “I have the usual anxiety dreams, like I’m on tour and I only have one sock. When I remember a dream and I try to analyse it, it just can’t be encompassed; and that’s kind of the way I feel that art is drawn from dreams. It’s some kind of distillation of it; art is just like a little spoonful of a dream.”

The conversation continues on the theme of sleep. “I have a lot of problems with sleeping. Occasionally I just forget how. Right now I’m obsessed with Theta wave music. It’s supposed to encourage your brain to get to the state you’re in right before you fall asleep. So I’m listening to very ambient, trancey, slow changing music. Actually last night I downloaded some and they sounded just like engines rumbling.” Brett must have been in the background, making a cup of tea of something, because his deep voice interjects at this point – “they were really beautiful.”

Rennie agrees with him. “Yes, they sounded like eerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgghhhhhhhhhhh (engine noises), and each one goes off for about an hour, but it put me right off to sleep so … “(I’ve googled it. Those engine noises might be ‘Pure Theta Frequency Wave | Binaural Isochronic Tone,’ for anyone interested…)

“I read a lot, but it definitely keeps me awake. So I’m trying to stop doing that at night. Even in my free time though, that’s what I like to do, read a story. I like to read history mostly – first person narratives of terrible things, calamities. It always makes me feel better about my life. At the minute I’m re-reading ‘The Account,’ written by a conquistador called Cabeza de Vaca in the 1600s.

“He wrote about the how conquistadors landed in Florida and got lost, wandering the Americas for the next 5 years. They made a raft and had to use their clothes for sails. So when the raft finally washed ashore, they were basically stuck with a few glass beads to trade with. Calamity ensued. It was lots of fun. But interesting and fascinating to get a glimpse of what North America was like before it was largely known to Europeans. “

“We don’t have a sense of just how diverse North America was before the Europeans came. There were very different cultures, very different beliefs that developed in isolation from each other. I’m obsessed with a slave named Esteban. He was captured by the Spanish somewhere in North Africa, taken to Spain, and then to the new world. He was the first African-American to walk around North America. What a fascinating journey this poor guy went on. He’d seen everything. He knew too much.”

With that, it was over. The phone rang, Brett answered, and we couldn’t really hear each other anymore. She had to go and talk to somebody else, and apologised for cutting the interview short. But it’s not short; and despite how quirky it all may come across, it’s not light. From the loss of beauty, to slavery, to theta waves, and an imploding-stuff-obsessed planet – this conversation really was a bottomless hole. I just didn’t realise it at the time.

Video Credits: ProOmgHeadshot, shagidra, Luca Add, THF ALBUMS, aceandson, HQ BinauralBeat

This interview was originally published on GiggingNI

www.handsomefamily.com