Love, Snakes and Whiskey

A Conversation with Brett and Rennie Sparks of The Handsome Family
June 20th 2008 in Bath. Interviewer: Lee Edwards

I first came across them through a Loose Compilation and their debut album Oddessa. However it was the 1998 album Through The Trees and opening track Weightless Again that confirmed my passion for them.

I guess the first Handsome Family track that stopped me in my tracks, so to speak, was Weightless Again.
Brett: Yeah it resonated with a lot of people.
Rennie: At the time we weren’t sure if anybody would like that song.
Brett: That was a big song. But at the time we were ambivalent about it. It was like, what shall we do with this song. The guy that produced it liked it and had this idea to put this big circus drum on it. That record was recorded with a single eight track tape machine and drum machine. We overdubbed some stuff on top of it. Then he added this huge circus drum – it was a fifty-inch drum. Then it just sounded so cool so we decided we just put this on Through The Trees as the first track, it just sounded so good. That song is probably the most compiled and anthologised Handsome Family song of all time. If we had a hit, [laughter] which we don’t, that would be it.

One thing that that always comes out when people described you is the word ‘twisted’.
Rennie: I can live with that.

But I played your stuff to a friend of mine who doesn’t listen to this type of music mostly, and his response was “wouldn’t that make a great soundtrack for a David Lynch movie?”
Rennie: I’ve heard that one too. [laughs] We haven’t heard from him. But I think David Lynch chooses music not because its similar to him but because it’s different.

I think their kinda saying more it’s like a musical version of a David Lynch movie.

How is the tour going? You’re about half way through now?
Rennie: One we have GPS and two we have Steve [Stephen Dorocke playing violin lap steel and electric guitar in their live band] whose a powerhouse who does all the driving. He’s very helpful. Yeah its been a great tour.
Brett: We have a great band with Jason Toth [drums] a fabulous drum instructor and he’s also with a bunch of indie rock bands.
Rennie: He’s not just a drummer..
Brett: …he’s a musician. He's drummer whose a musician, a very strange combination. And Steve’s great. Yep the best band, I think, we’ve ever had.
Rennie: Its actually fun to play.
Brett: We had a really good show in Belgium and we had a really good show in London at the 100 Club. Great show in Wales last night in a pretty remote place. Steve’s got the Stratocaster and I’ve got the Les Paul and we’re really rockin’ it out.

I’d like to talk about the new album of love songs. Loose [their record company] had this to say about it. “An album of love songs, but don’t worry everyone will probably die in the end.”
Rennie: I keep telling them not to say that [laughs]. We’re trying to write songs that are more about life and love and less about death and dying.
Brett: I have to say that this is probably a one off.
Rennie: The next one will be all train songs. [laughter]
Brett: But on this new album there are still lyrics from Rennie's twisted little mind. [laughter] So, there are lines that people are going to take as twisted or weird you know. There is a song on it that goes [sings] “Were you with me then my friend, are you with me now”.  A lot of people are going to think that that is really weird. Like about a ghost or something. A creepy kind of weird thing, or some Lynchian thing. But if you look at the Lynch movies they are about love. Twin Peaks is a teenage love story. We started getting into…this all started when we were touring through New Zealand and I just randomly bought a Platters Greatest Hits CD. Its got stuff like [sings] “My prayer is to linger with you, at the end of the day”. I mean that shit is so intense you know. So ethereal, spiritual and powerful and it transcends the very notion of love songs and nature and beauty. All those songs include references to nature like [sings] “Heavenly shades of night are falling, it’s twilight time, through the mist your voice is calling… ”. That’s really intense and powerful, and almost pre-Christian you know [laughter]. I mean it’s like nature worship. If you go back even further to the Inkspots you have [sings] “Whispering grass don’t tell the trees, the trees don’t need to know”. So we really starting getting into The Inkspots, The Mills Brothers, The Platters, Temptations, Isley Brothers. All this great tradition of African American love songs. So we really started to get into this stuff. At the same time we were getting into like songs like Stardust and like all the Tin Pan Alley stuff. All the Gershwin stuff, and the Cole Porter stuff. That stuff is so beautifully transcendent that it doesn’t matter that it’s about love that really hit you hard and make you cry. It’s one of the hardest records we’ve ever written you know. Getting the words and the music right because you can really get cheesy with this stuff. You have to watch that you don’t cross that line. I mean it’s a lot easier doing murder ballads, this twisted weird shit, and it’s a lot more forgiving. When the subject matter is love it’s easy to go down a bad alley. Listen to all those Beatles songs, those transcendent Beatles songs. Great Stuff.

And they were influenced by the very people you’ve just mentioned.
Brett: Tin Pan Alley

That’s why they were so successful because the music is timeless. Anyway I see you as welding country music onto to something of your very own. You are unique and one of a kind.
Brett: Yeah and that part of the problem [laughter] Sometimes we’ve gone out of our way to make a joke about some guy shooting his brother in the back or whatever but…
Rennie: …that’s life [laughter]
Brett: We don’t go out of our way to be weird or morose or whatever.
Rennie: I don’t write songs to make myself depressed I write songs to make myself better.
Brett: That’s just a part of country music tradition were we write songs like that, but we write a lot of pop songs as well.
Rennie: It’s about beauty really. You can’t appreciate beauty unless it dies.

I’ve never felt depressed listen to your music but rather more uplifted.
Rennie: I think o lot of those bubblegum type pop songs are really depressing
Brett: I think it depends o how its done.
Rennie: A sad song is about the loss of something beautiful. That’s what life feels like and it doesn’t mean that life is meaningless it means that life is full of meaning that’s why you’re lamenting. If we were all in a nihilistic chaos there’d be nothing to sing about. In America people are really afraid of sadness because they feel they may get stuck there.
Brett: Some people say to us “I tried to listen to your records but I just can’t go there”.

And that really is sad [laughter]
Rennie: A lot of Americans are underdeveloped emotionally. They’re frightened of feeling too much, and it will hurt them a bit. But its good for them.
Brett: With this new record I think its going to be very interesting to see what a lot of people are going to see as another side of us. That is my fear though and some people will see it as just dose of dark weird twisted morose…
Rennie: People find the strangest things depressing.
Brett: We haven’t made a concerted effort to make everything totally different but…
Rennie: ...were just writing songs.
Brett: Just writing songs yeah. But its different, its different. It’s a damn good record I’m really happy with it.
Rennie: A work still in progress.

Do you have a date to release it yet?
Brett: No but it needs maybe one more really strong song…
Rennie: …or maybe three.
Brett: It’s all written basically just needs to be flushed out now.
Rennie: I want to call it 'Love Birds'.
Brett: Nobody really has responded well to that.
Rennie: Mark and Tom [Loose Music] suggested 'Till Death Do us Part' [laughter]
Brett: Hang that was mine [laughter] that was a joke [laughter]

And they took you seriously?
Brett: Yep. [laughter]
Rennie: We’re not going there.
Brett: Definitely not.
Brett: We’ve have been married for twenty years.

Congratulations
Brett: Just celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary.

Rennie you primarily write the lyrics.
Rennie: He’s written stuff.
Brett: I haven’t written anything in years.

I’m also interested about the Mac element as used in recording.
Brett: I use ProTools.

So you really are a garage band then?
Brett: Oh yeah my studio is in a converted garage. It’s not really a garage, its got walls and doors and air conditioner and its got carpet. But its really filthy…
Rennie: There’s insects down there.
Brett: Its got a work area and yeah lots of weird insects. Millipedes and Moths, and things with pincers on them. I’m cultivating them. I summon them, come to me my little pretties. [laughter]

[Brett walks across the room and picks up a box]
Brett: This is my psychosis. What did I do in Bath today?

What did you do in Bath today?
Brett: I bought a USB interface so I can play around with ProTools and other software and stuff. Actually if I connect this [the USB interface] and that laptop over there I could make a record. Well I’d have to have a guitar and maybe a microphone as well. Yeah I’m kinda addicted to this stuff. We were here for a week or so I kinda got the itch to do some recording and some editing so I had to get this stuff. The way we work these days is that she’ll give me some lyrics and I’ll read them through many times a figure out what the song is telling me to do, and then strum and sing a little bit. Then usually record something to a minidisc because usually I finish around four or five in the morning. The when I do most of the creative stuff. So then the following morning I’ll get up and see if I was nuts or drunk or whatever. If it sounds good I’ll just take a guitar and record a guitar part and a vocal part, and that’ll be the ‘bottom’ of the song. Then I’ll just stack everything else on top of it. I do most of it with fake instruments like fake oboes fake strings and so on. Just to show a lot of shit at the palette. The I kind of figure out what the arrangement is about. Then I eliminate the stuff I don’t want and keep the stuff I do want. Then I’ll start filling in the real digital audio, like sampling real instruments where I’d used fake ones before. Some of the artificial stuff I’ll keep because I like the sound of artificial sounds sometimes. Because they sound cool, they sound nice. I like the hybrid between analogue and digital it’s a really exciting thing. I can sit a listen to just one sound for fours hours until is sounds exactly like I want it. [laughs]
Rennie: Though sometimes the increased choices you have can be problematic.
Brett: Yeah that can be a bitch. Recently I’ve become addicted to this program called Reason, which works, in synch with ProTools. The great thing about Reason is that it has endless possibilities. But the problem with Reason is that it has endless possibilities. [laughter] You can sit there and tweak stuff till your outa your mind. It can really make you nuts but if you want the sound of the B3 organ but with a rotating Leslie speaker the you can change the speed of the speaker, in real time, throughout the song. It’s completely convincing, almost indistinguishable from the real thing. It’s a good time to be a home recordist.

So what about commercial applications like Garage Band they must be pretty limiting?
Brett: Garage Band is OK if you really dig into it, if you really dig into those menus. It’s basically ProTools with a candy-coated surface. It’s the same engine as ProTools its Logic. It’s very friendly and easy to use but if you really dig into the menus in Garage Band it has some really powerful stuff in there. For something that comes with the machine it’s fuckin’ great.

Coming back to endless choices I still feel that eventually you make a decision to go with what you see or hear.
Rennie: Yeah you end up making a decision.
Brett: Yeah well the cool thing about working with a software synthesiser like Reason or Absinth, good name for a synthesiser, [laughter] is that say your trying to get the perfect mellotron mellow sound you can very quickly get lots of choices. Go away and come back later and make a choice you are happy with without recording anything.

So have you ever used a conventional studio?
Brett: Yeah we have. This song [points at compilation with track from debut album Odessa] and Milk and Scissors [second album] were both recorded in what you would call Pro or Semi-Pro studios.
Rennie: When we could afford to.
Brett: The guy was a friend of ours. He recorded everyone from Wilco to Royal Trux. Actually the funny thing is that I recorded with those guys on the first two records and then I started work on an EP for maybe Loose [Loose Music] or a German label that folded and I started making an eight track cassette with a drum machine and me playing most of the instruments. It was then mastered for vinyl. I took what I had done to them and they said “This is great, did you record it at home?” Then was talking to them about reserving some time to come in and work on some material for album three to the guy who owned the studio, who is my friend. He said to me “Why do you want to come to the studio?”. Whilst I wasn’t sure about it he was saying that it sounded fine and that we should do it for ourselves. He even offered to come and help us mix it if we needed it. Then we had the boon of Jeff Tweedy [Wilco] helping us. He loaned us all his equipment. Then we recorded it and that was Through the Trees. The record, that for better or worse, defined us as a band. That was the first record I did myself, I had no idea what I was doing.
Rennie: But the weird thing was that Jeff [Tweedy] gave us all this stuff to use while he was on tour, because he wasn’t going to do anything with it. The he came back from the tour and found that the basement where he had had the stuff stored had been flooded so that all the stuff…
Brett: …would have been ruined.
Rennie: So [laughs] it was kinda a nice twist to things.
Brett: The only reason I know how to use a computer and how to check my email was that I wanted to learn how to use it to record music.

So have you every felt the need to bring in a producer like say Tucker Martine?
Brett: Actually on our last record I wanted to have Brian Deck mix it. He did band like Calliphone and...
Rennie: …a lot of bands we like in Chicago.
Brett: He’s a really cool creative guy but by the time I got to mixing I was so attached to the material that I was…
It was too late to bring somebody in?
Brett: Yeah. It was too late to bring somebody in.
Rennie: We like making our own records.
Brett: I just couldn’t stand the idea of anyone else touching it. So now I’ve kind of resigned myself, and even on this new record, to doing it all myself.
Rennie: I don’t think you can take orders from anybody. [laughs]
Brett: Yeah I don’t want anyone fuck with it at this point. [laughs] Though I keep telling myself I should probably give someone else a chance.
I guess that if you guys got to point of really wanting or needing external input you’d go out and pick someone.
Brett: Yeah maybe. I mean we do have friends come in and get involved with the process. Like other musician who I trust. On the other hand I’ve started recording a lot of other bands at home in my studio. Like I’ve taken on other people’s projects. I’ve kinda gotten into saying “Ok this song needs this”. So I’ve kinda learnt to step and look at a track and see what it needs. I think working with other people has been really good for me. I’ve learned a lot about how to make songs work. The way things sound and flow.

How about live? How does the live experience of you playing live with a band affect how you develop as musicians?
Rennie: I think we’ve learnt a lot about some of these new songs by it. It’s great to hear how our drummer takes on the rhythm and tempo of a song and Steve [guitarist] does with solos. It’s great. It’s nice to play something live.
Brett: That is true.
Rennie: They always add to the song.
Brett: Even something as simple as tempo. Every night you find yourself playing a song twenty-five percent faster. [laughs] So maybe the song should be a little bit faster you know. [laughs] But that’s a weird thing.
Rennie: But I think its good to hear a record and then go see a band and hear something different from the recording. That’s the point of playing live. other wise people could just stay at home and listen to the record. It should be different.

Isn’t it also that meeting between you and the audience?
Rennie: Yeah that’s right.

You feed of the audience and they respond to you.
Rennie: Sure. Otherwise there would be no point in us paying live.
Brett: I just wanna see people fall apart emotionally and run out screaming. [laughter]

I saw Howe Gelb recently live and he was astonishing.
Brett:/Rennie: Yeah we love him.

Musician’s are always telling me how he influenced them in the way he approaches music. The way he works with lots of musicians.
Brett: Yeah Howe’s a really big influence on us. Before I met it was just mainly his, his cavalier…no uhm…
Rennie: Relaxed
Brett: Yeah his relaxed approach. Like without a care. His guitar playing is like totally virtuoso. He’s like the desert Jimi Hendrix. He’s amazing. But it’s almost like effortless and tossed off.
R He’s been doing this for something like thirty years.
Brett: And his overall attitude to music is like fun and effortless. He’s a fucking’ visionary. He’s also like the salt of the earth. He’s the sweetest nicest guy. He sees you’re coming to Tucson [where he lives] and he’s like “You better come to the house before the show and have a beer”. He really wants you to stop over.
Rennie: He’s got room in his heart for a lot of people. We listened to Giant Sand for years and thought this is the kind of music we’d like to make.

He doesn’t seem to buy into music genres
Brett: I was talking to Howe, when I first met him, about that. And he said “Nah who cares. The first time I played a festival in England, that was for music, that was New Romantic. [laughter] That was the Eighties.”

One final question what is the origin of the name The Handsome Family.
Rennie: Sort of a cross between The Carter Family and The Manson Family. [laughter]

I wish you well with the new album [Due out in February 2009, whatever it ends up being called] and look forward seeing you live in Bristol tomorrow.

The live concert was a complete triumph. My friend and colleague Charley Dunlap was there with me. Here is his review.

Copyright YellowMoon/ElectricGhost 2008