A smooth blend

By Sophie Best
January 14, 2005
The Handsome Family - Rennie Sparks and Brett Sparks.

The Handsome Family - Rennie Sparks and Brett Sparks.
Photo: Supplied

Making music together has paid off handsomely for this couple, combining fire-and-brimstone vocals with lyrical tales of the supernatural and the natural. By Sophie Best.

When the Handsome Family's Brett Sparks met his future lyricist, bassist, autoharp player and wife, Rennie, he was out on a date with another woman. "I was waiting on a lady - I think her name was Nadine," he recalls in his booming Texan drawl. "But then Rennie came - with a bottle of tequila. And then the fun began."

The couple have been inseparable ever since, and the music they make as the Handsome Family has won them cult status worldwide.

Drawing on archaic musical sources such as traditional folk, country and cowboy ballads, with lyrics at once macabre and picturesque, the Handsome Family's songbook is akin to the fairytales of the brothers Grimm. Delivered in Brett's dramatic, fire-and-brimstone preacher's vocals, Rennie's lyrical tales of the supernatural and the natural - restless ghosts and tiny animals, gravediggers and falling snow - have a twisted humour and dignified stature.

When they met over the bottle of tequila in New York, Brett was a music graduate student and Rennie a fiction writer. It was several years into their relationship before they merged those talents.

"We were married for a few years before we ever wrote a song together," Brett explains. "Rennie was always working on her prose; she actually had a disdain for people who called themselves poets, so she never wrote lyrics or anything."

Brett grew up in west Texas and spent his sheltered childhood listening to classical music. "I was a real dweeb," he guffaws. "I didn't listen to any popular music until I was 11 years old.

"I used to sing in the choir, and play piano. I was a born-again Christian, southern Baptist. They start 'em early over there - I was in the fourth or fifth grade, ready for the pickin'."

In high school, he discovered Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and Devo, closely followed by punk and new wave bands such as the Sex Pistols, X and Killing Joke. But he did not yet appreciate country music. He says: "I thought it was just inferior shit for idiots."

That attitude changed when he went to college in New York and heard the early Sun sessions of Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. "It wasn't long until I was listening to Hank Williams and George Jones and Merle Haggard," he recollects.

"I formed a band just so I could play this style, and all these New Yorkers had never heard this kind of music, so they just kind of freaked out. It was almost like punk rock - it was so raw and energetic and exciting."

Not long after their marriage, Brett and Rennie moved to Michigan, where they absorbed themselves in the Ann Arbor Public Library's folk music collection and the Anthology of American Folk Music edited by Harry Smith. "That was really big for Rennie," he notes. "She figured out that she could write lyrics like that, rather than the standard rock'n'roll form - writing ballads and short stories, like they used to do, in the good old days."

Brett himself was always a reluctant lyricist - "I never thought I was very talented" - so he inevitably cajoled Rennie into his writing process. "I wrote a really straightforward Nashville country love song," he remembers, "and I called her over ... 'Can you look at this lyric; try to change it?'"

The song was Arlene, which ended up on Odessa, the Handsome Family's 1995 home-recorded debut. In Rennie's hands, the narrative progressed from a tale of a one-night stand to a murder scene in which the protagonist drags the woman into the woods and clubs her to death in a cave.

"She changed it a little bit," Brett deadpans, "so, uh, from that point, we started working pretty consistently with each other."

Making music together, it seems, has been good for their marriage. "It's probably easier than being in a band with four or five guys - that can be a real drag," he says. "And to be on the road, away from your spouse, is not such a healthy thing for a man to do. I've seen a lot of people f--- up when they go on the road."

His wife's constant company is also a stabilising influence for Brett, who has battled depression and was admitted to hospital between their second album, Milk and Scissors, and their breakthrough release, 1998's Through the Trees.

"Rennie is real helpful to me when I'm having a hard time, not feeling well, or in a mental bad place. It's nice that she's there, to help me through it. I don't think you can do that with one of the lads."

The Handsome Family perform at CERES farm, East Brunswick, on Saturday with Sally Timms and Jon Langford of the Mekons (USA) and Wagons; at Manchester Lane, city, on Monday with Rowland S. Howard; at Ruby's, Belgrave, on January 22 and at the Harvest Festival, Red Hill, on January 23.