The Handsome Family is a Mr.-and-Mrs. outfit, essentially, consisting of Brett and Rennie Sparks, who live in New Mexico. This month they have a new record called “Wilderness,” their tenth. Neil Young once said that after his first hit, he grew bored with the encounters he had in the middle of the road and decided to head for the ditch, where the ride was rougher but he met more interesting people. The Handsome Family are ditch people.
Brett writes the music, and Rennie writes the lyrics. Rennie is also an essayist, and along with the record she has published a collection of essays on selected creatures. The essays have deadpan titles, such as “The Woodpecker,” “The Turtle,” “The Termite,” “The Shark,” and “The Ant,” that suggest an unpromising children’s book, but the pieces are highly intelligent and succinct. Certain facts from natural history, certain observations and things she reveals, read like a stumbling discourse one might fall into with a stranger and remember for a long while. Each essay is accompanied by a drawing she has made. A wolf stares out from the woods at night, his coat and the trees the color of flames. Ants circle down into a spiral. Two frogs facing each other sit in water up to their shoulders, like sentinels guarding the passage between the inner and outer life.
The Handsome Family like myths and folktales and scary stories. Brett has a deep, resonant voice that turns pleading and mournful in its higher ranges. He sounds like a man who has put aside a task—working in the fields, or running a general store, maybe being a funeral director—to make music. Music on the side is, of course, a venerable American tradition. Many vernacular musicians of the early twentieth century were dance musicians before they were entertainers. His melodies turn where you don’t expect them to or linger on a phrase where other songwriters might end it. He is a resourceful narrator and storyteller, but most of the tempos are dirgelike, and you have to accept that events will unfold according to his preference. If the difference between art and entertainment is that one form attempts to express a pressing and self-defined truth, and the other seeks to provoke, for gain, a reaction in an audience, then the Handsome Family are more artists than entertainers.
The conceit behind the record is that each song refers to a creature, but the references aren’t literal. The first line in “Wildebeest” is “When Stephen Foster died in a flophouse on the Bowery / his worn-out wallet held just a quarter and a dime.” “Woodpecker” is about a woman named Mary Sweeny, who was from La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the early twentieth century and had a compulsion to break windows. Her story appears in “Wisconsin Death Trip,” the collection of peculiar, bleak, and sensational episodes and photographs taken from newspaper articles published at the end of the nineteenth century. (For anyone familiar with the book, the connection between it and the Handsome Family’s sensibility will be immediate.) Sweeny rode trains with a hammer in a bag, smashing store windows and windshields in towns where she stopped. The story draws a parallel between the deep sensitivity of woodpeckers to the sound of bugs working inside old trees, and the conjecture that Sweeny may have seen images in the glass that disturbed her. She wasn’t able to explain herself and ended up in an asylum. “Lizard” is a kind of parable about an old woman who bewitches a town using the dark impulses that lie concealed in the citizen’s hearts.
When the band fails lyrically, it tends to be from being fanciful. “Caterpillars” is about a woman struck by lightning who develops an unbearably keen sensitivity to sources of electricity. To escape it she flies to Belize where she becomes cocooned in the jungle and begins a metamorphosis.
Some of the songs and essays refer to each other. The song “Eels” begins “They used to think the swallows were living underwater / all through the winter when they were missing from the trees.” The first line of the essay “The Caterpillar” is “People used to think that migrating birds were actually hiding underwater when they disappeared each fall.”
It’s an antique sensibility, modernized and less menacing than the original version, but a strangely pioneering one, too. The full embrace of the individual life, no matter what the period, is always dangerous.
Photograph by Jason Creps.