Animal Magnetism

The gothic-tinged folk and country of Albuquerque, New Mexico-based husband-and-wife duo The Handsome Family has long been based around the vivid imagination of lyricist/bassist Rennie Sparks – she crafts the words while husband Brett (guitar/keys) offers the baroque music and his emotive baritone – and on the pair's tenth album, Wilderness, she's cut loose with a collection of songs based upon various members of the animal realm.

The collection relates the travails of frogs in streams, octopi in caves, spiders in nooks and crannies and wildebeests on the plains, but the common thread is that all of the songs find nature intertwining with humanity; sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly, each offering contains an inter-special convergence of some description. “We can never really know what it feels like to be any other creature; we can only imagine from a human perspective what it would be like,” Sparks smiles. “No matter what, we're always going to be subjective so why pretend otherwise? I think there's a language that we can talk to ourselves with that's sort of like a dream language full of animals, and it seems like we all speak this language even though we don't really know that we speak it until we encounter it. It's odd, we're all born with these ideas about certain animals – things that are scary and things that are beautiful. It's a good thing.”

This penchant for mining inspiration from the dream state is prevalent not just in Wilderness but also throughout much of The Handsome Family's oeuvre to date. “Yeah, I guess I don't want to write about things that we can just talk about. What's the point? If we're able to talk about it then we'll be done with it, so I want our songs to be about something that can't easily be talked about but which seems to live inside a song. I want reality to be a little different, so when you hear a song it can change the world you live in while you're listening to the song. It should be like an altered state, so the rules are different.”

Sparks is a prolific wordsmith, having made many forays into other disciplines involving the written word – poetry and prose in particular. How does songwriting compare to these counterparts? “I think writing lyrics is a different kind of writing, because lyrics are meant to be sung and words on a page are meant to be silent,” she muses. “When I'm writing lyrics I'm always conscious that it needs to be words than can be sung, and words that will sound good aloud. Like I really wanted to write a song about jellyfish, but it's just not a word that sounds good sung, so I had to pass on that – I wrote an essay on them instead. There's something about jellyfish that just doesn't resonate when you say it out loud – we need a better name for that creature.”

Does she imagine Brett's deep voice specifically singing the words during this part of the creative process? “Yeah, I do,” Sparks admits. “Every once in a while there's one where I say, 'I think I should sing this one', but he's got the bigger voice – he can sing higher than me and lower than me; he can sing circles around me – and his voice has a certain authority, which makes it easy for me. I believe it more than I believe my own voice. And I really like to sing harmonies with him. I think that singing harmonies is just a beautiful experience so I'm really happy that I get to join in and then go away and then join in again. I always say that when you sing harmonies with someone you love it's a very special thing – it's a nice gift to have. If you love somebody you should try to sing in harmony with them at least once, you won't regret it.”

The Handsome Family's now been an ongoing creative concern for over two decades, apparently due to their eschewing the usual clichés of rock'n'roll excess. “We're mystified; this is a hard business to stay in for a long period of time, and we have some really wonderful, faithful fans who stick with us and seem to be continually interested in what we're doing and I'm really thankful for that,” Sparks gushes. “It's great to get up every day and do what you love, so we're really fortunate. It's certainly not a great time for musicians, they're all struggling, but we keep our overheads low – we don't spend a lot of money on cocaine or prostitutes, so that really helps keep the budget in line.”