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In the first line of "After We Shot the Grizzly," the fourth song on the Handsome Family's new Last Days of Wonder, a hunting party from long ago, pioneer days, goes badly awry. In the second line, a plane crashes. Then, before the song even catches its breath, the two scenes fuse and a single survivor—of which calamity, there's no telling—starts relating the story, which is narrated in the blackly stoic, just-the-facts voice of 19th-century frontier diaries and goes on to recount progressively more deadly mishaps with the verve of top-flight pulp adventure writers from the authors of the New Testament on down. First the survivors kill and eat some horses. They fall ill with fevers. When all the easy food is gone, a few sneak away and build a raft from the skin and bones of their dead confreres. One by one they die at sea ("The captain jumped into the storm/Then we were but four," singer Brett Sparks reports in a voice grave and droll) until only the guy telling the story is left, singing to his Mary back home that he can feel her presence in the shark-filled waves.

The song is clever, pretty, weird, touching, and funny all at once. It started as sort of a private joke. Brett and Rennie Sparks both wanted to write their own version of a Jim Reeves song they particularly loved, "The Blizzard." In it, a man and his mule trudge over six miles in a blizzard, at night, so that he can get home to his beloved Mary Anne. A hundred yards from the front door, the mule can't take another step, so the man stands out there with the animal and freezes to death by morning, as a Nashville chorus repeatedly laments, "He was just a hundred yards from Mary Anne."

It's tough to overstate how strongly Brett and Rennie feel about Jim Reeves. He is the only human being expressly named in the list of "Influences" at their Myspace page. (The others: "noises in basements, strangers at crossroads, abandoned graveyards, stray dogs, hissing cats, old men in windbreakers, old ladies in polyester turbans, the clenched fists of small children.") The affinity is easy enough to understand. Reeves, who died in a plane crash in 1964, was one of the most anomalous country music stars of his day, a rich baritone singer of careful, precise phrasing and diction. Brett has a similar sort of baritone voice, and similar impulses as a craftsman. Then, too, Reeves's records could be a little weird themselves: There was a gulf between his vocal approach and use of strings, on one hand, and the traditional-sounding country story songs he often liked to sing. The contrast made certain of his performances sound very strange. If David Lynch had not had a Roy Orbison record to score the roadside beating scene in Blue Velvet, he might have done well enough using a Jim Reeves record.

"The Blizzard" was "a big inspiration" for the Handsome Family song, as Rennie puts it with a satisfied chuckle. "Structurally, anyway, but everything goes wrong in my head."

She's talking about the lyrics, and what happens to the arc of a story when she takes it in hand. Brett, on occasion, has been known to make deprecating jokes about the elegant, elliptical lines that his wife of nearly 20 years is prone to writing. He hates trying to talk about the words. "Everybody always has an opinion about Rennie's songs," he groans early on in our first interview. "What I like about Rennie's lyrics is you don't really know what they're about. I've been singing them for years, and I have no idea what they're about." It's a good line. Also patently false: Very often, it's what Brett does musically that gives shape and sense to Rennie's words.

During their 12 years as a working band, the Handsome Family have released eight albums that commingle moments of mystery, wonder, dread, and mayhem. And for the past 10 of those years, as a cult audience has grown up around them in America and Europe, fans and critics have applied labels: Gothic. Americana. Folk. Traditional. Country. Alt.country.

 

The labels invariably fail to stick. If you put the Sparkses' collected works on shuffle mix, one song is liable to be a melodic and lyrical throwback to 400-year-old Scots-Irish murder ballads; the next is likely as not to be built around an electrified country guitar sound resurrected from a 1965 Merle Haggard record; and the one after that a paean to dead pets or to the ghosts that fly 'round 24-hour convenience stores under buzzing fluorescent lights in dead of night. The Handsome Family don't sound remotely like anyone else—at least anyone who could possibly still be alive. Their records have the odd capacity, after only a few listens, to begin sounding like something that isn't new at all, something you must have heard before because it's been around forever. Hasn't it?

It's hard to say where a song comes from, Rennie reckons, or why you wrote it, or how it manages to do what it does. "I can't tell you what it feels like to listen to our records," she demurs, "but I know with other traditional songs, like a murder ballad, I find those songs really comforting. At first I was surprised to feel that way listening to those kinds of songs, but I think they remind you people have always suffered, and there have always been beautiful things in the world that have been lost. And that, even so, life can still have enormous meaning to it, and little moments can contain these enormously important things that can't really be expressed in other ways.

"There's something about songs that lets them do things we can't do for each other. It's a different language, almost a dream language. It can make you feel alive again, aware of beauty again. You feel like suddenly you're in a magical place. A song can feel like it's saving your life. It's important. Art has a purpose. Feeling alive is very hard to do sometimes. It's easy to be numb."

So you take inspiration where you find it. Before Last Days of Wonder was, per their label's press release, "a collection of love songs sung in airports, garbage dumps, drive-thru windows, and shark-infested waters," it was something else entirely. Rennie can tell you precisely where it all started. "Brett knows," she attests. "It was all supposed to be about this little dog named Ladyfingers—"

"Oh, shut up, you weirdo," Brett interjects. He laughs as if to underline the fact this is a bit they do, and she's joking.

She's not joking. "This little dog lived in a yard about six blocks from our house," she explains after Brett desists. "I don't know whose dog he was or what his name was. But every time you walked by this yard, he would jump up on the fence and beg to be petted. Just the sweetest dog. And I started petting him every time I went by. And then one time I came by and there was, like, a line of people waiting to pet this dog, because everyone loved this dog so much. He went down the line giving people a lick. I wanted to write a whole record in tribute to Ladyfingers—I named her Ladyfingers because she was very delicate."

Rennie doesn't seem to notice that she's switched the gender of the hound in midstream. "I loved this dog so much," she continues, "I wanted to give her something. So I took my glove off and gave it to her. She took it across the yard and buried it. And I tried, you know, I wanted every song to be about her and about how great she was and how happy she made us all. The moments I spent petting that dog were moments when I felt incredible joy out of nowhere. And I think I was trying to capture some of that. But it's a hard thing to capture."

"It is indeed," Brett finally allows, clearly hoping that will close the subject.

 

a. Harry Smith explains

In 1952, a 29-year-old filmmaker, music archivist, and bohemian moocher named Harry Smith compiled 84 traditional music recordings on six boxed Folkways LPs collectively titled the Anthology of American Folk Music. The performers included people who would come to be known as legends of early blues and country music and people who would forever sound like fleeting, anonymous cranks with a single story to tell. All they had in common, the deacons and the drinkers alike, was that they were singing old songs (some dating at least as far back as the British Isles in the 15th century, some based on events that happened only a few years before they were recorded) and they were making folk music once removed: Unlike the field recordings that the Lomax clan and others had been harvesting for years, all 84 sides on the Anthology had been cut in the late '20s or early '30s for commercial release. Somehow all this apparently disparate music created its own sense of place—"Smithville," Greil Marcus dubbed it in his 1997 liner notes to the reissued set.

The few thousand people who bought the 1952 pressing were left to puzzle over the bizarre yet clearly painstaking way it had been assembled. The six records were paired off in sets labeled 'Ballads,' 'Social Music,' and 'Songs,' each color-coded to correspond to a primal element: red for fire, blue for air, green for water. The booklet Smith designed featured big, bold block numbers for each song and was festooned with cryptic symbols. Many years later, he explained to folk music historian John Cohen that the point of the Anthology, for him, lay less in the music than in the patterns expressed by this particular set of songs when organized in this manner. "I'd been reading Plato's Republic," he said. "He's jabbering on about music, how you have to be careful about changing the music because it might upset or destroy the government. Everybody gets out of step, you are not to arbitrarily change it because you might undermine the Empire State Building without knowing it."

 

"I felt social changes would result from it," he said of the finished work.

Harry Smith, in other words, was crazy as hell—deluded enough to believe a sprawling compendium of obscure 78s released on a tiny record label could effect broad alchemical changes in the ground we walk on and the air we breathe, that it could change the world.

 

b. Brett explains

"We met in college. On Long Island. I was waiting for a date in the student union building, a date at a dance. It sounds like a '50s song. Rennie the crazy woman came along with a bottle of some kind of alcohol. Tequila, I think. Cactus juice. And some card with a quote from Thomas Pynchon on it. I think she had a tambourine for some reason. She was probably on LSD, too.

"She sat down and we started talking and pulling on the bottle and kind of bonded. Then my date showed up, and I think the three of us went to a party. I ended up hanging out with Rennie and pretty much hanging out with her ever since. This was 1986 or '87. I was 23, I think, and Rennie would have been 20. I was in graduate school, she was an undergraduate. Rennie finished and went to the University of Michigan for an MFA program in creative writing. I followed her a year later. I worked in a music store in Ann Arbor for a year or so while she was finishing her degree. I'm just kind of a thirsty, hungry musical person. I went through a phase where I didn't listen to anything but opera for months. I went through a phase where I didn't listen to anything but art music, classical music that was composed in the 20th century, like John Cage, Stockhausen, Schoenberg.

"When I was in New York, somebody gave me a Hank Williams greatest hits tape. I was really just knocked down by its raw power. Really punk, very edgy. The lyrics were great, the music was great, and it was really simple. At the same time I was also really getting into Bob Dylan, and I saw the obvious line between the two of them. I was gravitating a little bit. I was in a rockabilly band that was basically playing all the material from Elvis's Sun Sessions. I was getting closer and closer to that kind of thing.

"When we lived in Ann Arbor, they had a great library with tons of records. I gradually checked them all out. Among those things was the Anthology of American Folk Music, the Folkways thing compiled by Harry Smith. It was another tire-iron over the head, like Hank Williams was. I started trying to write country stuff.

"It wasn't until we'd been married for about five years, and I was just working on my four-track stuff, that I asked Rennie to revise some lyrics that I'd written to a country song. They were cheesy, baby-oh-baby lyrics. She turned the song into a murder ballad. That was 'Arlene,' a song on our first record, and we still play it live."

 

c. Rennie explains

HOW THE WEST WAS WON

After winning the saddest girl in the world contest for six consecutive years, Rennie took to the streets, wandering from town to town wearing a tall pointed hat and warning people of her approach with a loud wooden clapper, not unlike the ones used by lepers in the middle ages. On the side of a dusty highway she laid eyes on Brett, wearing nothing but muddy overalls and a tin foil hat. He was singing Schubert at the top of his lungs and electrical sparks were flying intermittently from his fingertips.

"I'm a human battery," he explained, apologetically. "I often explode light bulbs just by looking at them."

"Do you like tequila?" Rennie asked. "I make my own using tea bags, number 2 pencils, and spider webs."

After several years of drinking, plate smashing, and falling down stairs and/or tumbling from icy sidewalks into busy streets, the two began collaborating on a letter to be sent to the President, the heads of all TV networks, and random people on the street wearing the color burnt umber.

Eventually the letter reached 80,000 words and still neither was satisfied with the results. However, when separated out into small sections, the letter revealed secret messages and suggestions of melody. Thus The Handsome Family's first songs took shape. Their first record was banned in several states, allegedly causing tumors and skin rashes upon repeated listenings.

Later albums refined The Handsome Family sound, and listeners reported brighter teeth, fresher breath, increased concentration, and a sexual energy verging on euphoria. The Handsome Family's latest record, Last Days of Wonder, has only just been released but already it's helped pull an elephant out of a muddy ditch and led hundreds of orphans across miles of wilderness to a truck stop in Denver where they were served hot chocolate and allowed to use the trucker phones. Rennie now only weeps approximately one hour per day and her tears are full of vital minerals that help plants bloom and birds to hone into magnetic fields during their migrations. Brett still sings Schubert, but he wears a shirt with his overalls and washes his face almost every day.

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