Wonders
of the Invisible World: The Handsome Family and the
‘Topographical Uncanny’
Asbjørn Grønstad
Spring 2005
George Jones shares a veggie
burger with Jim Morrison at McDonald's, where their order is
taken by Jerry Lewis. The chef is Franz Kafka. The background
muzak is Mahler's Symphony No. 1.[i]
Gravity is not the only force
at work in this world.[ii]
This is how it goes in the vernacular of rock journalism: the
more idiosyncratic the artists and the more distinctive their
sound, the more insistent are the attempts to embellish that
uniqueness with a plethora of motley, and often crudely chiseled,
monikers. Thus, the music of The Handsome Family has been
variously tagged as alt. country, Americana, backwoods noir,
post-millennial folk, American Gothic, Appalachian folk,
murderous balladry, and, perhaps most imaginatively, "honky-pop
and avant-tonk country music" (McLeod, 2000: 133). None of these
descriptive labels are necessarily erroneous or even imprecise; it's
just that they seem somewhat reductive. Contemporary though
hardly conventional hymnologists of the lingering influence of
the Puritan unconscious, Brett and Rennie Sparks are the
husband-and-wife team behind the band name The Handsome Family.
Over the course of six epochal studio albums they have
established themselves as arguably the foremost practitioners of
present-day American folk music, certainly related to, yet
noticeably different, from a slew of other artists and bands
whose work has made the last decade the rock'n'roll equivalent of
that kind of American literary renaissance promulgated by F.O.
Matthiessen in his landmark 1941 study.[iii]
Enigmatically combining the
self-conscious and the authentic, the records of The Handsome
Family transcend not only country music but even the more
heterogeneous Americana genre. While fraught with tensions
between the metaphysical and the material, the spiritual and the
secular, the unorthodox folk songs of this eccentric band
nevertheless envision a distinctive and internally coherent
narrative universe populated by characters who hear angels'
voices inside potatoes ("Gravity") and who are pulled under by
supernatural forces to drown ("Lie Down"). What I would like to
explore here are the ramifications of the persistent emphasis on
the extra-sensory and otherworldly - in short, that which remains
hidden - in the work of the Sparks.' This thematic gravitation
aligns their art with the tradition of American
Transcendentalism, whose acute sensitivity to the wonders of the
invisible world is shared by The Handsome Family. Moreover, implicated
in this postmodernized, Neo-transcendental aesthetics is an
overarching awareness of the unity of past and present, as well
as a sense of the inherent, fundamental continuity of life's rich
secrets. In the slow-motion waltz of "The Forgotten Lake," for
instance, "covered wagons/and the wings of missing planes"
manifest the spatial contiguity of different pasts within the
same dreamy seascape. According to Greil Marcus, it is nothing
less than a conception of "the old, weird American" (Marcus,
2002) that The Handsome Family brings into the present. But is
this notion of a barely tangible, sepia-tinted, and ultimately
inscrutable past really just a metaphor for that 'other country'
- not that of George W. Bush but of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel
Hawthorne - which may exist today underneath the veneer of mass
mediated images of corporate America?
The recent history of American folk music has its own
shadowy signposts, releases whose significance goes beyond the
merely influential to become representative of entire aesthetic
and cultural traditions. Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk
Music (1952), Bob Dylan and the Band's The Basement Tapes (recorded in
1967, officially released in 1975), and Uncle Tupelo's No
Depression (1990) are works which may make audible "the palavers
of a community of ghosts" (Marcus, 1997: 86), but they also
resonate, perhaps paradoxically, with a peculiar agelessness.
This sense of being firmly anchored in space yet adrift in time
permeates the songs of the Sparks family as well, and, taken
collectively, their four successive albums Through the Trees (1998),
In the Air (2000), Twilight (2001), and Singing Bones
(2003) are themselves in the process of becoming the preeminent
voices of this community.[iv] But The Handsome Family is far more
than just an avatar of Marcusian Americana; in order to encompass
the group's influences, range, and preoccupations one would have
to anticipate a conception of this particular brand of American
aesthetics much broader than that presently evoked by the even
eclectically folkloristic.[v] In approaching this tradition critically,
it would not be unwise to eschew the increasingly anaemic and
uninformative notions of cultural studies or popular culture.
What concerns us here is a transhistorical, inter-medial,
cross-disciplinary poetics of folk noir, an art of the basement
tape which lays claim to an almost surreal, semi-mythical, and mostly
imagined topography that is home to anyone from Emily Dickinson to
Johnny Cash. At the current moment The Handsome Family occupies a
space that reverberates with the crazed, distorted accents of the
inhabitants and stories of this slanted, enchanted universe.[vi]
Like so many of their peers, the Sparks family has a much larger
audience in Europe than in the States, a situation that somehow
seems oddly appropriate; artists who evoke a forgotten,
unofficial country are themselves largely forgotten or overlooked
by their own mainstream republic.[vii] When I talked to them in May
2004, Rennie and Brett Sparks told me that they felt like
expatriates, polemically invoking a connection between themselves and
the artists who fled Germany in the 1930s. The analogy divulges
an unmistakable, yet hardly unexpected rhetorical slant
delicately inflected throughout the band's lyrics. Although The
Handsome Family's ostensibly hermetic world of sad milkmen and
snow-white diners may appear to negate any political propensity,
their songs are in no way devoid of cultural critique (a subject
I shall return to below).
An appraisal of the work of the Handsomes might as well begin,
circuitously, in the realm of the visual. As I write this, I am
taken in by the cover of their fifth regular album, Twilight,
released by Carrot Top Records in October 2001. Different shades of
grey outline a background that accentuates a rigid formation of
thin, bare, black trunks with some empty space between them.
Muted and severe, the image is only vaguely figurative, defined
more by contours than content. What the faintly foreboding
depiction immediately recalls is in fact the titles of the band's
two previous albums, Through the Trees (1998) and In the Air (2000).
There are trees, to be sure, within the frame of the former
cover, a pine wood winding its way along a lake and climbing
toward a majestic mountain, patches of snow near its summit. Unlike the
Twilight image, that of Through the Trees is rendered in a
realist mode. Its focal point - the main object - is not the
trees referred to in the title but the towering mountaintop; and
the lake down in the left corner one hardly even notices at a first
glance. The subsequent album In the Air presents an image that -
despite the spatial dominance of gently sloping green fields - is
fraught with a sense of rarefied weightlessness. Its vista
appears calm and vertiginous at the same time. Gazing at the
scene for a prolonged period one may actually start to feel a
slight twitching in the stomach. Reminiscent of the work of Grant
Wood, particularly his Haying and New Road (both 1939), In the
Air conveys a dizzying openness that is serene yet menacing. Try
placing a copy of Fairport Convention's Over the Next Hill (2004)
next to The Handsome Family cover, and the juxtaposition will
yield a conspicuous disparity of tone. While both images feature
motifs that are to some extent similar, the former seems rather
sanguine compared to the latter's unaccountably ominous vibe.
With its turbulent cover depicting waves crashing against some
sea cliffs, Singing Bones (2003) at present concludes the band's
predilection for elemental imagery. The frenzied movement
captured by this illustration entails a drastic re-orientation
away from the stasis of the three preceding album covers.
Nonetheless, the configurational sense at work in the image is
much the same as before. Singing Bones gives compositional
precedence to the narrative moment in which a wave breaks in an
explosion of ocean spray, thus suggesting a structural
correspondence with Through the Trees while also reinforcing the
emphasis on vertical lineation so evident with regard to that
record and Twilight in particular.[viii] As indicated, the tempestuous
image extends the range of the group's concern with elementary
forces by adding water to earth and air. But the kind of
referential slide that occurs between image and title in In the
Air and between the title of Through the Woods and the
cover of Twilight is even more pronounced in Singing Bones. Two
of the album's songs are named "If the World Should End in Fire"
and "If the World Should End in Ice," denoting two phenomena or
states of nature that strangely contrast with the cover's
delineation of the raging waves. The title of the record, furthermore,
invokes no less of a discrepancy in its dialectical collapse of
two largely opposing forms of matter, epitomized, respectively, by
the surf and the brittle bones.
In what ways, then, do these album sketches promise a
gateway into the uncanny cartographies of The Handsome Family?
First of all, these covers are all manifestly about nature, and
not only that; there is also, in some of the titles, a suggestion
of a powerful immersion in it. The prepositions in Through the
Trees and In the Air imply a resolute movement into nature that,
presumably, may be construed both literally and figuratively. In
both these images, nature appears hospitable and conciliatory,
though maybe deceptively so. Conversely, in Twilight nature is
mainly intimidating and unapproachable, the dark array of trees
arranged as if to protect the primeval integrity of the woods
from any human trespassers. The concept of twilight both
underscores the existence of such a fearful boundary and portends
a tentative passage between different realms of being parallel to
that suggested by the preposition in Through the Trees. Singing Bones,
finally, portrays nature as a violent, untamed force that is not
only ambiguous and daunting, as in Twilight, but has turned downright
antagonistic, encroaching upon the world beyond it. In the image
of Singing Bones, nature itself has become the trespasser.
The visual consistency of The Handsome Family's four most recent
albums is only matched by the notable thematic and stylistic
unity of Rennie Sparks's lyrics, which, it should be pointed out,
are not so much lyrics in the ordinary sense as narrative poems
or even short short stories.[ix] While most of these narratives
converge on the subject of nature, they also comprise various
topical clusters. There are the murder ballads ("Up Falling Rock Hill,"
"My Beautiful Bride," and "Down in the Valley of Hollow Logs" to
name a few); the songs about animals (like "3-Legged Dog,"
"Don't be Scared," "In the Air," "Passenger Pigeons," and "White
Dog"); the songs specifically about the natural world, often in
conjunction with images of entrapment (for example "I Fell,"
"Stalled," "Where the Birch Trees Lean," "Bury Me here," and
"There is a Sound"); the shopping mall songs ("Peace in the
Valley Once Again" and "24-Hour Store"); and, finally, songs
about different forms of transcending the physical world
("Weightless Again," "The Sad Milkman," "Birds You Cannot See,"
and "Gravity"). It is to the latter categories in particular that
I want to turn in the following.
For The Handsome Family, the surface of the external world
is malleable, and the texture of fathomable existence may be
easily perforated. Singing Bones, for instance, is according to
Rennie Sparks "designed to rip holes in the veil between this
world and the next" (Handsome Family, 2005). She has also
explained that a chance encounter with a blind girl in a shopping mall
parking lot became the inspiration for the whole album.
Unperturbed and at ease within her own blindness, the girl,
Sparks said, revealed a "weird form of fearlessness"
(Gr¿nstad, 2004). Like a Walgreen Tiresias the girl seemed
to possess a kind of intuition or insight that only the blind
have access to. A source of contemplation as well as aesthetic
creation, the encounter must only have confirmed Sparks's
somewhat counter-empirical belief that our bodily senses can
perceive no more than about twenty per cent of the multifarious
phenomena that exist in our immediate ecology: "I just want to
make people consider," she reasons, "that life may be more
mysterious than we are aware, that our senses are limited"
(Hughes, 2004). "[W]e have a thousand preternatural things every day
before our eyes" - this is not Sparks, but Cotton Mather, who in
1692 was asked by judges to record his impressions of the case
against those accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts
(Mather, 2003: 393). Mather, who remained unconvinced by the
evidence collected, published his examination the following year
as The Wonders of the Invisible World.
This work does in fact figure prominently in the
intertexual tapestry that adds an aspect of historical
three-dimensionality to the kind of narratives told by the band.
Not only has Rennie Sparks acknowledged her keen interest in
Puritan literature, that of Mather and William Bradford in
particular, but Mather's conflation of the imperceptible and the
invisible with the wilderness, madness, and evil generates a
forceful cultural syndrome whose influence can be traced through
much of American history. As Richard Slotkin has shown in his
monolithic work on American mythology, the Puritan settlers'
response to and negotiations with the wilderness became the
matrix for the formation of the cultural consciousness of the
colonies and later the nation.[x] Projecting their own neurosis
onto the wilderness, nature - in short - came to represent
everything that the colonists feared. This perception of the wilderness
in terms of its impenetrable, overwhelmingly malevolent alterity is
something that Sparks continuously addresses in her narratives, but,
unlike the Puritans, she infuses her stories with an ambivalence
which assumes that solace and sin may co-exist in nature. While
the song "Whitehaven" (from Singing Bones) - directly inspired by
Bradford[xi] - evidently recapitulates the archetypal scenario in
which the narrator is being seduced and lured away by nocturnal
feminine energies, "Stalled" (from Through the Trees)
offers a much more unresolved situation where it is difficult to
tell whether the speaker is paralyzed by, or may be simply content
with, being devoured by the wilderness:
"Whitehaven"
What a hideous forest
Surrounded Whitehaven
Twisted black mountains
Wolves howled in madness
Never I ventured beyond the stone towers
As dusk spread her black wings
At the edge of the dark, wild wood
But one windy evening gathering timbers
Under white elm trees in shadows I saw her
The darkest of beauties
With her basket of cherries
The wind at her black skirts
Like the hands of the wild, dark wood
She turned in her terror
A madness possessed us
In shadows she pulled me
"Stalled"
Falling snow spun above the road winding
through the dark woods where my pickup stalled.
Falling snow hissing through the air, painting my windows
white till the trees disappeared. Even though I started to
feel cold and I was far from town, I just sat there in
the dark.
Ensnared by nature's volatility, the protagonist conjures a
palpable sense of resignation, even acquiescence, at the prospect
of being snowbound in the woods. This eerie yearning to become
one with nature is conceivably the origin of what I would refer
to as the topographical uncanny in Sparks's poetics; that is, the
uncanny does not arise so much from the space of nature itself as
from the emotional complexities of the narrator's response to
it. In "I Fell," also from Through the Trees, the desire for a
communion with nature, however violent, is even more urgent:
"Walking under those swaying trees, branches bowed with ice, I
wanted one to fall on me, to pin me in the snow." And, three
cuts later on the same record, the first-person narrator of
"Bury Me Here" wants to be submerged "with the spiders and fish"
at the end of a murky road where "black bears crawl to
sleep, tree sap slowly seeps and the sunrise never comes."
Sometimes nature intervenes more directly, as in the
aforementioned "Lie Down" from the In the Air album, where the
narrative point of view oscillates between an external narrator
and the sea itself:
Tuesday at dawn Michael's glasses washed ashore with a
styrofoam box and two broken oars. He'd been digging for
clams in the muddy swamp weeds when he heard the salt water
whisper to him, 'Lie down, lie down in the dark rolling sea.
When you get to the bottom we'll kiss you to sleep.'
Michael threw his glasses in the cold green water.
Elsewhere, as in "Don't be scared" (also from In the Air), nature is
imbued with a more uplifting element, featuring a gathering flock
of swallows - harbingers of hope - that "fall in a wave and tap"
on the protagonist's window "with their beaks." For Sparks, the
wilderness and its agents seem invariably to be capricious, the
motive of her characters wholly indecipherable.
The allusions to Puritan literature aside, the prevailing
literary context for Sparks's fiction may be located in the
partial affinities with the Transcendentalist rhetoric which
several of the band's songs forcibly animate. Rennie Sparks
considers herself a Romantic writer in the 19th century American
tradition - always significantly informed by a certain perceptual
sensitivity and intuition - and though she half-jokingly claims
that her muse inheres less in the pan in pantheism than in the
pan in panic (Gr¿nstad, 2004), there are recurring
intimations of the supernatural, oneiric, and ethereal in her
work.[xii] One of the key songs in which the theme of
invisibility merges with the metaphysics of the wilderness and
with a more affirmative vision of nature is "Birds You Cannot
See" (from Twilight). Here, there is no dark forest beckoning the
narrators to go with the chilling apparitions of the woods, no
conspiratorial swamp weeds talking the protagonist into suicide.
Instead, nature's messengers are not only friendly but even
philanthropic in their relationship to people:
There are birds in the darkness who douse electrical fires
flaring up in nursing homes and the bedrooms of blind men.
Birds you cannot see. There are birds in the darkness who
nest in wooden crutches, eye patches, and bandages, broken
spinal columns, and pots of withered plants. Birds you cannot
see filling every tree, falling out of closets and perched on the
hands of dying men. There are birds in the darkness who lead
lost dogs off highways, steer boats past icebergs, save
children
stuck in wells.
The Handsome Family oeuvre is full of references to animals, birds and
dogs in particular, and they are probably meant to embody a
diversity of traits and features that are frequently incongruous.
The birds in "Passenger Pigeons" (from Twilight) become a
poignant figure of sadness and loss,[xiii] whereas the crows in "Poor,
Poor Lenore" (from In the Air) signify both destruction and
melancholy as they fly Lenore "to the top of a dead tree where the
heartbroken go." Similarly, the four dogs that run past the first
person narrator in the infinitely enigmatic and surreal "In the
Air" and the dog that "sat in the branches with his glowing
yellow eyes" in "White Dog" (off of Twilight) represent creatures that
are terrifying not because they are threatening but because they
exhibit an undecidable aura that may turn friendly or hostile
depending on the mood or the circumstances.
As the speaker
in "White Dog" falls eternally down through the nightmarish branches of
white trees, he implores the eponymous canine to show him "the
door across the lake of fire to the silver shore." Transcendence
may be more unobtainable than ever in a post-numinous world, but
Sparks's neo-romantic imagination is anything but dispirited in
its desire to "penetrate into that region where the air is
music," to cite the enraptured Emerson of "The Poet" (Emerson,
2003: 1179). In a body of work not exactly unacquainted with the
subject of murder, tragedy, suicide, insanity, loneliness, and
the ongoing battle with nothingness, one can hardly fault the
characters for their longing for redemption and release from the
constraints of the physical world. This is no more eloquently
stated than in "Weightless Again," the seminal first track (which
they nearly left off the record) on the band's breakthrough album
Through the Trees and perhaps the defining moment thus far in
their career:
We stopped for coffee in the Redwood forest. Giant dripping
leaves. Spoons of powdered cream. I wanted to kiss you, but
wasn't
sure how. Like those indians lost in the rainforest, forced
to drag
burning wood wherever they went. They had all forgotten how
to
start a fire. This is why people OD on pills and jump from
the Golden
Gate Bridge. Anything to fell weightless again. Those poor,
lost indians -
when the white man found them, most died of TB; the rest
went insane. In our motel room you're drinking Slice and
gin,
reading Moby Dick on the other bed. Remember the first time
we slept together? You said it felt like when you learned
to float.
At once relentless and gentle, sad and hopeful, the pace of this
lush elegy is almost unbearably insistent, like a deranged,
slow-motion locomotive wrapped in cotton traversing cosmic
prairies. For some reason that may be attributable to the
references to the "dripping leaves" and the rainforest,
"Weightless Again" always makes me think of humidity or dampness,
connotations that confer a tactile dimension upon the song. But
what gives the performance its inimitable, crucial quality is the
absurdly modulated contrast between the conceptual focus of the
lyrics and the singer's emburdened phrasing of those same
words. Intoned by Brett Sparks as if he had a mountain of lead
in his voice, the lyrics are enunciated in such a way as to
counterpose the topic of weightlessness central to the story.
Even here - in a song about how, standing before the abyss of
disenchantment, people turn to narcotics and sex to overcome their
depressions - does nature play a salient part. To be alienated from it
appears to be one source of man's unhappiness, though the escape
into buoyancy that an immersion in nature may secure is again
accompanied by potential risks. When Sparks gets to the word
"forest" in the opening line "[w]e stopped for coffee in the
Redwood forest" his voice descends even more, and in an instant
it is made abundantly clear that this Redwood forest is not the
same as the one Woody Guthrie extols in "This Land is Your Land."
There may be malice in The Handsome Family's neo-Emersonian
wonderland, but that is, perhaps, the price of weightlessness.
It could be argued
that "Weightless Again" nicely crystallizes the principal
impulsion of The Handsome Family project - the need to discard
the limitations of the material world in order to become part of
the wonders of invisible continents. In this, their work shows a
profound continuity with 19th Century Transcendentalism, only for
this couple, the movement toward the great beyond is weirdly
graphic. Structured as an intricate interplay of centrifugal and
centripetal forces, the lyrics at least from Through the
Trees and onward are frequently defined by acts of either
levitation or sinking/falling. In addition to "Weightless Again,"
the songs "The Giant of Illinois" (Through the Trees), "In the
Air," "The Sad Milkman," "Poor, Poor Lenore" (In the Air), and
"Gravity" (Twilight) all contain attempts to do away with
gravity. Movements in the opposite direction are configured in
"Amelia Earhart vs. the Dancing Bear" (Milk and Scissors),
"Stalled" (which begins, revealingly, with the phrase "falling
snow"), "Where the Birch Trees Lean," "Down in the Ground," "I
Fell," "Bury Me Here" (Through the Trees), the Hopperesque "The Snow
White Diner" (Twilight), "The Forgotten Lake," and "The
Bottomless Hole" (Singing Bones). It is in songs like these that
what one may choose to call the vertical iconography of the album
covers finds its literary counterpart.[xiv] The spiritual craving
for transcendence is thus de-sublimated into a purely formal
choreography consisting of inverse movements of rising up and
falling down.
Ultimately, the
rejection of the horizontal ambit of worldly affairs should be
seen as not just psychological but also political. The
topographical uncanny is the product of the artistic
imagination's endeavours to preserve and promote those aspects of
life endangered by the ubiquitous pressures of neo-liberalism and the
globalized marketplace: mystery, beauty, spirituality, and
rapture. Fitting it is, therefore, that The Handsome Family is
able to return that most endemic and contemporary of American
wastelands - the mall - back to their beloved though certainly
unpredictable wilderness. According to Rennie Sparks's theory,
the immense American malls now fulfill the same function as did
the rugged outback in the frontier days. Hunters have become shoppers.
"The sheer vastness of our warehouse stores is so strange,"
Sparks ponders: "They are always windowless, as if designed to
make you forget there's another world outside" (Hughes, 2004).
And like Emerson's speaker in "Each and All," who comes to
understand that the luster of objects found in nature is lost
once the thing is brought home, the modern-day hunters always
realize in the end that - in the words of Sparks - "the bright
shiny things they buy will never be bright and shiny once the
plastic wrap comes off" (Hughes, 2004). [xv] In lyrics such as
"Peace in the Valley Once Again" (from Twilight) and
"24-Hour Store" (from Singing Bones), however, nature itself
invades the malls. While Ginsberg's 1950s supermarket pulsates
with consumers amid "the brilliant stacks of cans" (Ginsberg,
2003: 2873) - "Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados,
babies in the tomatoes!" (2872) - the vision of the mall Sparks
invents is markedly different:
When they closed the last shopping mall crickets sang
in crumbling walls. Termites ate through the doors. Rabbits
hopped along the floors. The empty shelves swarmed with
bees. Cash machines sprouted weeds. Lizards crawled
the parking lot. Swallows flew the empty shops. And there
was peace in the valley once again. Plants grew up the
mannequins painting them with leafy skin. Their plastic eyes
fell to the floor and were carried off by wild boars. All
the
mirrors cracked in half when wild horses galloped past and
mourning doves built their nests on the escalator steps.
And there
was peace in the valley once again.
Animals and plants have taken over the mall, whereas in "24-Hour
Store" the only people left in the Wal-Mart are ghosts. In this
spectral suburbia "the sleepless and lost/Push their squeaking
carts/Down the rows of clothes/And see nothing at all," a
disturbingly accurate metaphor of the insomnia-inducing,
zombifying effects of consumerism.[xvi] If, as The Handsome Family
suggests, Walgreen's has become the new wilderness of the
American collective unconscious, new wonders of the invisible
world are in urgent demand. We need anything to keep us
weightless again.
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Notes
[i] Brett Sparks concocts what can only be a euphemism for the
eclectic moods of his band. Uncut, No. 54, November 2001,
p. 100.
[ii] This is a line from the song "Gravity" from the album
Twilight (Carrot Top, 2001).
[iii] See F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and
Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, London: Oxford UP,
1941. This cornucopia of new American folk music includes but is
definitively not limited to artists like Sixteen Horsepower,
Wilco, The Willard Grant Conspiracy, The Black Heart Procession,
Calexico, Low, Songs: Ohia/Magnolia Electric Co., Will Oldham,
Grant Lee Phillips, Mark Lanegan, Mark Kozelek, Pinetop Seven,
Sparklehorse, Early Day Miners, Jim White, Johnny Dowd, Okkervil River,
Joe Henry and Lambchop.
[iv] Six years after it was first released, Through
the Trees was canonized as one of the ten essential Americana
albums by the readers of the highly respected music magazine
Mojo. See issue 129 (2004), 131.
[v] The prevalence of murder ballads in The Handsome
Family songbook obviously links the band's output to releases
such as The Auteurs' After Murder Park (Hut, 1996), Nick Cave's
Murder Ballads (Mute/reprise, 1996), and Kristin Hersh's Murder, Misery
and then Goodnight (4AD, 1998). But the duo displays a fairly
wide-ranging taste, and while Brett Sparks has told interviewers
that the Singing Bones record was particularly inspired by
Dylan's Love and Theft (Columbia, 2001) and Lucinda Williams's
Essence (Lost Highway, 2001), there are traces of many different
artists from an earlier generation of Americana in their work:
Hank Williams (incidentally, the song "My Sister's Tiny Hands"
from Through the Trees includes the Williamesque phrase "set the
woods to burning," which is almost the title of the song that
The Walkabouts quoted in the title of their 1994 album
Setting the Woods on Fire); Buck Owens; Tom Waits ("The Woman
Downstairs," from Through the Trees); The Band (especially
"Drunk by Noon," from Milk and Scissors); Leonard Cohen;
Neil Young; Alistair Roberts; and even The Dream Syndicate
("3-Legged Dog", off of Milk and Scissors). Among Sparks's literary
precursors one would not be surprised to find the likes of Emily
Dickinson and Flannery O'Connor.
[vi] For one recent visualization of this predominantly
malicious country, I recommend Andrew Douglas's documentary
Searching For the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003), featuring artists like
Johnny Dowd, Jim White, and The Handsome Family themselves.
[vii] Numerous are the examples of bands within the
amorphous Americana genre that have attracted a dedicated
following and garnered considerable critical acclaim overseas
while remaining virtually unknown - and in some cases even
undistributed - in the Unites States. Consider for instance acts
such as The Walkabouts, Giant Sand, Sixteen Horsepower,
Will Oldham, and The Willard Grant Conspiracy, to name but a few.
[viii] I owe this observation in part to Brett Sparks, who
during our interview pointed out that the motif of verticality
(which I introduced in relation to the lyrics and which I
shall return to shortly) appears in one form or the other on
several of the band's record covers.
[ix] Rennie has an MA in creative writing and is also the
author of the short story collection Evil (2001). She is
currently at work on a novel about the invisible world.
[x] Consult in particular the first volume of Slotkin's
trilogy, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American
Frontier 1600-1860.
[xi] The song's opening line - "What a hideous
forest" - is derived from a passage in chapter nine of
William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, "what
could they see but a hideous and desolate
wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men" (Bradford, 1963:
62). I owe this reference to Rennie
Sparks herself, who in an e-mail communication to the author
considers that "people of Bradford's time [may
have] used the word "hideous" a lot more loosely than we do
now. Sort of like "depraved" or "wretched" which
seem very strong words now, but might have not been so strong
then. Still, he clearly wanted to paint a dark
picture of the early days in America (Sparks, 2005)
[xii] The strong spiritual undertow in their music could be
seen as forming a part of an emerging trend in contemporary
American folk music. The work of David Eugene Edwards and Low are
two other prominent examples, though these artists, unlike The
Handsome Family, subsume the spiritual within an overtly
religious context.
[xiii] Rennie Sparks returns to the subject of passenger
pigeons in her essay on "Pretty Polly" in The Rose and the Briar.
By the turn of the last century, she writes, the birds had been
completely exterminated by reckless hunters (Sparks, 2004: 45).
[xiv]Brett Sparks has suggested that the vertical geometrics of
the later album covers may be taken to symbolize an escape from
the linear and the chronological and to the circular and
infinite. (Grønstad, 2004).
[xv] See for instance the following section in Emerson's
poem:
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild up-
roar. (Emerson, 1934: 505)
[xvi] A similar correlation of shopping and sleeplessness can be
found in David Fincher's Fight Club (1999).
Asbjørn Grønstad
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