“I’ve been able to rest for a few weeks and have been making guitars,” Sparks says from her home in Albuquerque. “I’m doing this whole series of guitars and right now and I’m in the middle of doing one with eels swimming across it.”
True to her love of nature, when asked about the band’s return to Australia after a long absence, it is our wildlife that piques her interest. “It’s so lovely to be back there,” she says with a gush of joy. “We love everything about going there and it seems exciting from start to finish; everything from the littlest bud to the biggest tree. We have had some amazing shows and we always say when we’re there that Australians are somewhat like Americans but without the puritans.”
As Sparks chats about what she’s most looking forward to seeing while on our fair shores, she explains that it’s still the animals of her dreams that inform her writing more than just the places she visits. “I think I’m more like an auteur of nature,” she laughs. “I don’t have any eels but I read a lot about them on the internet, watch them on YouTube and then I dream about them. I haven’t written about the animals that are around me here even. We have roadrunners and all sorts of snakes and spiders but I think I’m far more inspired by the animals in my dreams than anything around me. Who knows what will inspire me over there though? I remember last time being inspired by your green parrots; you cannot have a bad day with green parrots flying around you. They’re so beautiful; I wonder if I can get enough of what they like to eat can they fly me up into the air.”
With all of this almost peyote-like animal imagery, is Rennie Sparks hidden anywhere in the metaphor of her stories? “I try not to write anything about me; I know me,” she says. “I think ‘me’ is the voice that I hear all day, every day in my head so I’m eternally trying to find a different voice. When a song seems mysterious to me and when I don’t know what it means I feel like I’m really working on something important. I do want the songs to seem mysterious to me because I feel that’s when the deepest truths can be found.”
Don’t be mistaken though, Sparks isn’t trapped by her own creativity or drowning in her art pollution – she seems to be an incredibly smart and witty women who enjoys occupying her mind with the mysterious rather than the negative drone of modern life. She’s certainly not Facebooking away her existence like many, many others.
The Handsome Family have been afforded a long career thanks to an army of fans who enjoy the escapism of their art as much as they do. Sparks does, however, mention that the process of song writing can be a struggle for both Sparks. “After a few years I can find myself listening to our songs and enjoying them,” she says. “But that’s the sad part about writing songs; you begin the song with this connection to something so big and mysterious that it’s so powerful and wonderful and that gets slowly diluted as you complete the song. The only way you can see it again is by looking away for a while…somehow we have something that works but truly, each time we finish a song it seems like a miracle to me. When we’re in the middle of it, it always feels like it’s never gonna get finished and then, somehow, it’s finished. There’s a lot of effort to it for us I think. Particularly the more songs you write – it gets harder. It’s really easy to write your first few songs but after that it really gets a lot harder.”
And what can Australian audiences expect for the duo’s upcoming run of shows? “We always play a mix of new and old, and we’ll especially do that for this Australian tour. But I can guarantee all of the songs will probably be about animals,” she finishes with a laugh.
BY KRISSI WEISS
