The Dashboard Confessional record arrived at the MAGNET office today. Which is apropos of little, except to illustrate that the narrative style of the Handsome Family—husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks—is the antidote to that specific self-involved music and complaint rock in general. This is not a value judgment or an assertion that first-person songwriting is a tired dog; but cribbing from a journal (dude, you are not the cosmos) isn’t the same as writing a book. Singing Bones (Carrot Top) is the sixth album-sized world the Sparks have created (maybe on the seventh album, they’ll rest), and it’s populated by banshees in 24-hour convenience stores, a supernatural lake, an office-building spectre—in short, a host of ghosts. Baritone-voiced Brett sets Rennie’s lyrics to traditional country instrumentation and arrangements, spinning songs in an Appalachian graveyard filled with Carters, Cashes and Louvins. (With some exceptions: “Far From Any Road” has a Calexico-like mariachi feel, and a near-matching pair of apocalyptic a cappella numbers sounds like Sacred Harp music performed by a Welsh men’s chorus.) Though recording such old-timey music on a Macintosh computer leads to assumptions that Brett and Rennie are going for some kind of quaint gimmick, Singing Bones is a formidable, spooky album you can lose—or perhaps find—yourself in.

Brett and Rennie Sparks made light of the dark side from their home in Albuquerque.

OK, the tape is rolling, so you guys can can clam up now.
Brett: Man, I just saw the guy on That 70’s Show smoking a cigarette.
Rennie: Brett, please. Brett’s watching TV.
Brett: No, you’re watching MTV, not me. Don’t get me started.

Are you in different rooms?
Rennie: No. We probably should be, though.
Brett: No, we’re in the same room. Is it creating any strange acoustic anomalies for you?

I hear voices anyway.
Brett: Well, now you’ve got two more.
Rennie: OK, let’s try to focus here.

Well, since I mentioned voices: Your new record seems to have a lot of references to ghosts and spirits.
Rennie: I think so, yeah. I’m aware of things invisible, filling my rooms up. I’m preoccupied with the invisible world, maybe—
Brett: Maybe a little too much.
Rennie: Or maybe just the right amount.

Is that something that resonates in the album title, Singing Bones?
Rennie: I think so. There are a lot of old stories about singing bones.
Brett: It’s one of those stories that occurs in almost every culture, even in Africa and India and Europe, Russia. It’s usually a fratricide story, where brother kills brother ... I guess that’s kind of redundant. [laughs]
Rennie: Want me to help you, Brett?
Brett: And then some shepherd comes along and finds the bones and makes a flute out of it and starts playing it and the bone starts singing “I was murdered by my brother. My brother’s not a king.” And that’s when the shit really hits the fan.
Rennie: A Scottish [story] you might find most readily is called The Two Sisters. And one of them, her body is thrown into the river and somebody makes a violin bow out of the bone and the whole story is told. I think a lot about the fact that many people have lived in places where you walk through and there’s many layers of dead people everywhere and many layers of reality.
Brett: Like that song—what’s it, the second or third or fifth? Anyway, it’s “24-Hour Store,” it’s on the new record, and the chorus goes “Nobody hears the singing bones/Nobody sees the crying ghosts.” Maybe people just don’t think of these things as constantly as my lovely wife does.

You should come to Philadelphia, because here they’re always accidentally digging up Revolutionary War-era gravesites when they want to build a new parking garage. In one neighborhood, they just dug up a children’s graveyard where they’re building condos now, and you can see the caskets.
Rennie: I’m sure people sleep very well in those condos. That’s nice to be reminded of those things. I think a lot of times because people are always tearing things down and rebuilding nice, shiny, new subways over them, you could forget about the past.
Brett: It’s kind of like history, too—
Rennie: It’s not a bad thing.
Brett: You gotta dig something up to build a parking lot, I guess. It’s what we do best.

One thing I find interesting is that you’ll use both modern and antiqued imagery in the lyrics—even in the same song. “The Forgotten Lake,” for example, mentions covered wagons and wings of missing planes.
Brett: Oh, I never thought of that.
Rennie: I did!
Brett: She writes all they lyrics.
Rennie: He just knows the syllables.
Brett: But the weird thing is that line (“Where covered wagons/And the wings of missing planes”) is a very kick-you-in-the-gut line. I never thought about why it was so affecting, but maybe that’s a part of it.
Rennie: It’s important to me to write songs that have the same mystery and magic that a lot of the older folk songs that I really like have. When I listen to Carter Family songs or gospel songs by the Louvin Brothers, they have this great, magical feeling to them and they’re meaningful. But they’re not about anything extraordinary; they’re just about everyday life in the time period they took place in. Like going walking after midnight. Really good songs should talk about your time and place but somehow vibrate with some hidden meaning.

But in some sense, your songs reflect any or every time period.
Rennie: You know, if you could see God out in the desert in the year one, you should be able to see him in Wal-Mart right now. Maybe we’re just not looking, who knows? Look for the devil, too.

Well, if one’s there, the other’s gotta be there, too, right?
Rennie: I don’t know. Sometimes I think that there is no devil. It just seems kind of childish that there would be one. “Ooh, you’re gonna get in trouble.” But it would be kind of fun if there was.
Brett: That’s ‘cause you’re a heathen.
Rennie: I’ve been reading a lot about the Salem witch trials, and the witches were actually the ones everyone was afraid of. The devil was kind of like this little guy with a top hat who was like, “Sign my book with your blood, please.” But he doesn’t really do anything.
Brett: He had a top hat? Was he kind of like Mr. Peanut?
Rennie: Sort of, yeah. That’s making me think of some things. He was like Mr. Peanut. I mean, the devil. What’s the devil, you know? It’s maybe what—
Brett: Old Nick.
Rennie: —what evil is inside us.
Brett: Black Jack David.

One thing that’s funny about Rennie writing the lyrics and Brett singing them is that you, Rennie, could probably have a situation where your husband has to own up to any transgressions. Like a song where he sings, “I’m sorry I left the toilet seat up.”
Brett: Oh, we’ve been down this road, lemme tell ya.
Rennie: He’s basically my puppet.
Brett: Half the songs are about me falling down in the snow, bashing my head against the sidewalk. There are those kinds of songs where I do pay for my little vices. And I get the treat of parading them in front of an audience every single night for an hour.
Rennie: Not everything’s that way. If we’ve been through something that I want to write about, I write about it from his point of view since he’s going to be singing it. I really like to write from his point of view, too, it’s really liberating. I can write about things that wouldn’t be as believable coming out of my mouth.

Brett, do you have veto power if there’s a lyric you don’t agree with?
Brett: I try to give everything a fair shake. There are some things I object to for purely mechanical reasons, like I don’t like the way that they sing or the way they fall metrically. That bothers me more than the actual content.
Rennie: There’s always one verse that gets taken out in every song. It’s usually the verse where somebody turns to cannibalism.
Brett: You have to be careful, though. Like the song “Weightless” (from Through The Trees), I thought the lyrics really sucked, and that they were really ambiguous. They don’t make you feel anything. Weren’t there lyrics about sculptures of big concrete buffalos and shit, or something? We cut that part off. But it ended up being one of the most popular, anthologized, compiled, big fan kind of mini-hit—
Rennie: I want one more adjective, I’m still not seeing it.
Brett: —that we’ve ever recorded. So you gotta watch out, you know?

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