I imagine it’s kind of like being a speechwriter. I was reading an interview with a speech writer for President Bush—the first one—and he said how he wouldn’t use certain words the president didn’t pronounce well.
Rennie: We have problems like that, because Brett’s from Texas and sometimes it takes him a lot longer to get through the syllables.
Brett: I bet the new Bush doesn’t have that problem.
Rennie: Well, now they just keep it down to two syllables. But on the whole I think it’s really nice to write songs together. We’re both usually surprised by the results.
Brett: It’s interesting, because it gives Rennie this more blank, open palate to work with. When you write for yourself and you know you’re going to be singing the song, a certain degree of personal bullshit is gonna enter into ...
Rennie: It’s easy to fall into self-pity.
Brett: That’s the thing I hate most about modern music—god, I sound like an old fogey—is that it’s always basically about the personality of the artist. And really, who gives a shit about the personality of the artist?

Funny you mention that, since just this week I got this record in the mail by Dashboard Confessional. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this guy; he writes these really sappy, self-involved songs about himself and all his problems, and I was thinking how your lyrics are such a more entertaining narrative. It’s the polar opposite.
Rennie: I think when you’re young, you really like songs sung by someone who has a life more exciting or more romantic than yours. I think it’s a sort of escapism, but I find the songs that anybody could sing are more meaningful. When you get to be an adult—when you stop fantasizing, like, “Aw, if I wore leather pants, life would be so different”—
Brett: “Imagine how things would change.”
Rennie: —when your dreams for yourself become a little more complicated—
Brett: “I’d have to get a dry cleaner.” We saw this band the other night in Albuquerque, they all had leather pants on.
Rennie: That’s a commitment. I’m not willing to do that for the band.
Brett: That’s a sacrifice I can’t make.
Rennie: But it really heightens reality, you know? It changes everything. You enter a portal into a shimmery world.

Well, when you’re young, you also want to identify yourself with someone or some personality.
Rennie: Yeah. Who do I want to be when I grow up? Whose sexy life do I want to emulate? There’s certainly a need for that, but we’re not really offering much nourishment in that department.

You don’t think that people should emulate you?
Rennie: I don’t think that we should be the focus of the song. I think the songs might be smarter than us. I like to think they’re bigger and more meaningful than our pitiful little perspective on things.
Brett: Well, with the rise of mass media, personalities have become more important than music a lot of times. Back in the ‘20s and ‘30s when people only had access to records—and most people didn’t even have access to that, they bought sheet music—the song itself was what mattered. To me, it’s much more important and satisfying to write songs and record them and create these beautiful little objects rather than stand up in front of 1,000 people and be cool for an hour.
Rennie: Stephen Foster is a perfect example of what we’re talking about. Because he wrote these beautiful songs that were passed around on sheet music all over the country. And for a lot of people, those were songs that defined major portions of their lives, but nobody was like, “Wow, Foster’s got a nice ass.” Nobody knew anything about him. Actually, he was a very miserable drunk. His only pleasure was writing songs, and the voice in the songs was nowhere near the alcoholic haze he usually was in.
Brett: Look for the Handsome Family’s Stephen Foster tribute album in a store near you.
Rennie: We really like him.
Brett: We’ve been trying to figure out how to do it for a long time, and we will if we ever get some spare time.
Rennie: “Beautiful Dreamer” is on every keyboard you get.

I was thumbing through my Handsome Family CDs, and I noticed a pretty stunning similarity in the album covers. They’re all very postcardesque nature scenes on the cover, and most have animal pictures on the inside sleeve.
Brett: Yeah, we thought if we put the animals on the front cover it would distract from the title. So we put the cute little animals on the back. It’s kind of like bubblegum cards or something.
Rennie: Thanks for trivializing that one, Brett.
The credits also say that you, Rennie, either found or stole the images for the cover.
Rennie: I don’t like to know too much about the photos I use. I like that they feel mysterious to me. I know a song is done when I don’t know what it means anymore. I paint, and we were thinking of putting one of my paintings on [the cover]—
Brett: Too personal.
Rennie: —but there’s no mystery there.
Brett: I really push for Rennie to paint the cover, but it was too close or something. And then I tried to get her to put it on the inside, but she wouldn’t do that. That’s what she should’ve done. You fucked up bad.

Well, I guess the painting could then become your interpretation of the whole album.
Rennie: Yeah, that’s part of it. Like the new album’s cover is a seascape. Anyone could have their own reaction to a seascape.
Brett: It’s weird, because everyone who looked at that picture said, “What is that?”
Rennie: Your dad said, “Look at that castle!”
Brett: My father thought it was a castle. It’s kind of like a Rorschach test.
Rennie: It should be the kind of thing where everybody can decide what it is for themselves. Is it a happy cover? Is it a sad cover? It’s up to you.
Brett: The back cover of the new one is just a picture I took down by the Rio Grande river.

How do you like living in New Mexico, by the way? You moved from Chicago a couple years ago.
Brett: It’s home for me. I grew up around here. I grew up in Texas and New Mexico. I graduated from Albuquerque.
Rennie: What grade-point average?
Brett: I might still be going to school, I don’t know.
Rennie: It’s a nice place to live. There’s a lot of strange light here.
Brett: A lot of strange crime, too.

Strange crime? Like ... taco-snatching?
Rennie: We’ve had some taco-snatching, yes. How did you know about that?

I’m standing outside your window right now.
Rennie: We get a lot of people who shoot people.
Brett: There’s a lot of bank robberies, a lot of weird crimes of passion and crazy wild-West shit, just people shooting each other up for no reason, basically.
Rennie: Not very well-planned-out crimes.
Brett: Two guys got killed right down the street from us. The first guy was driving down the street and these guys rammed into him. They were on this Raising Arizona-esque crime spree where they stole donuts and $11 from a Diamond Shamrock gas station. They were fleeing the gas station, and they hit the guy, who was like, “What the fuck?” And they shot the guy.
Rennie: Once they stole the first donut, I guess they crossed the line. The theme here is that everyone is pretty low-functioning. A homeless guy stole a policewoman’s gun and he ran down the street with it.
Brett: He ran down the street waving the gun in the air.
Rennie: It’s just things that don’t happen in other places, where there are competent police officers. People escape from jail here and get away with it.

Really? Does someone bake the inmate a peanut-butter cake with a file in it?
Rennie: No, the jail was so crowded that they put the prisoners in tents.
Brett: Tents!
Rennie: And it turned out that you could get out of the tents pretty easily.
Brett: Yeah, maximum-security tents.
Rennie: But we didn’t move out here for the funny crime. We moved out here because it’s beautiful and dreamy.
Brett: Yeah, we’re near the mountains. We got a nice little house and a big backyard.
Rennie: And a lot of things that can kill you. Poisonous snakes and insects.
Brett: Black widows.
Rennie: Mountain lions and bears.
Brett: Brown recluse spiders.
Rennie: It’s good for you.

Do you still record at home? I think the last couple records have been recorded on your Macintosh, right?
Brett: Same thing. I upgrade every time I record. Same computer, I just put a different processor in it. I’m a dork. Now I have little autonomous rooms where I don’t get interrupted as much. In Chicago, we lived in a big loft where we lived on top of each other, literally.
Rennie: You make it sound more exciting than it was.
Brett: It’s really hard to read lyrics and create—
Rennie: When I’m around?
Brett: —when the person who wrote the lyrics is sitting 15 feet away from you. Whether or not they’re listening or judging ... you know what I mean.

The two a cappella songs “If The World Should End In Fire” and “If The World Should End In Ice” are unlike anything I’ve heard you guys do. It’s that country/gospel, sacred-music thing. What inspired that?
Rennie: We do listen to a lot of that kind of music.
Brett: I wanted to make it more of a Salvation Army band kind of march. I was gonna get some friends of mine to play brass. But I ended up muting all the tracks one night and just leaving the vocals and I was like, “I think I like the way that sounds.” So I just wrote a more dense harmony, a three-part harmony and worked it up that way. There’s nine voices in there with a lot of reverb. I wanted it to sound like a cross between the Sacred Harp music and Welsh men’s choruses.
Rennie: There’s something very graceful about a cappella music.

It’s almost a powerful thing, too, the way those two songs stand out on the record.
Brett: I wanted for them to feel like the closers to the record, you know?

Oh, so one would be the end of side A and the other the end of side B.
Brett: Exactly. I tried to do it at the beginning of the record and at the end, but it was just too jarring to start the record with.
Rennie: I like it. It’s kind of like, “Let’s take a moment now to give thanks.”
Brett: Or “Run away. Put another record on.” I kind of miss that. I think five songs or six songs is a good number to listen to. You take a little break, turn it over, and listen to another few songs.
Rennie: I think it’s good to be reminded of Doomsday. Pretty much a few times a day, every day.