RENNIE SPARKS likes Irish audiences. “You sing one chorus for them and you’re good to go. That’s really sweet,” she told me when I interviewed her last year.
Rennie, and her husband Brett Sparks, better known as The Handsome Family, are coming back to Ireland as part of their current tour and they will take in the Róisín Dubh on Tuesday August 3 at 9pm.
Rennie and Brett have been married for 21 years and have been writing, recording, and releasing music together since the early 1990s.
“We were married for a long time before we collaborated on any music,” Rennie said. “I was always writing lyrics and Brett music. Art can be a lonely thing to pursue, you might write or paint on your own, but what keeps us together is writing songs together and singing harmonies. For me that’s very romantic.”
The duo have forged a unique niche for themselves within the alternative music scene, bringing a dark, surreal perspective to country/folk/roots music - think of them as a Gothic Tammy Wynette/George Jones!
Since 2001 the duo have lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and record their albums in a studio that is a converted garage at the back of their house. It was here the couple recorded three of their finest albums - Twilight (2001 ), Singing Bones (2003 ), and Last Days Of Wonder (2006 ), as well as last year’s Honeymoon, with which the couple marked their 20th wedding anniversary.
The distinguished music critic Greil Marcus said the band sing “words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing...Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice”.
Aside from music, Rennie is also a keen painter (her work can be viewed at www.handsomefamily.com/paintingintro html ). “I paint in my pyjamas at home,” she said. “I do a lot of commissioned work and portraits of children and animals.”
Tickets are available from the Róisín Dubh and Zhivago.
