The Handsome Family is a 20-year songwriting collaboration between husband and wife, Brett (music) and Rennie Sparks (words). Their music has always been Americana in the truest sense — echoing everything from medieval ballad to Appalachian holler to Tin Pan Alley and punk rock. The Sparks’ write songs that are full of an awed sense of emotion in the face of nature’s mysterious beauty and the wonders of everyday life. The Handsome Family’s 2009 release, Honey Moon, for example, is an album of love songs, but the beloved found within these tracks is a praying mantis, a sleeping bird, a cement truck, and a puddle.

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