FJ: “So Much Wine” by The Handsome Family

If people have heard The Handsome Family it’s usually because their song “Far From Any Road” was used as the title sequence track for the first seasons of HBO’s True Detective, but the husband/wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks have a solid discography that stretches back over twenty years.

2000 saw the release of the album In the Air, an open and airy follow up to their  1998 breakthrough album Through the Trees. At least musically. Lyrically, In the Air still has all the dark and disturbing stories, the Appalachian murder ballads and paranoid familial fever dreams that The Handsome Family has made their bread and butter. To paraphrase William Burroughs, it seems as if the couple receives inspiration from newspaper clippings, radio signals, smatterings of conversation, ripping American Gothic myth from the thin air like a vulture will tear entrails from another bird’s mouth. “So Much Wine”, which gets more disturbing every time you hear it, is a short and bittersweet admonishment to an alcoholic lover. What makes it doubly tragic is that the singer isn’t quite convincing. His almost playful reminder doesn’t quite match the severity of the situation, and you wonder if he’s deluding himself or somehow manipulating her: “Listen to me, Butterfly, there’s only so much wine / You can drink in one life / But it will never be enough / To save you from the bottom of your glass”

It would be bold to call The Handsome Family America’s greatest living songwriters, but the case could definitely be made.