Handsome Family Hits the Road
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Rennie grew up in New York State, but she felt drawn to New Mexico as well. “I tell everybody the reason I decided to move was one night I was getting out of my car in Wicker Park, and walking to my apartment I saw this rat run across the street,” she says. “Instead of the usual, ‘Eww, rat’ feeling, I said, ‘Oh, it’s an animal.’ I wanted to cuddle it to my breast. I felt like Chicago was poisoning me after a while. I felt really nervous walking around, the traffic bothered me, the crowds bothered me. I just longed for some trees.”
Before vacating their cavernous Wicker Park loft in June, the couple finished their fifth album, Twilight, for Chicago’s Carrot Top label. Like the previous two, it was recorded entirely on a Macintosh G3. “I was definitely thinking that this would probably be the last record I would make in Chicago, and I wanted to write about things that made it a great place to live,” says Rennie, whose lyrics Brett sets to music and sings. “The Snow White Diner” is actually set in the greasy spoon that used to be at Clark and Wrightwood, but many of the songs are less narrative and more impressionistic than usual. For instance: “You can’t see the stars above the city skyline, but sometimes the air shines like gold under the yellow streetlights,” Brett sings in “All the TVs in Town.” Rennie explains, “I started looking at streetlights as if they were stars. I’d be walking down the street and I’d look up at a streetlight and think, ‘Oh, that’s so pretty.’ You replace what you’re missing in the natural world with new objects.”
In the late 80s downstate Champaign was something of a mecca for jangle pop, with post-R.E.M. guitar bands sprouting up like so many cornstalks. Perhaps the truest believer of the bunch was drummer Ric Menck, who played in an endless shuffle of short-term projects, including the Springfields, Choo Choo Train, and Bag o’ Shells. Some of those bands included Evanston native Paul Chastain, who’d previously indulged his sweet tooth in a twee duo called the Reverbs. By the end of the decade the pair had relocated to Providence, Rhode Island, where they started their best and longest-running band, the retro but insanely catchy Velvet Crush. Their most recent album is Free Expression, released by the Aurora-based Bobsled label in 1999; coproduced by Matthew Sweet, who also lends a hand on guitar, it’s as fine a document as any of Chastain’s dreamy power-pop hooks and Menck’s Ringo-esque swing.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Mark Owen.
