• Stan Ridgway & the Handsome Family
• 8:30pm

ABOUT STAN RIDGWAY

Does a songwriter chase his muse – or is it the other way 'round? That's but one of the intriguing notions at the heart of Stan Ridgway's 2010 release, Neon Mirage, arguably the most refined, yet musically eclectic collection of the veteran L.A. singer-songwriter/Wall of Voodoo founder's career. "You never really have a choice about the tone and subject matter of the records you make," Ridgway confides. "At least I don't. They're obsessions, really. It's about the music, and how it heals the mind." When Stan lost a beloved uncle, a colleague (Texas violinist Amy Farris, whose brilliant Neon Mirage work serves as fitting elegy), and the man who inspired so much of the musician's own worldview, his own father, during the album's writing/recording, Ridgway responded with some of the most reflective – if no less joyous – songs he'd ever recorded. "Events like that can't help but have an impact on the music you're making at the time," Stan admits. "You'd be lying to yourself -- and your listeners -- if you thought otherwise. I've probably confused people with my music, my choices, the albums and the changes in direction from year to year. But I can't help it. There's a weird old American jukebox in my head and it still plays everything that's ever got under my skin."

Stan Ridgway's Neon Mirage, due for August 24, 2010 release, is arguably the most emotionally revealing, musically far-ranging -- dare we say mature? -- album of the L.A. singer-songwriter's accomplished career. Yet it's also a project whose troubled circumstances might tempt Stan to paraphrase John Lennon's familiar wisdom: Life is what happens when you're busy making another album.

Indeed, in many ways Neon Mirage can't help but feel like an elegy to the colleague and family Stan lost in the midst of writing and recording its dozen, typically eclectic songs: gifted Texas-born violinist/session player Amy Farris; a beloved uncle; and the man who helped forge the very foundations of Ridgway's unique outlook on life and music, his own father. "Events like that can't help but have an impact on the music you're making at the time," Stan admits. "You'd be lying to yourself -- and your listeners -- if you thought otherwise."

Despite the troubled times it was recorded in, Ridgway insists Neon Mirage represents something even more personal than the sum of its songs to him. "It's as much a journey as a destination," Stan says of his music. "If I don't try and create something of my own, I just feel that I'm hangin' on a corner waiting for someone to tell me what to think and do. It's a mad society. But the best therapy for me is always creativity and invention. And a dedication to the people and things you love. Most people live their lives upside down and backwards, only jumping in when the consensus says it's safe. That's just human nature -- who doesn't want to be safe? But is that really possible?"

"At the end of the day I really consider myself just an inventor, or like a link in a chain to a tradition of song and art," the artist says. Music and songs and recording are an obsession for me -- sound and art. It's all in there, the ideas and things that influenced me. To see it and tell it your own way is the challenge. That's the last true, honest place to be. It might even be the new frontier right now."

ABOUT THE HANDSOME FAMILY

"Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing...Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice" — GREIL MARCUS

"As songwriters it's the eerie, ancestral voice of ‘Anonymous’ they ultimately resemble the most" —THE CHICAGO READER

"Dark, elemental, mischievous and mournful" —MOJO

Taking place under bowed branches and deep within winding corn mazes, The Handsome Family's latest release, "Honey Moon" is full of an awed sense of emotion in the face of nature's mysteries, Brett Sparks (music) and Rennie Sparks (lyrics) branched from their usual canon of the dark and mysterious on "Honey Moon", to establish a theme rooted in the tradition of 19th-century romanticism. It is an album of transcendence, of touching the divine, if only for a moment, through our love of someone else, even if he is a katydid. The record's release (their eighth) coincided with the Sparks' twentieth year of marriage.

The twosome's seventh CD, "Last Days of Wonder" (June 2006), was one of Mojo's Top Ten American Albums for 2006 and was called "an unqualified triumph" by Uncut. Their fourth album, "In the Air" was recently listed as one of the essential records of the first decade of the 21st century by Uncut. In 2004, a reader's poll in Mojo named The Handsome Family's third CD, "Through the Trees" one of the ten essential Americana records. UK national newspaper, "The Guardian" listed their song "Weightless Again" as one of the 100 essential songs about Heartbreak.

Their songs have been covered by many artists, most notably: Andrew Bird, Christy Moore, The Sadies, Sally Timms and Cerys Matthews. They have appeared in the movie, I’m Your Man (2005), a tribute to Leonard Cohen as well as Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2004). The Handsome Family record all their songs in a converted garage studio at the back of their Albuquerque house.
In their live performances the band is sometimes up to a six-piece band and sometimes just Brett and Rennie playing guitar and banjo. They have toured extensively throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

A recent live review (by Mike Ritchie) noted, "There’s a lot of smiling at this gig, on and off stage. That might surprise many people who have only read about the duo’s penchant for songs riddled with darkness, death and the macabre. But Rennie Sparks and her husband, Brett are funny live...through their chit-chat, the song introductions and the banter with the audience...This sell-out show, part of the excellent Glasgow Americana Festival, was a knockabout celebration of the deadpan, a real joy... Rennie’s words plus Brett’s music and strong, mellow vocals create a magical potion of grim fairytales in a rock and blues pot with grinning unavoidable."