“A lot of people mistake us for twins,” Melody and Violet shared with us when sitting down to discuss their new album, Full Circle. They spent their earliest years making music together but admit that when university time came, they had different plans and imagined they’d perform together “here and there but probably not full time.” That was until five-time Grammy-nominated producer Billy Smiley came knocking on their door. “[He] reached out and was like, ‘Hey, what do you guys think about coming out to Nashville and songwriting and making an album?’ And we were like, that sounds really fun and like a really new experience that we hadn’t done before.” Far from pursuing separate journeys, they were about to embark on discovering their new artistic identity together. “Now it’s been a few years of songwriting and recording, really just taking our music to the next level and kind of revamping our image too, as like, ‘This is who we really are. This is what we want to say to the world. Here’s our album.’”
Their debut album, Full Circle, was released in October and is a collection of heartfelt songs welcoming listeners to 50 minutes of escape. Melody is a soprano and Violet an alto, and they play with the differences in their voices. “Hers is a little higher and a little brighter, and mine is a little more, I guess, down to earth and soulful,” Violet explains, and Melody agrees. “There’s some jazziness to her voice… Sometimes I’ll be a little more ethereal, or even more Celtic, singing up high. So it’s fun because we have such a similarity, just being sisters, that we can take those two styles and still put them together very easily when we’re harmonizing with each other.”
It’s clear the pair have a special relationship. They constantly check in on each other and weave their answers, with each taking over in turn to finish a thought, almost as seamlessly as they do on the album. Melody starts, “Sometimes I’ll be singing a melody, and I can hear the lower harmony…” and right on cue, Violet chimes in, “and then I’ll just start singing it. It’s kind of like sister telepathy.” They shared how during a recent practice session, they were able to find harmonies just by looking at each other. “We kind of think the same, because we’ve been singing together so long that we’ll work together to find harmonies. Sometimes we’ll try something and then have to change it around… we both studied music theory and ear training and all of that, so it kind of just comes naturally at this point.”
They also have complementary talents: both play piano, and Melody enjoys crafting stories and writing poetry, while Violet is a visual artist, as illustrated in their video for Sketches. Violet shares, “I’m definitely a concepts person, and Melody is a details person. So it works really well for us—I’ll come up with a concept, and Melody can actually put into words what I’m trying to explain. When it comes to songwriting, sometimes it’ll be the opposite, but a lot of times we complement each other’s strengths.”
The album features some classical threads in the tracks Flower and Hidden Away, the first inspired by Delibes’ Flower Duet and the latter by Satie’s Gymnopédie. The former was the start of this album. “That was the first song we wrote, and we started writing our own message, kind of apart from the Flower Duet, but we took the same time signature and the same key. Just taking those two things, we came up with our own ideas, inserted the Flower Duet where it worked, and then came back out… In The Flower Duet, there are almost two melodies independently that work together. Same thing with our chorus—we came up with two different melodies that work independently from each other, but they also work together,” they quickly sing to illustrate the point. “We’re kind of able to speak back and forth. So in that songwriting experience, we drew inspiration from something we knew in our classical world, whereas one of the last songs we wrote, Full Circle, and also the title of our album, started when Violet was just sitting at the piano one day, playing this really beautiful piano thing that just kind of came to her.”
The track and the album title hold deep meaning for the sisters, rooted in a message of positivity and vulnerability that resonates with them both. “The world’s scary, but still go for your dreams, and still go for those things you want to attain.” The journey, which began out of self-discovery and allowed them to write material, has been liberating. “It starts with giving ourselves the tools and then being able to pass it on to others. The theme of Full Circle is multifaceted. When we started performing as kids, you have those dreams as little girls, like, someday we’ll be able to make an album and record in the studio, but it always seems so far away, like it can never actually be attained… In college, we were kind of going our separate ways in music, but then that one email from a Nashville producer just brought us back to this journey of being sisters, writing together and performing together. So that was the initial Full Circle. The second Full Circle is just through the whole album writing process itself, because we wrote all the music within a year, but then it was another two and a half till it was actually released. We’ve gone through a lot of trials and obstacles over the past few years, one of them being my health.”
In 2021, Melody was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome. “It’s an autoimmune neurological disease where, basically, your immune system attacks your nervous system, and I was completely paralyzed. I was in the hospital, had a breathing tube and everything, tingling all over my body, and I had Bell’s Palsy on my face.”
The diagnosis was a shock for both sisters and meant temporarily pausing their plans. It is a big reason why the album is so focused on positivity. “That contributed a lot to the hopeful message of Full Circle… actually, the bridge of that song, Melody wrote while she was in the hospital recovering.”
“I was literally in my hospital bed on my phone, typing out poetry—basically the words that became the bridge to the song: In the lowest days when you’re held in chains, a turning point you never saw coming, someone carries you, as you cry for who you want to be again’. In that moment, I wanted to be able to walk again.”
Melody fully recovered in two-three months instead of the typical six-twelve, and the two picked right up where they had left off in Nashville. “At the very end of that song, we have a little, as we would call it, a musical quote, [back] to our flower song. There’s a little piano intro in Flower that we did in the exact same key. A little tidbit, but at the end of Full Circle, the piano plays the same Flower intro, but in major instead of minor. So it kind of describes this journey we went through, where we went through all these obstacles, all these challenges. We weren’t even sure if we were going to finish the album, and we weren’t sure if I’d be able to walk again. And thankfully, I did recover, and we were able to continue on this journey. So this album really means a lot to us, not just because it’s our first debut album as songwriters, but because, emotionally and just as sisters, with all the things we’ve gone through the past year, it’s a big project — it really is our story. We hope that it can encourage other people to even try songwriting or just go after their dreams, because you never know what could happen… Everyone has obstacles and challenges like this that come out of nowhere. So we really wanted a lot of our lyrics throughout that album to encourage people to keep going, because good things can come out of the difficulties, even though it’s hard in the moment.”
Full Circle is now available to stream on all platforms. Stay tuned for more music coming from the Sparks sisters in the near future. Watch our full interview with Melody and Violet on Thursday, October 24th, at 6 PM EDT on YouTube or on Channel 10 in Connecticut (Ansonia, Beacon Falls, Bethany, Derby, Naugatuck, Oxford, Seymour, and Shelton).
