As a child—this would have been sometime in the mid-1970s—Terry and Jo Harvey Allen’s son Bale assembled in the front yard of their Fresno home a curious device, an elaborate congeries of crucifixes and mirrors suspended in deadfall. It was, the fledgling artist patiently explained to his bemused parents, a vampire trap. Half a century later, Blood Sucking Maniacs, the record by the eponymous Allen family band, resembles, in its own manner—that is, unwieldy and convoluted, ardent and hammy, slightly deranged—a vampire trap in both construction and intent. A bricolage of potent symbols and spare parts, wary of the eternal, at once affectionate and defensive, vulnerable and dangerous, fiercely protective of past and future wounds. In other words, a family—or a mechanism for one specific family to write (and interpret) itself. These maniacs, ten kin, span five generations and 121 years. In order of descending seniority: Pauline Allen, Terry’s hellraising, barrelhouse piano-playing mother, who died in 1984 but joins the party through a transmission from beyond the grave; Jo Harvey and Terry, the matriarch and patriarch, who, separately and together, inhabit myriad artistic endeavors; Bukka, their firstborn, an accomplished songwriter and studio and touring musician; Bale, their younger son, an equally accomplished visual artist, gallerist, and drummer; their three grandsons, Sled (a drummer, entrepreneur, and fisherman; see the “some like to fish” lyric in theme song “Blood Sucking Maniacs”) and Calder (another songwriter, musician, and fisherman), Bale’s two boys, and Bukka’s son Kru (a piano-playing football star); their granddaughter-in-law Sophie (music industry executive and mother), and finally, Sled and Sophie’s baby boy, Lucky Marlo, Terry and Jo Harvey’s first great-grandchild, whose fetal heartbeat opens and closes the record with the actual (ultra)sound of coursing Allen blood. Terry has designated four additional official Maniacs, surrogate family members adopted into the Allen family fold: Richard Bowden and Lloyd Maines (credited as the “Blood Brothers”), the benevolent bedrock of the Panhandle Mystery Band since the first day of recording Lubbock (on everything) in the summer of 1978, and real-life brothers Charlie Sexton and Will Sexton (the “Bastard Children”), who, between them, have collaborated with the Allens and just about anybody else you can imagine. Though their bloodlines are, genetically speaking, different, these maniacs have drunk deeply of Allen blood, and their sympathetic playing elevates these recordings.

The songs collected herein are miscellaneous and multiplex, comprising heartrending ballads and arch in-jokes on a spectrum from sublime to unabashedly sentimental, mordant to doting. These contradictory qualities, too, are redolent of family. The unifying principle here is not so much blood harmony as blood entropy. It’s all one thing,” Terry has often said, when confronted by confused critics, of his multidisciplinary practice, which embraces music, art, writing, and theater. The same formula applies to the Allens’ conception of art and family—it’s all one thing, or it can be. Notwithstanding the popular misconceptions about the romantic life of the hermitic artist and his hermetic art, family need not be an inconvenience or impediment to sidestep on the path to artistic fulfillment or career success (whatever those two absurd, abstract metrics might mean). Art and family need not present separate or parallel conditions and experiences but can, as in “Bloodlines,” the reprised title track of Terry’s 1983 album, flow together in confluence.

“The Allen family’s life has been as much an inspiration for me as Terry’s wonderful art and music.” – David Byrne

“Terry Allen is my hero.” – Kurt Vile

RIYL: Terry Allen, Calder Allen, Jo Harvey Allen, David Byrne, Bill Callahan, Guy Clark, Bob Dylan, The Flatlanders, Randy Newman, John Prine, Silver Jews/Purple Mountains, Townes Van Zandt., Kurt Vile, Wilco.