NEW YORK, NY.- Alan Sparhawk did not think his new song was any good. It was early 2017, and he was working on “Double Negative,” the 12th album by his longtime band, Low. The record would become a late-career breakthrough, the intimate harmonies between Sparhawk and his wife, Mimi Parker, supplanted from their slow, soft acoustic settings into beds of brittle noise.
But at that moment, Sparhawk was still wrestling with “Always Trying to Work It Out,” an elliptical portrait of a faltering friendship. He played it for Parker, whom he forever called “Mim.” When, unbidden, she began singing, he knew he had a keeper.
“That was as much approval as I ever needed. That was the way she communicated,” Sparhawk said during a phone interview, pausing often to cry. “When Mim would sing, that was all I needed to know.”
Sparhawk no longer has that filter or confidant. Parker died in November 2022, two years after learning she had ovarian cancer on Christmas Eve. Across three decades, Sparhawk, Parker and a succession of bassists built Low into one of indie-rock’s most mesmerizing acts, their voices moving in tandem like the blowing wind or a flickering candle. Self-diagnosed with autism and borderline personality disorder, Sparhawk also depended upon Parker as an emotional anchor, the person who could help him understand his frustrations simply by listening.
He is now trying to find his voice and language anew, to find ways to move forward in life and music without the person who guided so much of his past. Made with a drum machine and minimal guitar, his first record since her death — “White Roses, My God,” out Friday — routes his oaken baritone through an effects pedal, rendering him alternately robotic and animalistic. His second, due next year, is a collaboration with the bluegrass band Trampled by Turtles, fellow Minnesotans that Low took on early tours.
“I’m going to wrestle with the universe and generate art, because that’s what I do,” Sparhawk, 56, said several weeks earlier in a Chicago restaurant, chuckling wryly as he swept long curls and two braids of blond hair from his face. “But I’m not great at steering. I am a generator, a good engine, and Mim provided the parameters. So how do I steer this thing coming out of me?”
Sparhawk smiled as he remembered his first kiss with Parker. When he was 9, as part of a self-sufficiency push within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his family decamped from Salt Lake City to a Minnesota farm despite, as he put it, “not knowing anything about farming.” The new kid in a tiny town, he attracted instant attention. Parker’s best friend, Jeanne, even had a short-lived crush; at 15, the new couple first kissed in Jeanne’s back seat. “Your mind is flooded with a different perspective,” he said of the epiphany. “No one knows what will happen.”
Sparhawk was bloodthirsty for rock ’n’ roll, too. He’d watched his father play in bands, and seen acts like Eddie Rabbitt for free during the Minnesota State Fair while showing his goats. Around the time of that first kiss, the local new-wave favorites the Suburbs opened his eyes to music beyond the radio. He wanted to be in bands more like that; for a while, he was.
“My tendency was just nihilism. I wanted to challenge people, to get in people’s faces, to make them uncomfortable,” he said, eyes narrowing with relish. “I wanted to control the air.”
But he also wanted to be closer to Parker. They had been the kids in class with strange rock records, like the Violent Femmes or Husker Du, and they sang Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” together the first time he visited her house. After they moved to Duluth a few years later, Parker stunned Sparhawk not only by agreeing to sing at a house party but also by how pure and powerful she sounded. But she wasn’t interested in performative aggression and volume.
“I knew she was the most talented, and I knew deep down that if I was going to make music, I wanted to do it with this person I loved,” he said. “But she had standards. She wanted to be able to hear herself, so she could sing the way she wanted. She didn’t want me cussing. She wanted it to be pretty.”
Low was pretty while also controlling the air, its narcotically paced and library-quiet records seeming to pause the world around them. Sparhawk and Parker evolved, galvanizing their harmonies with rock dynamics after the start of the millennium before delving into the blown-out sonics of hip-hop and the avant-garde a decade later. They finished their third such record, “Hey What,” while Parker underwent chemotherapy. When she seemed to turn a corner in early 2022, they toured.
But by that summer, the cancer had tightened its grip. Sparhawk marveled at Parker’s resilience and constancy. She prepared their finances for when she was gone, often without him knowing, and she was never angry about her situation. The day after she died, however, Sparhawk erupted, as a year of record snowfall swept into Duluth.
“I was so angry at snow, just grumbling and swearing under my breath,” he said. “And I kept thinking, ‘Who am I talking to? Who am I telling how I feel right now?’ I realized there was nobody. I don’t even know how to process anger anymore. So now what?”
Just three weeks later, Sparhawk returned to the stage, joining Trampled by Turtles to play Low’s “When I Go Deaf.” The performance was desperate and beautiful, a prayer hurled against a gale. A few months later, he asked to hop on their bus and play guitar during a Willie Nelson tour. Being home was tough. The ritual of walking their dog, Blue, kept him alive, he said; weed, running and his two children helped. Still, he needed a break.
“We were keeping it light — let’s just go play music, hang out, stay up late, have fun,” the Trampled by Turtles singer Dave Simonett said in an interview. “Any of us, in a heartbeat, would sit down and have a good cry with him, but he just wanted to be a musician for a minute.”
Something seemed to shift for Sparhawk. He began building beats with a drum machine and synthesizer, sometimes letting them unspool for an hour. He sang whatever words arrived into a Helicon VoiceTone pedal, putting space between how he felt and how he sounded.
Those extended improvisations became the core of “White Roses, My God,” a record where his quest to keep his head above grief is mirrored by the way his disembodied voice wriggles atop electronics. His daughter, Hollis, 24, sings on several tracks, her voice carrying an uncanny resemblance to her mother’s; his son, Cyrus, 20, plays bass and will soon join his father onstage.
“What’s the border between howling and singing and language?” said Nat Harvie, a longtime family friend who has become an essential collaborator. “It’s not easy listening to hear that question asked, but it’s brave. There’s a record someone is expected to make in this situation, and this is entirely different.”
As Harvie and Sparhawk worked last winter, Sparhawk headed three hours south to Pachyderm Studios, where Trampled by Turtles was finishing a session. The band had asked him to add vocals to a song, but he wanted to record an entire album together. In two days, they cut nine tracks, Sparhawk’s feelings now clear without his pedal’s sway. One of them, “Screaming Song,” is an exquisite and heartbreaking portrait of a panic attack, Sparhawk hunting for breath just to keep yelling.
“To capture an emotion like that, especially one you might not even want to look at, is amazing,” Simonett said. When he looked up while tracking, the entire band was in tears.
The improvisational approach of “White Roses” allowed Sparhawk to make songs without writing them, per se, and sing without needing to nail a note. His sessions with Trampled by Turtles afforded an instrumental context far removed from Low’s austerity. He now plays in a funk band with Cyrus and a Neil Young cover band with Minnesota pals. It’s all an outlet, he said, not an escape.
“You think I sing ‘Down by the River’ and don’t think about my wife?” he asked at one point, chuckling ruefully.
Still, Sparhawk suspects that a return to writing more familiar songs — that is, the kind of work he would have taken to Parker — is on the horizon. He had worried that, without her, he’d lost that ability. In early September, he stumbled upon a few lines he liked, the promising start of something new.
“I’m still trying to find my way into the room, having a little trouble with that door,” he said. “But there were five or 10 minutes the other day of standing close to that fire. I had to back off, because it’s a familiar fire. You’ve got to build a tolerance for it, and, sometimes, I get a little scared.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
