A warm breeze blows off the southern shore of Lake Superior and the sun shines overhead as Alan Sparhawk stares into his garden and ponders what it all means. It’s 11 a.m. in Duluth, Minnesota, and Sparhawk is at the kitchen table of the farmhouse he bought with his wife and musical collaborator, Mimi Parker, in 1997. It’s a strange experience, being alone this way, but one to which Sparhawk is reluctantly getting used to it. following the November 2022 death of his fellow navigator of nearly 30 years from the dreamy indie band Low.
“There’s something special about having this big monolithic thing right next to you,” he says, gesturing to the vast expanse of the lake. “At any time you can take a few steps and look out and you can see the horizon of the water – a bit like the ocean. There’s something about that: you can lean your back to the void and keep your eyes on what’s coming your way.”
Things have come fast for the 55-year-old since December 2020, when Parker was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Now he’s poured those feelings – the disorientation, the trauma, the slow journey to acceptance – into his stunningly raw first solo album, White Roses, My God.
Low had a unique sound, a mix of calm and stormy, volatile and relaxing that journalists dubbed slowcore. But bands, like people, change, and in the twilight of the project Sparhawk and Parker had begun to pepper their songs with distortion and harsh electronics.
Sparhawk pushes further into the great unknown on the tumultuous White Roses, My God, his voice masked by robot-like Autotune effects, thumping screeches and rumbles in the background. It’s not easy to listen to, but there’s comfort in his honesty and his refusal to paint a pretty picture of pain.
“This stuff started coming out of me maybe five or six months after Mimi died,” he says, adjusting the laptop he placed on the table. (His and Parker’s two adult children, Hollis and Cyrus, are out this morning.) “I came across a rumor. It took a while before I realized it had any value or was worth sharing. It was very personal for me.”
Sparhawk remembers “trying to get to a place where I could let out everything that was inside me.” “I couldn’t reveal it. It’s not something you can consciously solve,” he says. “I’m trying to trust the process, trust the time, trust my friends and family. It’s been a year since I started writing these tracks. The whole process has been part of the phases, the ups and downs, the new things you learn. The new things that take time, the new things you didn’t know you had to deal with.
Parker’s death led to an outpouring of grief from both those who knew her personally and those whose connection to her was through her music. “When I close my mind’s eye and imagine his voice, it sounds the clearest of any voice I’ve heard in my life,” Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy said. “Alan and Mimi and their delightful entanglement, his voice has a serene and beautiful shimmer,” tweeted Robert Plant, the former Led Zeppelin frontman. “They have been an inspiration to me for so long.”
Did that statement bring any degree of comfort to Sparhawk? He’s not sure. “There is nothing that can be done. [Her death] it’s something that happened. And there is nothing that can take away or lift this reality. The loss is real and will be forever felt by all who knew her. Somehow there is something very beautiful about this. It cannot be lifted. It cannot be touched. It’s just there – it becomes in a strange way an anchor that isn’t as depressing and dark as you might think. And this is coming from someone who has spent his whole life with depression. Depression is confusion. Loss: The loss is real. You can have real feelings. It is just as healthy as joy.
He made White Roses, My God in fits and starts. Cyrus, who is 19, is a hip-hop fan; Sparhawk was fascinated to watch his son and his friends improvise vocals over rhythms conjured up on the spot. On a whim he adopted their working method: sitting alone with a microphone, pulling voices and music from the ether.
The resulting album is a unique entry in the ever-expanding field of albums about grief, a category that also includes Nick Cave’s more traditionally song-based Ghosteen (a lament for his 15-year-old son, Arthur). Rather than wrapping itself in a funereal cloak of melodrama, Sparhawk captured the sheer strangeness of grief, the feeling of being isolated in your own reality, an invisible wall placed between you and the rest of the world.
“There’s something ecstatic about it [the LP] – something ecstatic in the moments I was creating it,” he says, agreeing that the project isn’t particularly depressing or upsetting.
“The recording you get – the voices, they’re there as they came out of me. I would say 99% of it was improvised. There’s definitely an ecstatic element to it. I made this beat: I want to feel something here. Can you hear anything here?”
It was his way of “trying to get me back on my feet” and adjusting to life without Parker. “It’s a lot weirder than you would expect to be all of a sudden… It’s weird to be used to doing everything with one person, to have that barometer. And have that someone to compete with and to set limits for each other. I feel like I’ve accidentally worked on a way to get some stuff out.
It helped that he had set strict rules. The songs wouldn’t sound like Low. The vocals had to be filtered through pitch-shifting effects – a method used by Kanye West in 2008 when he mourned his mother on the album 808s & Heartbreak.
“Somehow it had to be subjected to rigorous checks [parameters]. There had to be a box. They had to be very simple tools,” says Sparhawk.
“Okay, now my voice sounds like this – okay, what’s going to come out of me now? I don’t hear my voice, but I’m still in control. I’m still coming to terms with this. What is my voice? That doesn’t mean it will always be weird and it won’t always be disguised. I love singing.”
Sparhawk was born in Utah but moved to rough Clearbrook, Minnesota at the age of nine. His Mormon father wanted the family to get closer to the natural world by working on a farm. He and Parker met that fall at school and, in a city plagued by poverty, violence and alcoholism, music was their shared refuge. Religion was too, and Parker converted to Mormonism before marrying Sparhawk, although in later years she would express surprise when people saw their faith as unusual or new.
[ Low: Hey What – Undeniably one of the best bands in the worldOpens in new window ]
He would later experience problems relating to his mental and emotional health. He suffered from depression his entire life and was diagnosed with ADHD when he was 30. Things reached a crisis point after the 2005 release of Low’s album The Great Destroyer, when they canceled the second leg of their tour and the band’s bassist, Zak Sally, suddenly left.
“I’ve had these problems all my life, long before I joined a band,” Sparhawk explained in 2006, when Low (minus Sally) were traveling to Dublin for a concert. “Things came to a head last year. I got to the point where I just couldn’t cope. Did music play a role? You know, I honestly think this would have happened no matter what my life path was.
One factor in Sparhawk’s collapse was substance abuse problems. He has since cleaned up. “I was getting very sick, a mental illness,” he says now. “I had a lot of chaos coming out of my head. I’m surprised we put together some pretty decent songs [on The Great Destroyer]. After that it had to break into something. There are some basic things you can do to stay away from acute mental chaos, namely getting some sleep, eating healthy food and staying away from stimulants – caffeine or otherwise.”
He smiles, a lock of hair curling into his face. During Low’s heyday, Sparhawk resembled the archetypal Midwestern American dad who accidentally joined an acclaimed indie band. With his well-groomed hair and chiseled features, he was an everyman who had mistakenly ended up as Whelan’s headliner.
In the years since his wife’s initial cancer diagnosis, he has shed that look. His hair is long and silver and is arranged in busy locks over his shoulders, accentuated by the thick explosion of facial hair. In White Roses, My God seems like an artist haunted by pain. Face to face on Zoom, he seems like one too.
“Why do I look different now? I don’t know, man. It started creeping up on me when Mimi got sick. There’s something about that experience that really lobotomized my perspective on things. It was placed one meter to the side. I look at things differently: I see what is important and what is not.
He questions everything now, on a daily basis. “Why have I always thought this way when in reality this is how things are? It’s a bit like me trying to resist my own perceptions of what the narrow-minded would want me to do.
He runs his hand through his hair.
“I don’t know… I’m not sure what’s going on. This is the look I was most terrified of when I was a child. I grew up in the 70s, and the creepiest, sketchiest looking motherfuckers out there looked like this. And for some reason I was a little scared of it. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s a strange thing to do. I don’t know, I like it. I should have started earlier. Plus, I’m getting older. My hair will eventually become this tuft of white stuff on the back of my head. I call it my last hurray.
He’s still trying to get back into music and think of himself as a separate person from his wife and Low. The release of White Roses, My God is a step forward. Another is coming to Dublin in early November when he begins his first solo tour at the Opium venue on Wexford Street. (When it was the Village, that’s where Low filmed The Great Destroyer.) He’s looking forward to it, but he knows it’s going to be a tough night, both for him and the audience.
“It will be exciting. It will be the first show. I did a couple of short local sets. This will be the first time with the new record, playing most of these new songs. I do not know. It’s going to be weird.” He pauses and takes a breath. “I assume the room is full of friends and I’ll do my best.”
White Roses, My God is released via Sub Pop. Play Alan Sparhawk OpiumDublin, November 2nd
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