A warm breeze is rushing in off Lake Superior’s southern shoreline and the sun is blazing overhead as Alan Sparhawk stares out at his garden and ponders the meaning of it all. It’s 11am 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 like this, but one to which Sparhawk is reluctantly acclimatising following the death in November 2022 of his fellow navigator, for nearly 30 years, of the dreamy indie band Low.
“There’s something about having this large monolithic thing right next to you,” he says, indicating the lake’s immense expanse. “At any given point you can walk a few steps and take a look out and you can see the horizon of the water – kind of like the ocean. There’s something about that: you can lean your back on the emptiness and keep your eye on the stuff coming at you.”
Stuff has been coming at the 55-year-old at speed since December 2020, when Parker was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. He has now poured those feelings – disorientation, trauma, the slow journey towards acceptance – into his gut-punchingly raw first solo album, White Roses, My God.
Low had a unique sound, a mix of tranquil and stormy, volatile and soothing that journalists dubbed slowcore. But bands, like people, change, and in the project’s twilight Sparhawk and Parker had started fuzzing their songs up with distortion and harsh electronics.
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Sparhawk moves even further into the great unknown on the tumultuous White Roses, My God, his voice disguised by robot-like Autotune effects, beats screeching and rumbling in the background. Easy listening it is not, yet there is comfort in its honesty and its refusal to paint a pretty picture of grief.
“This stuff started coming out of me maybe five or six moths after Mimi passed,” he says, adjusting the laptop he has set on the table. (His and Parker’s two adult children, Hollis and Cyrus, are out this morning.) “I stumbled upon a voice. It took a while before I saw it had any value or was worth sharing. To me, it was very personal.”
Sparhawk remembers “trying to get myself into a place where I could let out whatever was inside me”. “I couldn’t unravel it. It’s not something you can consciously sort through,” he says. “I’m trying to trust the process, trust time, trust my friends and my family. It’s been a year since I first started doing 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 would face.”
Parker’s death led to an outpouring of grief both by those who knew her personally and those whose connection to her was through her music. “When I close my mind’s eye and imagine her voice, it rings the clearest to me of any voice I’ve heard in my life,” Jeff Tweedy of Wilco said. “Alan and Mimi and their delicious weave, her voice a serene and beautiful shimmer,” tweeted Robert Plant, the former Led Zeppelin frontman. “They were an inspiration to me for so long.”
Did that outpouring bring any degree of comfort to Sparhawk? He isn’t sure. “There’s nothing that can be done. [Her death] is something that happened. And there’s nothing can take away or lift the reality of that. The loss is real and will be felt forever by everyone who knew her. In some way there is something very beautiful about that. It can’t be lifted. It can’t be touched. It’s right there – it becomes in a weird way an anchor that is not as depressing and as dark as one would think. And that’s coming from someone who spent their whole life with depression. Depression is confusion. Loss – loss is real. You can feel real feelings. It’s 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 see his son and friends improvise vocals over beats conjured on the spot. On a whim he adopted their working method – sitting alone with a microphone, drawing vocals and music out of 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 late 15-year-old son, Arthur). Rather than wrap himself in a funereal cloak of melodrama, Sparhawk has captured the sheer weirdness of bereavement, the sense of being siloed off into your own reality, an invisible wall placed between you and the rest of the world.
“There’s something ecstatic about [the LP] – something ecstatic about the moments when I was creating it,” he says, agreeing that the project is not particularly depressing or upsetting.
“The recording you get – the vocals, they are there as they came out of me. I’d say 99 per cent of it was improvised. There is definitely an ecstatic element to it. I made this beat – I want to feel something here. Can you feel something here?”
It was his way of “trying to get my footing” and adjust to life without Parker. “It’s a lot stranger than you would expect to suddenly be ... It’s weird to be used to doing everything with a person, having that barometer. And having that someone to measure and give each other boundaries for. I feel like I kind of accidentally worked on a way to let out some things.”
It helped that he had set strict rules. The songs would not sound like Low. Vocals were to be filtered through pitch-shifting effects – a method Kanye West employed in 2008 when he mourned his mother on the album 808s & Heartbreak.
“In some way it had to be under a stringent [parameters]. There had to be a box. It had to be these very simple tools,” Sparhawk says.
“Okay, now my voice sounds like this – okay, what’s going to come out of me now? I’m not hearing my own voice, but I’m still in control. I am still coming to terms with that. What is my voice? It doesn’t mean it’s always going to be weird and it’s not always going to be masked. I do loving singing.”
Sparhawk was born in Utah but moved to hardscrabble Clearbrook, Minnesota, at the age of nine. His Mormon father wanted the family to get closer to the natural world by working a farm. He and Parker met that autumn at school, and in a town beset by poverty, violence and alcoholism, music was their shared haven. Religion was, too, and Parker converted to Mormonism before marrying Sparhawk – though in later years he would express surprise when people saw their faith as unusual or a novelty.
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Later he would have issues around his mental and emotional health. He has had depression throughout his life, and when he was in his 30s he was diagnosed with ADHD. Things reached a crisis point after the release in 2005 of Low’s album The Great Destroyer, when they cancelled the second leg of their tour and the band’s bassist, Zak Sally, left abruptly.
“I’ve had these problems all of my life, long before I was in a group,” Sparhawk explained in 2006, when Low (minus Sally) were en route to Dublin for a concert. “Things sort of came to a head last year. It got to the stage where I just couldn’t cope. Was music a factor? You know, I honestly think this would have happened whatever my walk of life.”
One of the factors in Sparhawk’s breakdown had been substance-abuse issues. He has since cleaned up. “I was getting fairly sick – mental illness,” he says now. “I had a lot of chaos coming out of my head. I’m surprised we nailed down some pretty decent songs [on The Great Destroyer]. It had to break apart into something after that. There are a few key things you can do to stay out of acute mental chaos, namely get some sleep, eat some healthy food and get away from the stimulants – caffeine or whatever.”
He smiles, a stray straggle of hair spooling into his face. During the heyday of Low, Sparhawk resembled an archetypal Midwest American dad who’d accidentally joined an acclaimed indie band. With his neatly trimmed hair and chiselled features, he was an Everyman who’d ended up headlining Whelan’s by mistake.
In the years since his wife’s initial cancer diagnosis he has abandoned that look. His hair is long and silver and sits in busy straggles at his shoulder, augmented by his bushy burst of facial hair. On White Roses, My God he sounds like an artist haunted by his grief. Face to face over Zoom, he looks like one, too.
“Why do I look different now? I don’t know, man. It started creeping in on me when Mimi got sick. There’s something about that experience that has really lobotomised my perspectives about stuff. It’s sort of been set three feet to the side. I’m looking at things differently – I’m seeing what’s important, what’s not important.”
He questions everything now, on a daily basis. “Why did I always think this way when actually things are that way? It’s a little bit of me trying to grind against my own perceptions of what narrow-mindedness would have me do.”
He runs his hand through his hair.
“I don’t know ... I’m not sure what’s going on. This is the look that I was most terrified of when I was a child. I grew up in the 1970s, and the most terrifying, sketchy-looking motherf***ers out there looked like this. And for some reason I was a little bit scared of that. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s a weird thing to do. I don’t know – I like it. I should have started earlier. Also, I’m getting old. My hair is going to eventually be this wisp of white stuff on the back of my head. I call this my last hurrah.”
He’s still feeling his way back into music and into thinking of himself as a person separate from his wife and from Low. The release of White Roses, My God is one step. Another will come in Dublin in early November as he begins his first solo tour at the Opium venue, on Wexford Street. (Back when it was the Village, it is where Low toured The Great Destroyer.) He’s looking forward to it – but knows it will be a heavy evening, both for him and for the audience.
“It’s going to be emotional. It’s going to be the first show. I’ve done a couple of local short sets. This will be the first time with the new record, playing most of these new songs. I don’t know. It’ll be strange.” He pauses and takes a breath. “I’m going to assume the room is full of friends and I’m going to do my best.”
White Roses, My God is released via Sub Pop. Alan Sparhawk plays Opium, Dublin, on November 2nd
