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.
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