When Low’s Mimi Parker passed in 2022, ALAN SPARHAWK lost his life-partner and his band. Rebuilding has involved a brave left-turn into electronica and a hometown indie-folk team-up that’s birthed a stirring new album. What hasn’t changed is his compulsion to embrace intensity and soul-scouring candour. “All I can do is trust the music,” he tells BOB MEHR.

You can call me Al: Alan Sparhawk gets intense at the Lodge Room, Los Angeles, January 21, 2025.

Arturo Solorio

OUTSIDE THE LODGE ROOM, THE ATMOSPHERE is heavy: the smell of smoke lingers in the air and there’s ash on the ground. It’s late January in Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighbourhood, and for the last two weeks, much of the region has been engulfed by flames from a series of fires. One of the two largest blazes, the Eaton Fire, is centred just a few miles from the old Masonic temple where Alan Sparhawk is performing on this night. It will be a couple more weeks before the fires are fully contained, but the residents of the area are already looking to the future, trying to find a way forward amid the devastation. It’s a feeling Sparhawk knows well.

For nearly 30 years, Sparhawk and his wife, drummer/vocalist Mimi Parker – along with a rotating cast of bassists – led the beloved indie rock band Low. Over the course of 13 albums the Duluth, Minnesota minimalists were carried by transcendent songs and the twined voices of Sparhawk and Parker. Even as Sparhawk occasionally struggled – with mental breakdowns and drug issues – Parker held things together and the band persevered, as its music and career blossomed.

“We were lucky, we had an ideal trajectory,” says Sparhawk of the group. “We were hustling the whole time but made just enough to continue doing it. We got to evolve, honed in on a creative freedom that was still anchored in the way we sang and the way we wrote. That gave us confidence and we just kept growing. We were playing our biggest shows at the very end.”

That end came in November of 2022, when Parker lost her two-year battle with ovarian cancer, leaving behind Sparhawk and their children, Hollis and Cyrus. The outpouring that followed Parker’s passing – from friends, fans and fellow musicians – sustained Sparhawk as he dealt with his grief over the loss of his “Mim”.

“I’ve had thousands of affirmations from people acknowledging their love for Mim, for the band, for what we did and what we meant to them,” says Sparhawk. “As overwhelming as it would be to try to fully comprehend that, it’s incredibly beautiful. At the same time, there’s no way you can hold it or claim it because it was the music… it was something that went through us, through Mim and me. It was an honour to be a conduit.”

Keeping a Low profile: Alan Sparhawk with his wife Mimi Parker, Duluth, 2021;

Photograph by ARTURO SOLORIO

Sparhawk in September 2024: “I am always eager to jump off the cliff and see where I land.”

Alamy, Sophia PhotoCo, Nathan Keay

As the thought lingers, Sparhawk sighs softly: “Like I say, I was really lucky.”

IT’S EARLY EVENING, A COUPLE OF HOURS BEFORE showtime, and with soundcheck complete, Sparhawk is laid out on a leather couch backstage at the Lodge Room. At 56, he’s remarkably fit, a sinewy figure with long blond curls in a pink hooded sweatshirt and brown overalls. He’s just a few dates into a West Coast tour – backed by his son Cyrus on bass and frequent collaborator Eric Pollard on drums – in support of his first post-Low project, a solo album called White Roses, My God, released last fall.