ALAN SPARHAWK - Alan Sparhawk With Trampled By Turtles

You put the words to a melody and try to make it fit

Sometimes it kills you, but it sets you free

It cuts right through it

(“Too High”)

Sometimes, screaming is all we can do. Screaming until your breath gives out, screaming until you're left empty. Alan Sparhawk still needs to scream, still needs to let the pain pierce through him. As on “White Roses, My God”, the loss of Mimi Parker – his lifelong partner and, always, one half of Low – remains a wound he cannot set aside. This time, though, the outcome is completely different: if on the previous record Sparhawk seemed intent on dissolving his own face behind a mask of vocal distortion, this time he ventures into the more familiar territory of Americana to rediscover his own identity. With crucial company: Trampled By Turtles, fellow Duluth residents, longtime friends, and standard-bearers of contemporary bluegrass.

This isn't a path mapped out in advance, but a door left open to whatever life brings: “How can you say no when your friends ask you to sing with them?” Sparhawk admits. “It's something that can really pull you out of tormenting yourself.” And friendship is indeed the keystone of this record: the chance to share even the most intimate part of your suffering with the people close to you.

“When you flew out the window and into the sunset/ I thought I would never stop screaming”. Sparhawk's voice is warm and solemn on “Screaming Song”, one of the record's most nakedly emotional peaks. “But I ran out of breath, so I took in some more/ And I started to scream even louder”. The fiddle heralds the crescendo of a raw, stinging lament, its screech becoming the cry of a heart torn apart. Screaming, precisely. Until the scream becomes part of you, even in silence.

Is it possible to find peace in that silent scream? "It’s not broken, I’m not angry", proclaim the lyrics of “Not Broken”. The vocals, placid yet intense, belong to Holly Sparhawk, daughter of Mimi and Alan. Her appearance is the only possible way to bring to life one of the last songs her parents were working on during Mimi Parker's illness. And when, at the end, father and daughter's voices intertwine, it's hard not to be moved.

The tone of the album reveals itself right from the incipit of “Stranger”: a menacing cello over which unfolds the most classic gait of the old Low, threaded through with a weave of banjo and sustained by an interlacing of strings and voices. A single day of recording, a spontaneous approach, the trust reserved for friends. The most fitting adjectives to describe the union between Sparhawk and Trampled By Turtles are the ones used in the album's press release: “Collective. Communal. Fraternal. Empathetic”. There's also room for a reinterpretation of two songs already featured on “White Roses, My God”, with the rural, dreamlike reincarnation of “Get Still” standing alongside the choral-souled gospel-folk of “Heaven” (where even heaven becomes a lonely place without the people we love).

“I don't know if I'm angry at God or disillusioned with him”, Sparhawk admits. “With grief, you lose your sense of the universe, and it takes time to find it again. To accept that the universe is different from what we think it is”. And so the Appalachian plea of “Don't Take Your Light” rises up, like a biblical psalm suspended between the skeletal frame of the banjo and the sound of a fiddle once again pushed to its limits: “Don't take your light out of me/ Oh my God, please”, Sparhawk's voice implores. Because even when we see no way out, we can always keep on screaming.

I can be patient

See what I see

I can be hopeful

I can believe

I can be grateful

But be empty

I can feel nothing

I feel everything

(“Don’t Take Your Light”)

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04/07/2025