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The New Yorker - The Heart of Low

Spring 2024 Tour

Outline NYC: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Alan Sparhawk (of Low), Marina Herlop, Maria BC

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Low is an American indie rock group from Duluth, Minnesota, formed in 1993 and currently consists of Alan Sparhawk, Mimi Parker and Steve Garrington.

The band formed in early 1993 after Sparhawk had been playing in the Wisconsin band Zen Identity which was formed by drummer Robb Berry and vocalist Bill Walton. The band recruited John Nichols as their bass player. Sparhawk left Zen Identity, who continued to perform and record without him, and he and Nichols recruited Sparhawk's wife Mimi Parker to play a makeshift drum kit composed of a single cymbal and a single floor tom in the outfit that would become Low.

Low's debut album, 'I Could Live in Hope', was released on Virgin Records' Vernon Yard imprint in 1994. The band struggled to make any chart impact however until their 2005 release 'The Great Destroyer' which appeared on the US Billboard Heatseekers Charts and the UK album charts. What the band lacked in commercial chartings over their career they made up for in live reputation, their shows quickly became iconic on the indie circuit. They struggled in the beginning due to the quiet nature of their music being easily overshadowed by audience chatter and background noise.

After this initial hurdle the band found their live stride and began to feature drastically reinterpreted cover versions of famous songs by the likes of Joy Division and The Smiths. In performance, Low shows off a sense of humor not necessarily found on their recordings; a tour in early 2004 featured a cover of OutKast's hit song "Hey Ya." At a gig in Los Angeles on Halloween 1998, the band took the stage as a Misfits tribute act, complete with corpse paint and black clothing.

Their latest release 'The Invisible Way' was considered their most successful international release, charting just outside the UK top 40 album chart and also appeared on charts in countries including Ireland, France and The Netherlands. It was also received well critically, with Metacritic assigning the album an average score 80/100.

Live reviews

I've seen Low perform live several times between the end of last century and more recent times. I love the ethereal atmosphere they effortlessly create, and the way their songs build up, often through minimal repetitious and textural emphasis. The first time I saw them was one of the best live experiences I've had the pleasure of being absorbed into (The Garage, London).

Their first few albums are my favourites and as the set list naturally evolved with their development, as much as I like the newer material, the slower and more minimal stuff was more to my liking, with reverb courtesy of Kramer production! However, the new stuff has built on these principles and perhaps gone into a more feel-good territory, also becoming more accessible.

The live experience is great and perhaps I have just gotten used to seeing them! I've seen them at large spaces such as the Royal Festival Hall (London) but prefer to see them at smaller venues and churches with natural reverb such as Union Chapel (London), for a more intimate affair. They have a subdued somewhat deadpan comedic banter between songs, which provides relief from some of the more intense moments. If you are a fan, I very much doubt you'd be disappointed if you've not seen them before and have an opportunity to!

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American indie outfit Low have a huge reputation on the live circuit as one of the most creative and intriguing performers of recent years. Forming back in the early 90s, the group has been on the road for over two decades and have been continuously honing their skills as musicians. Minimalistic arrangements give way to complex guitar riffs as they transport the audience to a celestial world of dream pop.

Sometimes they slow the pace so much that it feels as though they have stopped playing altogether yet it is just another well timed moment as they allow the silence to emphasise the spanning nature of their music. They have never enjoyed huge commercial success in either their homeland or the UK yet they do have a cult-like following in both allowing them total freedom when choosing the setlist. It definitely feels as though they have chosen the most technically brilliant tracks tonight as they close on a magical rendition of 'When I Go Deaf'.

Low's sound continues to grow. From the deeply contemplative sounds of the ethereal bass and ominous drums to the quavering, often exploding guitar, the audience is transported into some kind of other realm, whatever that might be. Their latest album, Double Negative, has a more electronic sound, vague at times, but building as always. The two shows at Brooklyn's National Sawdust provided evidence of Low's continuing evolution, focusing primarily on the moody, drifting music of their latest album, jumping ahead, suddenly loud, with the flip of a switch. They eventually played some of the older material with the developing sound, all of it string and compelling. My only complaint is that both nights had almost the same playlists, only a few songs changed. Here's hoping they make more changes for the third and final night.

This is the second time I saw Low in Toronto, and it was an amazing show!

Alan is such a good guitar player and harmonies Mimi and him sing together are coming from another world. I was wondering how are they going to present new album with a lot of electronics and experimental sounds, but Alan’s shoegaze skills are just unbelievable - I still don’t understand how he manages to control everything with pedals while playing and singing. Very special moment was their super awesome drone rock hit “Do you know how to waltz?”. I feel blessed for witnessing new “Low” era in such an intimate venue of Great Hall Toronto. Can’t wait to see them again soon!

This band never ceases to amaze me. I came into this show with tempered expectations given how produced their most recent record is. Some songs were literal representations of what's heard on record; others, however, were much more stripped down and reminded me that no matter how much production paint gets applied in the studio, the songs are still quintessential Low. "Always Up" was a pretty good example of this. The highlight of the SF performance for me had to be the medley of Tempest > Do You Know How To Waltz? Two of my absolute favorites of all time. The house sound and lights were incredible.

Small club venue for the show turned out to be an intimate evening with Low. Sound and lighting was good. The renditions of Double Negative songs was brilliant, and we got the treat of Do You Know How To Waltz, followed by segue into Lazy. Also did favorites Sunflower and Especially Me, so I happy boy! Set was over 90 minutes, and I got to chat with Mimi after show. Opener EMA was experimental with PJ Harvey influence...good start to evening! Even met some new friends...Gary and Irma, you guys rock!

Fantastic show yesterday evening at the Epicerie Moderne.

A wide place offered to Double Negative but also a lot of classics (Lazy, Nothing but Heart, Holy Ghost, No Comprende, What Part of Me) and a great version of 'Do you know how to waltz?'.

Alan, Mimi and Steve in great shape, a fabulous sound and an audience with a rare listening quality.

I can’t wait to see them again in Nîmes at the « This is not a love song » indie music festival.

Thanks again gor such a great evening.

It was wonderful, the sound, the performance, the visuals. Alan's guitars are truly creative, and the mixing man does his job amazingly. Band's voices'interaction works perfectly. The drone jam in the middle of the session was just in the right moment. It's only a pity that they didn't perform 'Rome'. Thanks MeetFactory and thank you Low!

Alan Sparhawk is an amazing guitarist. Glad I finally got to see him play in person. Also the visuals synced well with the setlist. The diversity in song selection was well chosen also and the 2 hour duration was the perfect amount of songs to include in one night. Beautiful show on all fronts.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ uncompromising concert - it was mind blowing. As the set list unfolded it went from an intellectual journey to a very physical experience. The album double negative dominated. But we stayed Just barely on the right side of positive the whole time

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All Time Low Announce North American 'The Sound of Letting Go on Tour'

Pre-sale tickets will be available beginning today, and general on-sale will kick off this Friday, April 28 at 10:00am local time.

Multi-platinum-selling rock band All Time Low have announced "The Sound Of Letting Go On Tour," a North American fall headline trek featuring special guests Gym Class Heroes, Grayscale, and Lauren Hibberd.

The 21-city tour will kick off on September 8 with a hometown show in Baltimore, MD, visit major markets coast-to-coast, and wrap on October 17 in Portland, OR [full itinerary below]. Pre-sale tickets will be available beginning today, and general on-sale will kick off this Friday, April 28 at 10:00am local time HERE .

Next month, All Time Low will hit the road for leg one of "Tell Me I'm Alive On Tour" with support from Mayday Parade and Games We Play. The 25-city North American Trek includes two special shows of legendary proportions that quickly sold out - the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, CO which All Time Low is headlining for the first time on May 23; and a special unplugged performance at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium on May 18 that will kick off the epic headlining tour.

Additionally, All Time Low will appear at When We Were Young Festival 2023 in Las Vegas this October. A complete list of upcoming tour dates and ticket information can be found HERE .

All Time Low's latest studio album Tell Me I'm Alive was released last month, and is available HERE via Fueled By Ramen. The 13-track collection marks All Time Low's first full-length album in three years and ushers in an exciting new era for the band.

Recorded in Los Angeles and Aspen with longtime collaborators Zakk Cervini [blink-182, Machine Gun Kelly, Halsey] and Andrew Goldstein [Maroon 5, Katy Perry, Jxdn], the album is a gut punch of renegade riffs and intense introspection that finds the band reaching thrilling new heights of creativity.

Highlighted songs on Tell Me I'm Alive include the new soul-baring chant-along focus track "Calm Down," as well as the "Sleepwalking," which hit No. 1 at Alternative Radio, the emotional title track "Tell Me I'm Alive," and "Modern Love," the anti-dating anthem ironically released on Valentine's Day. All Time Low recently delivered the network television debut performance of "Calm Down" on Good Morning America.

Of the album, frontman Alex Gaskarth states, "'Tell Me I'm Alive' is an exploration of loneliness, isolation, and coping with the pitfalls of a world that feels like it's out to get you after collectively going through several very tumultuous years kicked off by the pandemic.

It is not a 'pandemic record,' per se, but written on the heels of such a life-changing event, its themes are certainly focused through and informed by that lens; Some songs echo defiance and a desire to escape, others are reflective and remorseful over lost time and longing for deeper connections and deeper meaning.

We wanted to instill a hopeful tone, but ultimately this album is about dealing with hopelessness and surviving. We hope our fans find comfort in the understanding that even at our lowest points, there can be forward motion, growth, the strength to let go of what no longer serves us, and ultimately a message of resilience."

All Time Low Tour Dates

May 07, 2023 - West Palm Beach, FL - SunFest 2023

May 18, 2023 - Nashville, TN - Ryman Auditorium

May 19, 2023 - Chattanooga, TN - The Signal

May 20, 2023 - Birmingham, AL - Avondale Brewing Company

May 23, 2023 - Morrison, CO - Red Rocks Amphitheatre

May 24, 2023 - Salt Lake City, UT - The Union Event Center

May 26, 2023 - Riverside, CA - Riverside Municipal Auditorium

May 27, 2023 - Tucson, AZ - Rialto Theatre

May 28, 2023 - Albuquerque, NM - Revel Entertainment Center

May 30, 2023 - San Antonio, TX - The Aztec Theater

June 01, 2023 - Austin, TX - ACL Live - Moody Theater

June 02, 2023 - Oklahoma City, OK - The Criterion

June 03, 2023 - Kansas City, MO - Arvest Bank Theatre At the Midland

June 04, 2023 - Milwaukee, WI - The Rave / Eagles Club

June 06, 2023 - Newport, KY - MegaCorp Pavilion

June 07, 2023 - Pittsburgh, PA - Stage AE Outdoor

June 09, 2023 - Columbus, OH - KEMBA Live!

June 10, 2023 - Stroudsburg, PA - Sherman Theater

June 11, 2023 - Portland, ME - State Theatre

June 14, 2023 - Richmond, VA - The National

June 16, 2023 - Raleigh, NC - The Ritz

June 17, 2023 - North Myrtle Beach, SC - House of Blues Myrtle Beach

June 22, 2023 - Mexico City, Mexico - Pepsi Center

June 24, 2023 - Monterrey, Mexico - Machaca 2023

June 30, 2023 - Austin, TX - Moody Center

July 01 - Dallas, TX - Dos Equis Pavilion

September 08, 2023 - Baltimore, MD - Maryland State Fair*

September 10, 2023 - Boston, MA - MGM Music Hall at Fenway*

September 12, 2023 - New York, NY - The Rooftop at Pier 17*

September 15, 2023 - Sayreville, NJ - Starland Ballroom*

September 17, 2023 - Philadelphia, PA - The Fillmore*

September 20, 2023 - Toronto, ON - HISTORY*

September 22, 2023 - Detroit, MI - The Fillmore*

September 23, 2023 - Chicago, IL - Byline Bank Aragon Ballroom*

September 24, 2023 - St. Louis, MO - The Factory*

September 26, 2023 - Charlotte, NC - The Fillmore*

September 27, 2023 - Atlanta, GA - Coca-Cola Roxy*

September 28, 2023 - Orlando, FL - Hard Rock Live*

October 01, 2023 - New Orleans, LA - The Fillmore*

October 03, 2023 - Houston, TX - Warehouse Live - Ballroom*

October 04, 2023 - Dallas, TX - The Factory in Deep Ellum*

October 06, 2023 - Phoenix, AZ - The Van Buren*

October 07, 2023 - San Diego, CA - Observatory SD*

October 11, 2023 - Los Angeles, CA - The Wiltern*

October 14, 2023 - San Francisco, CA - The Warfield*

October 16, 2023 - Seattle, WA - Showbox SoDo*

October 17, 2023 - Portland, OR - Roseland Theater*

October 21, 2023 - Las Vegas, NV - When We Were Young Festival 2023

October 22, 2023 - Las Vegas, NV - When We Were Young Festival 2023

*On-sale Friday, April 28 at 10:00am local time

About All Time Low

All Time Low have undeniably, albeit unassumingly carved out their own corner of popular culture. The multi-platinum Maryland quartet have toppled charts, sold out arenas worldwide, and served up a series of instantly irresistible anthems in the process.

Their catalog consists of five consecutive Top 10 albums on the Billboard Top 200 in addition to picking up multi-platinum, platinum, and gold certifications. Speaking to their impact, Rolling Stone even named So Wrong, It's Right among its "50 Greatest Pop Punk Albums." In 2020, they ascended to a new commercial and critical high watermark with their eighth full-length LP, Wake Up, Sunshine.

Following a #1 debut on the Top Rock Albums chart, it spawned the biggest hit of the band's career thus far, "Monsters" [feat. blackbear]. It clinched #1 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay Chart for an unprecedented 18 weeks, emerging as the longest charting song ever at the Modern Rock format.

In addition to going platinum, it notably garnered "Alternative Rock Song of the Year" at the 2022 iHeartRadio Music Awards, while superstar Demi Lovato teamed up with the group for the Official Remix. Meanwhile, the mainstream came to them as they delivered show-stopping performances everywhere from Bonnaroo and Firefly to The Late Late Show with James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Ellen, Good Morning America, and beyond.

Photo Credit Ashley Osborn

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Low review – human warmth fills music of social collapse

The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker unleash a charged cacophony on the reverent crowd but the couple’s connection provides an underlying sweetness

A s Low walk on stage, there’s the usual air of anticipation from fans, but with it a sense of tentative concern. How is this band of two married Minnesotans and a bassist, on a spacious stage, going to recreate the crushed concentration of an album like Hey What – a continuation of the experimental distortion of sound that surprised fans and critics on its predecessor, 2018’s Double Negative ?

Beginning with the stop-start staccato of Hey What’s opener White Horses, any such thoughts soon fall away. Dressed in black, guitarist Alan Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker, alongside Liz Draper who has replaced the band’s previous bassist Steve Garrington on tour, unleash a sustained, charged ambient cacophony that settles on the reverent crowd. Playing Hey What in almost its entirety, keening riffs and thundering drums recreate the techno distortions of the studio album. Silhouetting the musicians are three pillars of horizontal lights, like tall windows with venetian blinds through which branches, cars and streetlights appear. “I’m awake / Must be another day,” sings Sparhawk on I Can Wait, as a mood of desperation takes hold.

Moving into their older albums, the same discomforting spell is held. Sparhawk dedicates No Comprende to a machete-wielding man he met in a Tennessee hotel, an absurd, end-the-world image that feeds into the hot paranoia of the song, as crimson lights soak the band.

Across their last two albums, Low have been documenting the emotions of living through social collapse, distilling their anxieties into apocalyptic clouds of abrasive instrumentals. But always piercing through are Sparhawk and Parker’s voices, which, without digital effects, offer an anchor of human warmth. There’s sweetness to the couple’s harmonies and their on stage connection. “If you can’t tell by the body language, I’m being told to calm down,” Sparhawk says as Parker smiles. The gentle strumming guitar of Silver Rider and romantic sincerity of Will the Night close the set: the two older Low songs are a balm after the intensity of the evening. With a gentle “goodnight friends,” from Sparhawk, who begins to shuffle off stage still clutching his guitar, Low’s spell finally breaks. It’s less a triumph and more a gift of solace against the cruelty of the outside world, glimpsed through blinds.

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Upcoming Low Festivals Appearances

Upcoming low concerts near me.

Sylvan Esso Unveil Live at Electric Lady EP: Stream

The Spotify-exclusive EP features a cover of Low's "Will the Night."

May 24, 2023

Death Cab for Cutie Cover Low's "The Plan," Announce Asphalt Meadows (Acoustic)

Asphalt Meadows (Acoustic) is due out March 10th.

January 31, 2023

Robert Plant Honors Low's Mimi Parker with Cover of "Monkey": Watch

"We've been drawn to the music of the great duo Low," Plant told the crowd in Edinburgh, Scotland.

November 7, 2022

Jeff Tweedy Covers Low's "I Hear... Goodnight" in Honor of Late Mimi Parker: Stream

Drummer/vocalist Parker died over the weekend following a battle with ovarian cancer.

Maynard James Keenan Mourns "Huge Influence" Mimi Parker of the Band Low

Parker passed away after a battle with ovarian cancer.

Low's Mimi Parker Dies Following Battle with Cancer

Parker was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer in late 2020.

November 6, 2022

Low Cancel Tour Dates, Citing Mimi Parker's Cancer Treatment

The indie rock duo have called off their dates through August due to Parker's treatment schedule for advanced ovarian cancer.

August 15, 2022

Death Cab for Cutie Announce New Album Asphalt Meadows, Share "Roman Candles": Stream

The band will promote their tenth studio album with a 2022 tour alongside supporting acts Low, Yo La Tengo, and illuminati hotties.

May 11, 2022

Low Release New Album HEY WHAT: Stream

It's the Minnesota band's 13th studio full-length overall.

September 10, 2021

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The Heart of Low

By Justin Taylor

Last winter, I flew to Minneapolis to hear a funk quartet play at a bar. The weather was miserable: hard-frozen snowbanks in every gutter, skating-rink sidewalks, roads so ripped up by rock salt and plow blades that I had to return my first rental car, because it shook like a leaf if I took it above thirty. I had come to see the band Derecho (since rechristened the Derecho Rhythm Section), the newest project of Alan Sparhawk, who for three decades fronted the seminal indie-rock band Low, which he co-founded with his wife, Mimi Parker.

Sparhawk had grown his hair out during the pandemic, and the red-blond mane was still shaggy past his shoulders. He wore work boots, a black T-shirt, brown overalls, and a black beanie that came off as the room warmed up. As in Low, he plays guitar and sings lead. Cyrus Sparhawk, his and Parker’s nineteen-year-old son, plays bass and writes much of the music. On this icy night, the Sparhawk boys—abetted by Al Church and Izzy Cruz on percussion—served up two piping-hot sets of Roy Ayers, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Childish Gambino covers, alongside a handful of original compositions.

The audience numbered perhaps fifty people, including several dancing couples and two bootleggers, whose taping rigs sat on their tables, beside their chicken wings. Sparhawk noted their presence with bemusement but without concern. The music was tight, buoyant, punk-inflected, and exploratory enough to explain what the tapers were doing there. Between songs, Sparhawk joked about the band being willing to play weddings and bar mitzvahs—any gig that paid. It was a happy, high-spirited show, but there was unspoken sorrow in the air.

Low was supposed to have reached its thirtieth anniversary in 2023. The band’s past few albums had been critical hits. A pandemic-era live-from-home concert series had deepened the connection to old fans and won over a legion of new ones. Cyrus, Parker and Sparhawk’s younger child, had come of age. Low should have been out on tour, taking well-deserved victory laps across the U.S. and Europe, claiming its rightful place in the indie-rock pantheon alongside the likes of Pavement, Sleater-Kinney , and Yo La Tengo . But there was no more Low. In late 2020, Mimi Parker had been given a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. After a brutal two-year struggle, she died on November 5, 2022. She was fifty-five years old. As Parker and Sparhawk themselves sing in uncanny harmony on the first single from Low’s 2021 album, “ Hey What ,” “When you think you’ve seen everything / You find we’re living in days like these.”

Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker were childhood friends turned high-school sweethearts turned longtime artistic collaborators. Across four decades, thirteen albums, five bass players, and two children—through Sparhawk’s semi-public struggles with mental illness and addiction in the early two-thousands, as well as Parker’s more recent and more private illness—they produced one of the most singular bodies of music in the history of rock. Low’s sound is solemn, sometimes glacial, with elliptical lyrics that often touch on questions of faith. (Sparhawk was raised Mormon; Parker converted before they married.) The band’s music demands patience and attention, which it repays in beauty and transcendence, punctuated by occasional bursts of earworm jangle-pop or cathartic, pummelling storms of noise.

Sharon Van Etten first heard Low in 1999, when one of the first friends she made at college played Low’s record “Secret Name” for her in her dorm room. “They are so deceptively simple,” she said. “I could feel their love and their pain.” Michael Hadreas, who performs as Perfume Genius , spoke of the band’s “hymnal quality.” “There was a warmth to it,” he said. “But it was also really fucked up. The music is kind of fucked. And dark. That’s comforting to me, that those all exist at the same time.”

Rilke writes in “ Duino Elegies ” that “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror” and that it is on this account that “every angel is terrifying.” I’ve thought of Rilke often while listening to Low, because so much of the band’s work explores divine love, dissolving the border between awe and fear. In “Nothing But Heart,” from the album “C’mon” (2011), Sparhawk, adopting what I take to be the persona of God, sings, “I would be your king / But you want to be free / Confusion and art / I’m nothing but heart.” That last line is repeated at least twenty times, with Parker harmonizing, in the next several minutes, while the music builds to a whirlwind roar. The song is at once openhanded and gnomic, elegant and menacing. It’s the song that converted me—at a 2011 concert at Terminal 5, in New York City—from a casual, even dismissive listener to an ardent fan. When the band kicked into “Nothing But Heart,” I felt the nature and depth of my attention shift. It was as though the music were a long-locked door to which I’d finally found a key—or, better, as if I contained a long-locked door, which the music had finally pried open.

Sparhawk and Parker met on the second day of fourth grade in Clearbrook, Minnesota, a hardscrabble town of fewer than five hundred people. He was the new kid: his family had relocated from Utah because his father had bought a farm, pursuing what Sparhawk described to me as a “Mormon version of ‘back to the land’ ” for which the family was woefully ill-equipped. (Per the refrain of Low’s “California”: “Though it breaks your heart / we had to sell the farm.”) Parker also lived on a farm, and music ran in both families. Her mother had tried to break into country music, and her father sang around the house. Parker learned to sing by harmonizing with her older sisters. Sparhawk’s mother played church organ, and his father wrote songs and played drums in a country band. “If it were up to him, he played jazz,” Sparhawk said, “but, because of where we lived, that was the gig he could get. For a while, that was the only cash he made.”

In Clearbrook, alcoholism was rampant and violence commonplace. In a 2021 interview, Parker said that the song “Laser Beam,” which she wrote, was based on a childhood memory of accompanying her mother to pick up her intoxicated father from a bar and watching from the back seat of the family car as he was maced by a cop in the parking lot. Sparhawk’s parents didn’t drink—they were practicing Mormons—but his father was mercurial. “I got some broken ribs from tussles with my father,” he told me, though he hastened to add, “I got tons of friends who put up with way more shit than I did.” Sparhawk, who was diagnosed with severe A.D.H.D. and borderline personality disorder in his late thirties, now believes that his father had similar problems.

Music was a way to repair, or at least circumvent, the damage in the father-son relationship—a way to express love. Sparhawk would watch his father play guitar, and, as he began to learn the instrument himself, they were able to play together. “It’s a language that’s untainted,” he said. “You completely connect with this person, and all the other stuff falls away.” In fifth grade, Parker joined the school band, drawn to drums because banging on stuff was fun and she didn’t have to learn to read music. Sparhawk started playing guitar around the same age. He couldn’t pinpoint when they started dating, but he remembered the first time they played music together. They were fifteen, and he was over at her house one day after school. He started playing Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” hoping she would join in on the harmony without his having to ask. She did.

Sparhawk spent a year at Brigham Young University before transferring to the University of Minnesota Duluth, where Parker was enrolled. They graduated and married. Duluth had a small but energetic music scene powered by an intensely communitarian ethos. “There’s a sense of camaraderie,” Sparhawk said. “We’re all trying to get through the winter, and the town is off the beaten path, with an underdog complex, so there’s a certain flavor to your determination.” Sparhawk and his friend John Nichols were in a rock band called Zen Identity, but they had grown restless. They were thinking about the inverse propositions suggested by loud, fast music. How much could you strip out of a song before it stopped being one? How slow—and, crucially, how low—could you play the remaining elements while still commanding the attention of a rock crowd?

Sparhawk and Nichols, who was on bass, coaxed a reluctant Parker to play drums. She devised a minimalist setup, playing with brushes more often than sticks. Sparhawk sang most of the leads, but it quickly became clear that the heart of Low’s sound was the harmonies that Parker and Sparhawk could achieve, along with Parker’s spare drumming. Their first album, “I Could Live in Hope,” was released in February of 1994 on Vernon Yard, then an imprint of Virgin Records. The music is hushed, skeletal, haunting. All the songs have one-word titles, and the album closes with a wrenching cover of “You Are My Sunshine” (listed simply as “Sunshine”) that is as bereft as a funeral dirge.

By staying in Duluth rather than defecting to New York or Seattle (or even Minneapolis), Parker and Sparhawk were able to keep their overhead low. They worked odd jobs when they had to but lived as full-time musicians as much as they could, which meant long stretches on the road to cultivate the following they were gaining in Europe and the U.S.

“The fact that we were married helped,” Sparhawk said. “I think it gave a certain license for creative intimacy and trust, though it also made us each other’s harshest critics and harshest editors.” Nobody knew that better than Zak Sally, who replaced Nichols in 1994 and went on to become Low’s longest-serving bassist. “We hit it very, very, very hard,” Sally said. “This is a band that makes music, this is also a marriage, this is also a matter of faith. This is also family, this is also friends, and it’s also a job, and some of those lines just cross over each other.”

Low released four albums between 1994 and 1999, as well as a dead-earnest Christmas EP with a cover of “Little Drummer Boy” that ended up soundtracking a Gap commercial the following year. “Slow Down” is a sixty-second spot in which seven people, bundled up in brightly colored Gap sweaters and scarves, have a fun-filled slow-motion snowball fight in a frosty field while Low performs one of the most moving versions of “Little Drummer Boy” ever recorded—not least because Sparhawk’s solemn vocals and Parker’s martial timing suggest that this drummer boy is aware his story is unfolding in the shadow of Herod’s massacre of the innocents.

The ad ran in heavy rotation throughout the 2000 holiday season. And it came along at a critical moment: they’d just found out Parker was pregnant with their first child, Hollis, so they knew they were headed for a long stretch without any touring income. They used their Gap-sponsored sabbatical to write and record “Things We Lost in the Fire,” which closes with what might be the sweetest song in the Low catalogue, “In Metal.” “Partly hate to see you grow / And just like your baby shoes / Wish I could keep your little body / In metal,” Parker sings to Hollis, whose laughter and babble can be heard throughout the track. It wasn’t dubbed in later; they’d brought her to the recording sessions. The album came out in January, 2001, and the band launched a tour to support it. Hollis was ten months old, her Pack ’n Play stowed in the back of the van amid the instrument cases and sundry gear.

A year later, Low released “Trust,” which found the band oscillating between extremes. “Canada” and “Last Snowstorm of the Year” are loud and catchy enough for rock radio, whereas “Little Argument with Myself” and “Point of Disgust” are among the most gorgeous and anguished faith songs in the band’s catalogue. But it was “The Great Destroyer,” from 2005—an angry, muscular, moshable record—that threw down the gauntlet. It was the band’s first record with the label Sub Pop, and it was recorded the same year that Parker gave birth to Cyrus. Parker and Sparhawk were well into their thirties, more than a decade into Low, and tired of being the standard-bearers of “slowcore,” a term that they’d been saddled with early on but had never embraced. Beloved now but divisive at the time (Pitchfork used the words “crass and boorish” and rated it a 5.5), “The Great Destroyer” proved its point—that Low would not be boxed in by critics, fans, or its own history—but the album’s tremendous energy can feel compulsive, as if the band is trying to stay two steps ahead of its own exhaustion.

They kept touring. Parker had mounting reservations about bringing both kids on the road, but the obvious alternatives—leaving them behind for months at a time, or Parker taking leave from the band—both seemed worse. Amid all this, Sparhawk’s mental health was deteriorating. He was treating his undiagnosed conditions with substance abuse, which for a believing Mormon presented a spiritual crisis on top of the practical one. In May, 2005, the band cancelled its summer tour because Sparhawk was having what he later described as a nervous breakdown. He had visions of the apocalypse and came to believe that he was the Antichrist. He spent about a week in a psychiatric hospital. “Long enough to get a little bit of antipsychotic medication and realize you are delusional,” he recalled. “And then you crash really, really, really, really, really hard. Because you realize this spiritual experience that you’ve been having is a complete joke and a lie.”

Sparhawk began to pursue formal treatment, including medication and talk therapy. He hasn’t had another serious episode since. But it was a tumultuous, halting recovery. Sally, the band’s bassist, told me, “There was a candle burning at both ends for many years, and it just stopped burning, and I had to leave.” He quit the band in October, 2005. In a message that he later wrote to Hollis, he told her, “Me and your mom and dad were mad at each other for a while, but we never did not love each other. Ever.”

Sally was replaced by Matt Livingston, who played in Sparhawk’s hard-rock sideband, the Retribution Gospel Choir. Low launched back into writing and recording, but now scheduled tours with some deference to the school calendar and usually limited itself to a few weeks at a time on the road. A couple years later, Parker and Sparhawk bought their neighbor’s house, in Duluth, and created a practice space in the light-filled living room next door. There was more space for Sparhawk’s collection of guitars and effects pedals, and they could even record if they wanted to, without having to go anywhere or pay for studio time. Technology had improved enough that weird or extravagant ideas could be attempted with the click of a button.

“Alan, in particular, took what he would otherwise do with a guitar and did it with electronic equipment and editing stuff,” the music writer Bruce Adams told me. (Adams is currently working on an oral history of Low.) “Also, I think Mim’s influence is in there: ‘What can we do with the vocals? How can we maintain these threads of melody through all this static?’ ” On “Double Negative” (2018), Low threw down another gauntlet. Released the year of the band’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the album is jagged and unforgiving—full of feedback, distortion, industrial stutter, and glitched-out chaos. The eleven songs flow into one another, like a long explosion detonating in waves. Sparhawk told me, “Say I have a song. I know the chords and movement and the arrangement in and out, but I want to hear it done with sounds I’ve never heard before. And I want it to blow my mind. Once you taste that, it’s really, really difficult to go back.”

The first episode of Low’s streaming series, “It’s Friday I’m in Low,” was broadcast on YouTube on April 3, 2020, a few weeks after the first COVID -19 lockdown began in the U.S. We see Parker and Sparhawk, slightly out of focus on what is clearly a cell-phone camera. She’s haloed by a full head of curly dark-brown hair, perched on a radiator behind her trademark minimalist drum kit: one cymbal, one floor tom, one snare. He’s sitting on a plain wooden chair, steadying his electric guitar on his thigh with one hand and holding a pint glass full of water in the other. They’re both wearing black button-up shirts and black jeans; Sparhawk has begun to let his hair grow out. The first thing you hear is Hollis off camera, twenty years old and home from college, telling her parents, “You’re now live. All right, go.” Sparhawk introduces the project: “This is for everybody who is out there alone, especially, and people going through some tough times and some questions and some fears.” Their five-song set included a Hendrix-homage take on “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the début of an unnamed song that would go on to become “Days Like These.” It wasn’t long before Cyrus joined the streaming series to sit in on bass.

Low was putting the finishing touches on “Hey What” when Parker’s ovarian cancer was detected, near the end of 2020. The diagnosis came late, and the prognosis was dire. There were multiple surgeries and heavy chemotherapy. For a while, she seemed to have beaten long odds. When “Hey What” was released in September, 2021, she was well enough that the band toured to support it. But the cancer returned in the summer of 2022, and it had spread to her lungs. Low played its last show on September 4, 2022, in Duluth’s Bayfront Park. It was a cold, gray, blustery day, and everyone onstage was wearing winter coats. Parker’s voice sounded as strong as ever. The next month, she was told that she had a month to live. A week after that, she was gone.

There was no question of Low continuing without Parker. “Mim was the glue,” Sally told me. “She had this effortless melodic sense. Me and Alan would be banging our heads against the wall downstairs in the practice room trying to get at the core of some song, and she’d just walk in and do something first take—it was intuitive for her.” Some people close to her say she was shy or guarded, but onstage that reserve came across as impeccable cool. Lois Maffeo, who records as Lois, and who met Sparhawk and Parker when they started touring, told me, “ ‘Majestic’ is a word that comes to mind for Mim, not in the sense that she held herself in a position of power, but that her essence as a person was to be so comfortable with herself.”

As word spread of Parker’s death, tributes poured in from across the music world. Death Cab for Cutie added a cover of Low’s “The Plan” to the acoustic version of their album “Asphalt Meadows.” Phoebe Bridgers and Storefront Church covered “Words,” from Low’s first album, which came out the year Bridgers was born. “I probably took a lot of inspiration from Low, because my music tends to be pretty slow and drawn out,” Bridgers told me. “There’s sparsity, letting people fill in the gaps, to feel something that isn’t directly handed to them.” Like many of the women I spoke to about Parker, Bridgers emphasized that she had been a role model: a female drummer (rare enough in rock) who was also co-lead singer and songwriter, and who didn’t try to hide the fact that she was a mother. “I have a friend who saw them when Mimi was, like, very pregnant,” Bridgers told me. “And that rocks to me—that image really sticks in my mind.”

Like their parents and grandparents, Cyrus and Hollis have music in their blood. They both play multiple instruments and sing. Cyrus had stayed on as bass player until the end of the streaming show’s run, and, before long, he and his father were jamming and writing songs together. “It feels right to be playing this music with my son,” Sparhawk told me soon after I met him. We were at the practice space in Duluth, eating a couple of sandwiches at one corner of a large dining table, most of which was given over to a circus-themed jigsaw puzzle that Parker had been working on before she died. He’d made the statement with confidence, but the phrasing had emphasized that the arrangement might be temporary, or at least conditional. I asked him recently whether he still felt that way. “Well, we’re still playing,” he said. Derecho Rhythm Section now has ten songs up on Bandcamp, six of which feature Hollis on backing vocals.

In late 2023, Sparhawk began to play more often as a solo act: there was a short European tour in November, and this year he’s played shows in New York City, Chicago, and a handful of cities around the South, all of them with Cyrus playing bass in his backing band. (Hollis sat in on drums at the New York shows.) He’s also been recording again, experimenting with improvising guitar and pitch-shifted vocals over a preset synthesizer clocked to a drum machine. “I was messing with this rigid stuff. There were moments where it would quickly become very visceral, very spontaneous,” he said. “You’ve created the structure for it to happen and come through you, but you’re trusting the universe about what is going to come in.” The fruits of this work will be released this fall under his own name, as a record called “White Roses, My God.” ♦

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Exclusive: Neil Young & Crazy Horse Bassist Billy Talbot Shares Details About Band’s Love Earth Tour

N eil Young & Crazy Horse launch their first full-fledged tour since 2014 with a show on Wednesday, April 24, in San Diego. The band’s Love Earth Tour currently features more than 30 North American dates, and is plotted out through a September 29 concert at the famed Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

The last time Young played live with Crazy Horse was in November 2023 at a private event at the Rivoli nightclub in Toronto. That show, which featured a full performance of Young and the band’s lauded 1990 studio effort, Ragged Glory , was recorded and is being released as a live album titled FU##IN’ UP.

[Buy Neil Young Concert Tickets]

The Crazy Horse lineup for that concert, and the two other shows Young played with the group in 2023, featured founding bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina, longtime multi-instrumentalist Nils Lofgren, and a new addition—guitarist/keyboardist Micah Nelson. Nelson, who is the son of country legend Willie Nelson, also is a member of the group Promise of the Real, who served as Young’s backing band for a number of albums and tours during the 2010s.

Nils Lofgren Won’t Be Taking Part in the Tour

In a new interview with American Songwriter , Talbot revealed that Crazy Horse will be down a member on the new trek.

“Nils isn’t able to be with us this time, because he’s out [on tour] with Bruce [Springsteen and the E Street Band,” Talbot explained. “So we’re doing it without Nils, but with Micah.”

[RELATED: Neil Young & Crazy Horse Extend 2024 Tour: How To Get Tickets]

As for how Nelson is fitting in with Young and Crazy Horse, Talbot said, “Well, [Neil] really likes Micah, and so do we.”

Plans to Play “Cortez the Killer” with a Long-Lost Verse

Talbot didn’t reveal much about the set lists Young and the band might be putting together for the tour, but he did share some info about Neil’s recently reported plan to reintroduce a lost verse from the group’s classic 1975 tune “Cortez the Killer.”

“[W]hen we were recording ‘Cortez the Killer’ for the first time, the electricity went off in the control room, and the machine stopped, but we kept playing,” the bassist recalled. “And that verse was one that had been sung in that period of time when we were playing and they weren’t recording. Then they turned the machines back on, and we were still playing. So, consequently, [when] we edited ‘Cortez the Killer’ together … that verse was missing.”

Talbot added, “So Neil has come to terms with that, and he likes that verse, as it turns out … so we’re probably going to re-introduced it to the song.”

Talbot Feeling “Really Ready” to Tour

Meanwhile, Talbot, who turned 80 in October 2023, said he’s feeling like he’s prepared to hit the road with Young and the other guys.

“I’ve been playing a lot here at my ranch [in South Dakota], with my equipment and tapes and everything, just getting ready,” he said. “I feel like I’m really ready, but … we will see what happens when we all get together. I think it’ll be a successful gathering.”

Tickets for Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s tour dates are available now via various outlets, including StubHub .

More About the FU##IN’ UP Live Album

FU##IN’ UP got its initial release as a limited-edition clear-vinyl two-LP set as part of the 2024 Record Store Day event on Saturday, April 20. Then, on Friday, April 26, the album will be released on standard black vinyl, on CD, and via digital formats.

The album features live renditions of all 10 tunes on Ragged Glory , but, interestingly, the titles of nine of the tunes have been changed to other phrases taken from the lyrics of those tracks. The one exception is “Farmer John,” which is a cover tune.

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The post Exclusive: Neil Young & Crazy Horse Bassist Billy Talbot Shares Details About Band’s Love Earth Tour appeared first on American Songwriter .

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