White Roses, My God, the debut album proper by Alan Sparhawk, formerly of Low, is our Album Of The Month in the September 2024 issue of Uncut. Here’s an extended version of the Q&A that appears alongside the review, in which the songwriter tells us more about the record, rediscovering his voice and even his next album… “I didn’t set out to be contrary…”
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You’ve certainly been keeping yourself occupied, musically…
Yeah, between a few different bands and local things and just people asking, ‘Hey, can you do this?’ ‘Yeah, I suppose I could do that. Let’s just get this band going…’ It’s pretty fun. It keeps me on my toes and keeps me playing, and engaged. I’m better if I have deadlines and things coming up, it helps shape my motivation, figuring out each day what I need to do.
The last couple of years since Mimi passed away can’t have been easy.
It’s a wild process… There’s of course the grief, the loss, the shock of this thing that was so so real being gone, but you really do find out how deeply you are just one part of a whole, that you’re incomplete without that person that you’ve resonated with, and lived with, and experienced with your whole life. There’s a lot more subconscious interaction going on than people realise, there’s a lot of sharing of tasks and processing of life that is really subconscious but still shared. And it feels very much incomplete without the other person.
In some ways, White Roses… isn’t so different to the last few Low albums – they all had a lot of processing of instruments and voices.
Yeah, a lot of processing, a lot of trying to find something new. We were really getting into a pretty deep, deep aesthetic with pushing things forward and finding new sounds and new ways to deliver songs. Even, you know, to the end, I felt like we were gaining even more confidence as singers, and I thought Mim certainly was becoming an even more poignant and masterful singer, right to the end.
This album feels very fresh, as if a lot of the songs were quite improvisatory?
Yeah, it was. I had been messing around with stuff and at first thinking I was just trying to figure out the gear. But when “I Made This Beat” happened, I realised that I was starting to get some songs. That one was very much a moment. There were moments when you know you’ve found a line onto this very alive and electrical current that sort of runs throughout the universe. Once you have tasted that a few times, you can really become very acute at feeling when it’s happening, and you learn pretty quickly to not try to move in and manipulate it too much, and [just] let it come out of you, and to trust the light and trust the thread.
Were you inspired by any artists or was the technology driving things?
I would sit down and start pushing buttons and moving knobs and mumbling into the microphone. It was exciting to me was because I was just capturing the moment something was being written, essentially being freestyled. My son is into hip-hop and him and his buddies will freestyle over beats. It’s pretty great to hear, and if you do it a lot, your mind gets used to that. So a lot of hip-hop he listens to inspired this, as well as other moments I’ve experienced with Low or other bands, where you’ve opened up your ear and your mind and your soul to what needs to be translated in that moment, and what needs to be made into sound. I became very aware that the key here was to capture that moment and have that be the recording, not go ‘This is a cool demo… let me write another verse and then go six months later to a studio…’ I wanted to trust that it was all there.
It’s hard not to see the vocal processing as being designed to put a distance between the listener and your emotions, which you probably needed.
I don’t know. I’ve definitely pondered it. I’ve had to ask myself, like, what is this voice thing? Why do I like it? What do I like doing it? What’s going on here? Is it an escape? Is it healthy? Am I doing it out of fear? Am I doing it out of fearlessness? How I fell into it was very visceral and very unexpected, and there were things about it that really surprised me once I started doing it. The thing I’m using is like a hard pitch corrector, you can dial in and set the key and then sing. I found it interesting. Over the last handful of years, I’ve been trying to figure out, ‘Who am I? What is my voice without Mim’s?’ Part of me is tired of hearing my own voice a little bit, so I thought, ‘Why not just [process it, and] say it’s this and then see what I can do within this parameter?’ When you take pitch off the table, it really opens up possibilities of what you’re doing, especially when you’re improvising something.
What hip-hop have you been listening to?
Whenever we’re driving my son will be like, ‘Hey, check this out.’ I was listening to a lot of Earl Sweatshirt, a lot of old OutKast, Kendrick Lamar… There’s something about Earl Sweatshirt that really has awoken my mind a little bit, there are some subtleties that kind of cracked open my mind a little bit. I wasn’t necessarily thinking like, ‘Oh, I wanna rap’, there’s just something about [that] style and delivery that sounds sort of lazy and effortless, but it’s actually really, really clever and really well delivered. I became really aware of how talented hip-hop artists are – a lot of hip-hop artists can just freestyle the hell out of stuff, that blows my mind. I have huge respect for that, because I’ve had just the slightest glimpse of what it takes. I’ve touched that energy, and I’ve seen that glowing horizon… I’m still listening to reggae, and Alice Coltrane’s something that keeps coming around. I’m trying to tap into the universe, I’m trying to listen, I know there’s a voice out there and I’m trying to figure out what it’s trying to say.
There’s another record coming soon, we hear, a more traditional one?
I mean, at least using more traditional instruments, right. We’re finishing it up right now, and I think we’ve come to something that’s pretty unique, something that’s pushed both of the entities involved, Trampled By Turtles and myself. I’m excited. I didn’t set out to be contrary or second guess, you know, [or have] a plan going here or there and whatever, but it just kind of happened to be how things unfolded. And I ended up with some time with those guys to do some recording. They’re all friends, and it just clicked so easily. And we’ve we decided we had to follow through and make something with it.