Mimi Parker of Low: Gone Too Soon

We lost Mimi Parker this weekend. Mimi and her husband Alan Sparhawk were the core of the band Low. Low lasted for 30 years and never stopped growing. For many of us, Low was that rarest of entities: a band that spanned decades but remained so crucial that they never turned into nostalgia.

It is difficult to explain Low. Even if you’ve been immersed in music your entire life, if you haven’t heard their albums, well, I really don’t know who to compare them to as musicians.

In their early years they were slow, sparse, quiet. Several years in they were working with soft / loud contrasts, surprisingly recorded actual rock songs, eventually veered off into a more electronic space… so many different things going on, but every album distinctly them, because always at the core, it was them, Alan and Mimi, singing.

I struggled to find an explanation for what made Mimi unique as a vocalist in a nominally rock mien, and came up with this absurd analogy:

Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux never had the most overwhelming fastball. What he had was the uncanny ability to throw a pitch at whatever speed he wanted up to his limit, and with pinpoint control. By the end of his career his fastball topped out at 86mph. But he would throw it 84, 77, 81, 72, 75, 82… you just never knew exactly how fast, or where the ball would go.

Mimi Parker could do this with her voice. She never went loud. She would not bend notes into spaces they didn’t belong. No, she did something different. She would hold a word for 7 seconds if that’s what the word called for. She would hold the a trailing note for exactly 3.4 seconds if that’s what it required. And you wouldn’t see it coming, and when it was done, it was exactly right, ending at the right time. This may sound like the sort of thing opera singers can do, and it might be, but an opera singer tells a story a different way, moving across octaves. Nobody ever called an opera singer glacial.

Mimi’s voice, and drumming, are often in contrast to Alan’s voice and guitar playing. Alan is noisy, Mimi calming. Alan is on edge, Mimi stabilizing. Alan, at times, is flat out neurotic. Mimi is grounding.

And I think “slow” or “glacial” might be understandable adjectives, and I’ve often seen the word “restraint” used in a complementary fashion, but what you really get from some of the most essential material is that these were two people who understood how, together, to use time itself as an instrument.

Not in lyrical content, I think Mimi and Alan were, in their early years at least, doing with the shape of the music what someone like Keats or Wordsworth did with the shape of words. They were romantics, who created what was substantially their own vernacular form, and then pushed well beyond it.

I was a little late to the party. I knew of Low, I’d heard about the slowcore, I’d probably heard songs along the way. Best as I can remember, I didn’t get my hands on an album until Things We Lost in the Fire (2001) or maybe Trust (2002), albums which included bassist Zak Sally. For me, Things We Lost in the Fire was already a statement, a compelling masterwork, an album which experimented not only with time as an instrument but also volume. There was a short period around 2000 when bands who specialized in quiet / loud contrast were all the rage, bands like Mogwai or Godspeed! You Black Emperor or Explosions in the Sky… all of them instrumental bands. It’s funny to me writing that last sentence, because those bands sound nothing like Low, but they’re about as close as I can come to meaningful comps at the time.

The Great Destroyer arrived early in 2005. It is often loud, sometimes caustic, produced by Dave Fridmann, best known for working with bands like Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips. It was a jarring listening experience, it is still a jarring listening experience, and for my money is one of the ten greatest albums ever released. It is the kind of album that you don’t come back from. Indeed, in the aftermath of the album’s release, Alan Sparhawk finally had the nervous breakdown that you can practically hear developing over the course of the album itself.

At that point Low had been around for 12 years, had released multiple critically acclaimed albums, and then had gone full rock experience. Where on earth could they go from there?

As it turns out, The Great Destroyer was only the middle point, the 7th of their 13 studio albums. Their 2015 album Ones and Sixes is particularly excellent in my mind. On their last two albums Double Negative (2018) and Hey What (2021) they were exploring increasingly electronic territories, which almost never works out well, but this was Low, so of course it worked.

Two shows in particular were among the best I’ve ever seen, 2008 at Epiphany, a music room in a converted church chapel in West Town, and 2015 at Thalia Hall. I deeply regret not having seen them more often than I did.

I wasn’t sure which part of the META-SPIEL audience this was most for: the people who are already in mourning along with me, or the people who must be very confused by a word like “slowcore”.

I think this is the thing: 2005 was an especially pivotal year of my life. If you were around me then, then you know that in 2005 I was still holding down a very strange job, in a place I really shouldn’t still have been in, not really seeming to understand what the hell I was doing with anything, but maybe finally turning some kind of a corner, finally recognizing that I was nearing the end of the road of whatever the hell my twenties were.

The Great Destroyer was the centerpiece of my soundtrack to 2005. Was it a good thing that an album essentially chronicling a man’s collapse into a nervous breakdown would be the soundtrack to a pivotal time in my life? I think it was.

“Death of a Salesman” is just Alan and his guitar, except, it’s not just Alan, not really:

Now, some curation.

I believe their first proper video, from 1995’s Long Division, “Shame”:

Live at ACTV in Austin from 1996, when they were maximum slowcore. (Yeah, that’s really a Joy Division cover in there.) “Violence”, “Transmission”, “Caroline”, “Swingin’”, “David & Jude”:

I’m not sure if this is an official unofficial video or what exactly, but I recommend you turn the speakers up and just sit back and listen for four minutes. From 2001’s Things We Lost in the Fire, “Dinosaur Act”:

The song where people started saying, wait, Low decided to rock out? Oh, if we only knew what was coming next. From 2002’s Trust, “Canada”:

There’s so many candidates from the Low catalog, but for evidence of what Mimi could do in a very different setting from the early years, does it get any better? From 2011’s C’mon, “Especially Me”:

Low is a band who not only permitted but encouraged the uploading of show recordings. There’s a lot of other stuff on YouTube and a whole lot on Archive.org.

I had a hard time finding the photo I wanted to use… it’s Mimi’s passing, but Mimi and Alan are inseparable. I finally found the one above and I think it’s just right (and much better than Alan in those overalls.)

So much of Low’s music was about resilience. I never really thought about it like that until tonight, but… the manipulation of time and space to construct a narrative is an extreme act of resilience in the face of an overbearing planet.

What I see in this photo, which maybe others won’t, but I see a couple of people who were resilient together, whose musical creations defied expectations and clearly defied a whole lot more in the process. A couple who endured. And they were still creating. They had no intention of slowing down. I cannot help but think they would have continued pushing boundaries in new and thrilling ways. But I suspect they will be the rare band which will continue to gain fans years into the future as young people unearth unfamiliar glacial sounds. In such a turgid world, we could all do with lessons in manipulating time and pulling the beauty from the space within.