Alan Sparhawk: I Made This Beat

"I made this beat! Those words are coming out of me. It's for real. I'm ecstatic." 

You can tell Alan Sparhawk means it when he sings 'I Made This Beat' on his new album White Roses, My God. The lyrics are simply the song title, repeated as a mantra through extreme pitch correction over a strutting synth-and-drum machine backing.

"I created this beat," he explains, "and the first thing that came out of me was how fucking excited I was this was happening, and every time I'd say it, I'd want to say it again. The more I tweaked the knob, I'd be like, 'Yeah! Damn right, I made that beat.'"

Anyone who has buzzed off the thrill of getting a few patterns sequenced and rolling in unison will relate to Sparhawk's enthusiasm. In its pure celebration of electronic music production, the song is a wild departure for an artist whose accomplished life in music is written into the annals of alternative rock. Sparhawk is best known for fronting Low alongside his wife, the late Mimi Parker, since the couple were young newlyweds in their native Duluth, Minnesota. Parker died in November 2022, and White Roses, My God arrives as Sparhawk's first fully realized music project since losing his soulmate. Such loss looms large over the record and feeds into the distinct sonic departure Sparhawk has taken, where a drum machine and synthesizer are the only instruments and his voice communicates solely through a TC Helicon VoiceTone C1 pedal.

But as Sparhawk himself acknowledges on a Zoom call alongside the album's producer Nat Harvie, such monumental loss is not a one-note experience and threads of joy repeatedly manifest on the record, especially on 'I Made This Beat'. "It's kind of defiant," Harvie suggests about the track. 

"It's defiant against grief," Sparhawk agrees. "It's defiant against your own inadequacy, or your own perceptions of what you're able to do. It's that creative moment when you surprise yourself. Grief is wildly complicated, man. There's waves of joy, waves of gratitude, waves of fear, waves of anger and defiance. There are moments in this record where I'm rap battling against the fucking universe."

"I feel like the joyful parts of the album are like a returning to the body from being trapped in the mind," Harvie adds, "just spending hours listening to these pretty simple, loud beats."

The purely electronic palette of White Roses, My God is a departure that might surprise long-term Low fans. Sparhawk and Parker's band tested boundaries throughout their expansive, nearly-30-year discography, embracing the rich tonal possibilities of guitar pedals and teasing beats and synth textures into their mid-period and later work. But they never went as far as Sparhawk does on this new record, especially in terms of the voice treatment. Taking the trend of auto-tune to new extremes, his voice is an unrecognizable, cartoonish sprite fluttering and warbling through the C1 pedal's hard pitch correction, but for the listener the quirky novelty of his approach quickly settles into a compelling, emotionally charged expression.

"When I was first starting to do these tracks, it was really casual," Sparhawk reveals. "I was mostly just messing with the gear my kids were using, and the voice pedal felt like, 'Haha, you sing through it and it sounds weird.' I did wonder early on, 'What is this? Am I hiding behind this voice?' and there is a little bit of that. But as I would improvise and try things, I'd be surprised what would come out of me. It was a little bit like a costume, but I kept finding myself able to say things I knew were pretty solid, and I could feel the quickening as it was coming out of me, like this is something. It does feel like a mask, but because you're controlling it, it gets pretty personal pretty quick."

White Roses, My God has its fair share of direct, emotionally raw lyrics, not least on 'Heaven', while elsewhere Sparhawk toys with mantra-like throw downs and less obvious imagery. On 'Feel Something', the relatively simple refrain starts as "Can you feel something here?" and subtly modulates to become "Oh, I can feel something here." It feels like a reflection on Sparhawk's newly synthetic musical practice as much as his emotional state, searching out the human heart in the machine-fronted sound. Part of the C1 pedal's charm lies in the cracks and imperfections which let Sparhawk's humanity shine through. As he improvised with the pedal across extended jam sessions, he started to learn where the limitations and idiosyncrasies of the hardware yielded interesting results.

"The voice is such an intimate thing," he explains. "Even if you're not a singer you're so close with these subtle muscles that change your voice. Having something that responds so quickly to those parameters, it became an instrument and an amplification of the possibilities for improvising. There's little edges there. They're very human, whether it's a note fighting to jump into something else, or tones you throw at it where it gets confused. You can find spots where you're riding that edge and using it as the key to the instrument."

"That sort of generative abuse of the technology wouldn't have been possible if we were just using it as an effect," Harvie adds. "It's not something we put on Alan's vocals. No song on this record has any dry, pre-auto tune Alan vocals."

The voice pedal was one part of the musical alchemy which took place when Sparhawk started to head in this new direction. The two key instruments which form the vast majority of the rhythm and melody on the album were the Roland TR-8S drum machine, which even features on some of Low's later records, and a Novation AFX Station monosynth which he picked up second hand from a store in Duluth. "I think I know the person who had the Novation before me," he chuckles. "They had gotten really surgical with a bunch of the presets but I was able to go through and find a couple of clean patches."

There was no great plan to begin with. The gear was hooked up and Sparhawk would hit record and start jamming out drum machine patterns and synth lines for an hour or two at a time. When the voice pedal was introduced into the process, it quickly became apparent there was something concrete emerging amidst the reams of improvised recordings. A month or so into tracking some of these ideas, Sparhawk realized he needed someone else's input to start sifting through and finding the tangible material. He played some of it to Harvie, who had previously mixed and engineered other local projects Sparhawk had been involved with, and the album started to take shape as the two worked together to zero in on the essence of the sound.

"I had about half the material going before Nat and I started working together on it," explains Sparhawk. "At that point I was in the middle of it and just turning stuff out. Once we started working, within the next couple weeks I was finishing up more stuff, and there were maybe two songs which emerged from an edit. I remember thinking, 'Okay, this could be a record. Let me see if any more material happens." 

"Alan was just treating the computer as tape," says Harvie, "so I'd look through an hour-long thing and peek at the transients and see where the vocals were. Alan would show me the parts he liked, then I would bring them into Live and chop them up a little bit. But we'd be sitting together finding the core pieces. My production was less about parts and more about supporting from underneath—these different moments we wanted to make bigger or smaller. It became clear very early in the process it was not going to be about reconfiguring these things into songs, but trying to use the idea of a song to make the original spirit of these things legible."

A constant pitfall of the production process is the distance that can open up between the spark of an original, often improvised idea, and a labored production process which loses the spark's essence along the way. Throughout White Roses, My God there's a strong sense of raw immediacy, as though we're hearing the songs as they were first realized in the moment. Although he professes a deep love for dub and the idea of pliable musical elements, Sparhawk knew that was not the approach this particular project called for.

"I felt pretty strongly, early on, there was something there," Sparhawk explains, "and it had very much to do with those tools, and the fact I was being spontaneous and honoring what was coming out. Instead of going, 'Okay, that was cool, let's get a better beat,' it was very much about honoring that moment when something comes out of you. Some things came out early on that really surprised me, and I felt like if I go back to try to duplicate this, it's just going to take distance away from this moment that's really powerful."

As well as preserving the intention and shape of the drum patterns and synth tones in their truest form, it's noticeable how immediate and close the final sound of the record is. When jamming with hardware it's easy to lose the visceral energy of the straight-out-of-the-desk sound in the recording process, and it takes the right post-production approach to bring the vibrancy back into such raw sonic elements. As well as admitting to 'breaking' perceived rules about mixing when they were engineering the album, Harvie credits the mastering as a pivotal part of how directly White Roses, My God hits. 

"For the mastering we worked with an engineer in New York called Heba Kadry," says Harvie. "We came to her with a weird brief saying, 'We really welcome your fingerprints on this, and we want you to push these mixes as hard as you can.' She really rose to it, and there's a special character that emerged from her work on the record."

Now that character manifests on stage. As a lifelong performer, it's natural Sparhawk has looked to take the album on tour, but the drastic change in direction means an entirely new approach. His small band set up includes his son Cyrus on bass and Al Church on drums, but front and center it's Sparhawk putting the guitar to one side, triggering loops and stems from a 1010 Music Blackbox and singing through the C1 pedal. Compared to the atmospheric poise Sparhawk would hold on stage performing in Low, with no guitar in his hands he's had to figure out a new way to present himself and his music.

"As a person very much used to guitar, bass, drums, an almost acoustic approach, it's very different," he says. "I love that approach. That's something I've spent a lot of time with, but being a little more out there with just your own body and a microphone is pretty crazy. It's a real big jump…"

"You're definitely giving it, though," argues Harvie. Watching footage of an early performance of new tracks such as 'Get Still' and 'I Made This Beat', it's clear to see Sparhawk is leaning into his role as one man with a microphone, and he's projecting the joy in the music as he does it.

"Yeah, I'm trying," he modestly shrugs. "I see why an ageing artist might be a little bit more desperate about holding on to the tools they've always used, but exciting things happen when you take some chances."

It's an inspirational attitude for any artist, let alone one with the sizable legacy Sparhawk has, but his musicality has never rested in one mode for too long.

"Inadvertently," he adds with a wry smile, "I've actually really been enjoying playing the guitar lately."

Follow Alan Sparhawk on his website

Text and interview: Oli Warwick