Low‘s 2005 LP The Great Destroyer was their pivotal “Loud” album, the one wherein they finally cranked up their amplifiers, hit the distortion pedals, and unleashed the violence that had been lurking beneath their icy minimalism all along; it was the sound of the torrent breaking through the glacier. But that is not to say that Low had abandoned their minimalism, no: in fact, the penultimate track “Death of a Salesman” might just be their most haunting quiet song of all.

Over the most basic of guitar chords, Alan Sparhawk tells the tale–all the more devastating in its brevity and simplicity–of a young man who writes some songs he “could sing without shame,” but is discouraged by his friends who all tell him the same thing: “music’s for fools/you should go back to school/the future is prisms and math.” (For the longest time, I misheard that lyrics as “prisons and math”; some days I’m still not sure I misheard it). So he “did what they said/now my children are fed/cause they pay me to do what I’m asked” (another victim, in the words of John Prine, of the Great Compromise). Now much older, he has long since forgotten all his songs, “the words now are wrong/and I burned my guitar in a rage.” But then curiously, the song takes a subtle left-turn in the last verse, when he declares cryptically, “But the fire came to rest/On your white velvet breast/So somehow I just know that it’s safe.”

The irony of course is that Alan Sparhawk in real life did not follow the trajectory of this song; he was the one who instead chose to keep on playing those songs he “could sing without shame,” to refuse to be a victim of the Great Compromise, to not live Thoreau’s proverbial “life of quiet desperation” and regret. And what’s more, his children were still fed! And his wife still made him feel safe! And if he’s ever burned his guitar, it was likely only in a Jimi Hendrix homage, not out of a profound rage born of frustration. In a perverse sort of way, this song was perhaps comforting for Sparhawk, reassuring him of the hard path he did choose (even if the song is still achingly devastating to those of us who didn’t, or couldn’t).

Yet Sparhawk also seems aware that regret is impossible to avoid even if you do follow your dreams, which fact he articulated just five years later on 2, the 2010 album by his then-side-project Retribution Gospel Choir. The penultimate track there is the extended, ecstatic Rock jam “Electric Guitar,” about, well, someone who “traded it all” for “An electric guitar,” cause “Nobody plays like you”:

This song is very much flip side of the coin from “Death of a Salesman,” where in this case, his pain comes not from never pursuing his musical dreams, but from the fact that pursuing his musical dreams had ultimately led him nowhere–to drive nothing but a “dirty old car,” to only getting gigs “Closin’ the bars”–with the ever repeated yet unanswerable question echoing over the feedback, “What are you going to do?” Indeed, what else can he do?

Although here again, the irony is that Alan Sparhawk in real life didn’t have to choose between either of these despairing visions: though he certainly never became a superstar, his various bands still did much better than merely “Closin’ the bars” in a “dirty old car”, nor did he have to give up much at all (definitely not his wife and family) to make an honest living doing it.

Now, most musicians have not been nearly so lucky as to attain even Low’s modest success, but that is not the point here: what both these songs express together is the fact that regret is impossible to avoid either way, no matter which path one might choose.

(This, by the way, is the entire point of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken“–“I shall be saying this with a sigh, ages and ages hence” he writes, in the sigh of wistful regret. Remember that he took the other path as “as just as fair,” that he actually wanted to try it later–“I kept the first for another day!”–but “knowing how way leads on to way/I doubted if I should ever come back.” Though he is apparently content to have taken the road less traveled, he is still frustrated that he couldn’t have tried both).

Because sometimes the hardest choices you will make in life are not between a good choice or a bad (Heavens, I should hope those are the easy ones!), but between two good options that will leave you with regret over the one you didn’t choose, either way. Will you become a doctor or a lawyer, an artist or an engineer, a teacher or a trader–or something else entirely? Will you live in the city or the suburbs, the mountains or the deserts, the east coast or the west, state-side or abroad? Will you ask out this person or their roommate, pursue this crush or different one, marry this person or another–or neither? Overall, just what will you do with your severely limited time on this earth–and what, of necessity, will you therefore not be able to do instead?

And what’s especially frustrating is that these sorts of impossible choices are not the exceptions in life, but the rule.

I knew a woman in grad school, who’d worked as a successful accountant for 25 years, until she got divorced, and so in a late-midlife-crisis decided to retire and go back to grad school to get the PhD in English she’d wanted all along; that is, she finally got to try the other path! But it had taken her a quarter century to get back to it (“knowing how way leads on to way”), and there would not be a third.

I also knew a guy in high school who decided not to pursue med school after college like he’d intended, but instead ran off to Alaska to become an outdoors man, living off the land. We all found it kinda impossibly romantic–right up until he went canoeing one day, and they later found his canoe but not his body. He was only 26. There would not even be a second path for him.

And when I turned 26 myself, I suddenly realized that when my mother was my age, she was already middle-aged and didn’t know it yet. (And 26 is now officially awhile ago for me).

It’s in these middle-aged moments when I reflect back on my life of regret–when I realize it would’ve been impossible for it to be otherwise, even if I had chosen differently–that I get an inkling for the genius of the Atonement. Remember that per Alma 7:12, the Atonement not only cleanses us of our sins, but of our pains and sorrows, too–and as Thomas S. Monson was keen on reminding us (his ever-quoted “For all sad words of tongue and pen/the saddest are these, it might have been”), there is no pain keener than regret–and more cruelly, no pain more impossible to avoid.

Something infinite and eternal, therefore, is necessary to cover the fact that, no matter whether we compromised on our dreams or followed them through, that we would all, without exception, be filled with pain and regret, one way or the other. Indeed, only something infinite and eternal could cover all the collected infinite regret of the human race (let alone our sins as well). This is the Atonement I suspect Alan Sparhawk intuited the need for when he composed these two complimentary songs. It’s what I’m reminded of every time I listen to either of them.