Recently I discussed how no two people mourn the same way, and boy has Alan Sparhawk been proving me right. The former Low frontman just this week released the lead single for his forthcoming solo album White Roses, My God, his first full-length since his wife Mimi Parker passed way in 2022. The song is a “near-industrial” synth-Pop track called “Can U Hear”, and boy is there a lot to unpack here.

As one can see from the video, Sparhawk (in what is ostensibly his first statement as a stand-alone artist, mind you) has intentionally obscured his own voice via Auto-Tune and his own face via digital pixelation. This is an interesting choice, because Sparhawk’s only other solo offering to date (incredibly) has been 2006’s Solo Guitar, which was strictly an ambient noise-rock instrumental. I’m tempted to say that Solo Guitar almost doesn’t even count as a Sparhawk solo album, since it never once featured his own voice and face–save that the lead single off his second solo album doesn’t feature his voice and face either! Though separated by 18 years, his two solo albums weirdly work in the same register, of effacing Sparhawk from his own music entirely. Sparhawk evidently prefers to express himself solely within the context of a band (e.g. Low, Black-Eyed Snakes, Retribution Gospel Choir, Murder of Crows, Damien, Swans, etc.), such that being stripped of a band paradoxically also strips him of himself.

Which is perhaps the point: TS Eliot once argued that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”^[1]From Eliot’s influential 1919 essay ”Tradition and the Individual Talent” Sparhawk, too, is by all appearances seeking to escape his personality and emotions, especially in the aftermath of his profoundest grief.

It has been an open and anxious question among fans as to how Sparhawk was going to handle Parker’s passing, you see. Low had almost broken up once before, clear back in 2005 during the Great Destroyer tour, when Sparhawk suffered a psychotic break so severe that he began to seriously think he was the anti-Christ, had to cancel tour dates to seek treatment, and drove their long-suffering bassist Zak Sally to quit for good. The reason why Low still lasted another 17 years and 6 more albums (and 3 more bass players) beyond that breakdown, is because he had a loving spouse there to help re-stabilize him. I too have had to hospitalize a close loved one for psychosis not once but twice, so I can testify from personal experience how important it is to have a loving spouse there to help ground you back to reality.

But now the person who had been grounding Sparhawk for over 30 years is gone. This was likely an Abrahamic trial for him, so the question was real: after suffering the heart-wrenching loss of not only his wife and band-mate and and the mother of his children but also the single most stabilizing influence upon his mental health, just what genre would Sparhawk—that most melancholy of musicians—turn towards to process his profound grief? Slow-core? Drone? Ambient? Hard Rock? Blues? Electronica?

Funk, as it turns out.

I’m not kidding here: in the year immediately following Mimi Parker’s passing (and before he started laying down tracks for White Roses, My God), Sparhawk joined his two oldest children in forming a straight-up Funk group called DERECHO Rhythm Section; they even released a small batch of singles on their bandcamp page. If you go listen to them right now, you will find nothing the least bit ironic or deconstructive or subversive about these tracks: they are by all appearances just straight-ahead, ’70s-throwback Funk. Though fun to listen to, these songs would be considered slight little larks even under normal circumstances; but given his recent grief and loss, they seem almost darkly comic.

Or are they?

Because as Sparhawk has started touring again, it has specifically been DERECHO songs, not White Roses ones, that he has been debuting live. In the following video for example, from a Dutch music festival last Fall, three of the four songs here highlighted are DERECHO tracks you could stream or download right now^[2]and that aren’t even on the track listing for White Roses:

If you watch this video, you will be forced to conclude that Sparhawk is not performing these Funk tunes to distract from or numb himself to his bottomless grief, but to express it. He seems to truly believe in these songs! He did not apparently write them as, say, a bonding activity with his kids after their mother’s death, or even to just have some fun for a change, but because they really do speak to the immense hurt in his soul. Such seems to indicate that Sparhawk finds something genuinely cathartic and healing about Funk music.

Funk, after all, has multiple meanings in English: it is derived from the Latin “fumus,” meaning “smoke”^[3]as also seen in the Spanish verb fumar, “to smoke”. It comes to English via the old French funkier, “to blow smoke upon,” which by the 17th-century came to mean having a musty smell, as though you’d been trapped in the smoke for too long. By the late 20th century, Funk in Great Britain had come informally to mean “a state of great fear or panic”, while in North America the word came to signify “a state of depression”—which you’ll note Low’s music was also renowned for. We will still today say that a depressed person is “in a funk”. In this sense, Sparhawk has always been Funky, before he literalized it with DERECHO Rhythm Section. The fact that Funk is also one of the most joyous, dance-able, and upbeat musical genres of the late-20th century is somewhat ironic.

Or, again, is it? Funk music after all comes to us from African-Americans, the same fine people who gave us Blues, Jazz, Dixieland, Swing, BeBop, Rock ‘n Roll, R&B, Soul, Disco, Hip-Hop, Techno, House, and innumerable other genres; what all these share in common is the fact that their joyousness comes about because of their deep melancholy and mourning, not in spite of it. To make something “Funky,” then, is to take the smoke that has clouded your vision and even gotten in your clothes, and transform it into a party. Like Dixieland a century ago, Funk is an act of defiance, a funeral as celebration. Hence, whether Sparhawk is performing a more straight-forward song of mourning like “Don’t Take Your Light Out of Me“^[4]which also does not feature in the track listing for White Roses or jamming out to “Want It Back”, there is no incongruity, because he’s in a Funk either way—in every sense of the word.

There is in fact strong scriptural backing for this reading: Paul, in 1 Corinthians 13:12, famously says that “we see through a glass darkly” in this life–all is cloudy, as though heaven itself were obscured by the smoke, by the endless funk–“but then face to face.” We can celebrate amidst the Funk because we know that the smoke is just the prelude to the Vision of Heaven, when all will at last be revealed, when things that were hidden “shall be proclaimed upon the housetops”^[5]Luke 12:3, when “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more death”^[6]Revelations 21:4. It is why, perhaps, Alan Sparhawk has been absolutely right to get in a Funk in the aftermath of his greatest grief.

Yet if his first solo single is any indication, Sparhawk is not going to be performing any Funk whatsoever on White Roses, My God, but some species of synth-pop–but then again, synth-pop is also a direct descendant of Funk. If he has obscured both his voice and his face in his first single, perhaps that is another way of saying he has again obscured himself in the smoke, in the endless Funk, “through a glass darkly.” He is still transforming a funeral into a party, and a party into a funeral. Whether that’s the case for the entire album or just the first single remains to be seen when the rest of the record drops in September.