Alan Sparhawk finally gave me an excuse to discuss “JCMF.”
To recap for the umpteenth time: after his wife and bandmate Mimi Parker tragically died of ovarian cancer in the Fall of 2022, Alan Sparhawk wisely dissolved Low–that most Mormon of Indie bands (and my most fanboyish of obsessions)–and then of necessity embarked on a solo career to pay the bills, where he has thus far let his muse run absolutely buck wild. I mean, he recorded some straight-up old-school Funk singles, of all things, with his kids in 2023; then dropped the deeply polarizing Electronica album White Roses, My God in 2024; followed by the much more crowd-pleasing Bluegrass album With Trampled by Turtles in 2025. Musically, he’s been all over the map.
Yet though each of these releases differed radically in genre, when he performed live, Sparhawk still sang tracks from all three projects together, in the same set, as though there were no stylistic differences between them whatsoever. I had tracked down a live Bootleg of a Sparhawk show from early-’24, where sure enough, he was whipping out the vocoder and synthesizer as comfortably as he did the electric guitar and effects-pedal, laying down the funk while also road-testing the songs that would end up on both his solo LPs together.
All except for “JCMF.”
The exclusion of “JCMF” from both of his post-Low solo albums struck me as curious, because 1) concert reviewers were singling it out as a set highlight as early as ’23; and 2) because it seemed to pair so naturally with “Screaming Song,” perhaps the stand-out track from With Trampled by Turtles, and his plainest expression of grief after his wife’s passing. By all available evidence, the two tunes were originally intended to be performed together, in quick succession, as shown by both the above-linked bootleg, and by this other live YouTube clip I found online.
Yet though I fully understood why neither track would’ve meshed well White Roses, My God, it felt slightly odder that “JCMF” didn’t make the cut onto With Trampled by Turtles. (The latter LP is only 32 minutes long, there was definitely room to squeeze on one more track.)
Yes, the righteously angry “JCMF” seems more custom built for a distortion pedal than a Bluegrass band, but then so did “Screaming Song,” and Trampled by Turtles was still able to solve that one; seriously, they could’ve at a bare minimum recorded a much more subdued arrangement of the track, which Sparhawk had already shown a willingness to try out in that same YouTube clip up above.
Maybe they tried several different takes and it just never quite gelled; maybe the political anger of “JCMF” simply didn’t synch up with the more personal tone of grief and mourning that With Trampled by Turtles was going for; or maybe Sparhawk’s Mormon upbringing at last re-exerted itself and he got cold feet last second about putting that much profanity on one record, who knows. In any case, “JCMF”—a centerpiece of Sparhawk’s post-Low live sets—seemed doomed to disappear into obscurity.
Him finally releasing the track as a single on his Bandcamp page (with B-side “No More Darkness“) does not exactly ensure it’s preservation for posterity either, but it is heartening at least to hear that Sparhawk has an interest in doing better by this track as well. I’d made asides in both my reviews of his last two albums that I wish Sparhawk had given me more a chance to discuss this track in depth, and I will take these crumbs from his table. (At a bare minimum, I’m finally able to insert it after “Screaming Song” in my playlist of post-Low Sparhawk releases.)
“JCMF” is short for “Jesus Christ Mother Fucker,” and is a prophetic burst of Punk rock provocation against the wickedness of this world. (If he’d recorded it 15 or 20 years earlier, it could’ve easily made a Retribution Gospel Choir cut.) As we’ve quoted many times before, Joseph Smith once declared, “I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm yet deals justice to his neighbors and mercifully deals his substance to the poor, than the long, smooth-faced hypocrite”, and Alan Sparhawk takes the Prophet of the Restoration at his word.
Joseph Smith was also once asked of a reporter if he thought all non-Mormons were going to hell, to which the Prophet shot back, “Yes, and so will a great deal of Mormons, if they do not repent”, and Sparhawk shares his sentiments exactly—especially in our present moment, when 60% of all U.S. Mormons have voted for a confirmed child rapist three straight election cycles in a row now. Christ Himself had declared that whosoever shall offend one of these little ones, it were better that a millstone be tied around his neck and he be drowned in the depths of the sea; and Sparhawk—who, according to every personal anecdote I’ve heard about the man, positively adores small children and loves being around them—is equally disinterested in mincing words.
Hence when Sparhawk belts out, “When Jesus comes back/He’s gonna gather all the children around,” you need to understand that he is assuredly not invoking some pastoral Primary scene of adorable little children in their Sunday best sitting beatifically on the grass around a white-robed Savior while the birds chirp in the trees or what have you, but of a wrathful deity in red gathering together these “little ones” under his divine protection so that he might all the more righteously rain down vengeance and violence upon all those who would violate children. In our era of pedophile Epstein clients left unpunished because of their money, all while helpless children everywhere are kidnapped by ICE agents and thrown into animal cages, are shot in the head in Gaza, and blown up by American bombs in Iran, one gets a sense of just how ferociously Sparhawk means it when he repeatedly spits out, “When Jesus comes back/All you Mother Fuckers are gonna pay.”
El-P of Run The Jewels once rhymed against those who “talk clean and bomb hospitals/so I speak with the foulest mouth possible”; Sparhawk, too, practically dares any of his fellow Latter-day Saints who find his crass language offensive to explain why they don’t find rape and war even more offensive (“When Jesus comes/there’ll be no more guns or war” he also belts out), of why it is that they can strain at a gnat yet swallow a camel. Like John the Baptist and Christ Himself, he feels compelled to call us all a generation of vipers.
This is an important point to emphasize, because though Low lyrics were often vague and cryptic—and though anyone who ever saw Low live can testify that Sparhawk has a very under-appreciated sense of humor—one thing that Sparhawk is emphatically not is sarcastic or ironic. He really does seem to mean every word he says, especially on those rare occasions (like here on “JCMF”) when he gets explicit for a change.
Hence he really does seem to mean every word when he belts out, “When Jesus comes/There’ll be no more rich or poor.” As this site has cited ad infinitum and ad nauseum before, per Acts 2:44-45, 4 Nephi 1:3, Jacob 2:17-19, Mosiah 4:16-20, D&C 42:30-39, D&C 49:20, and many, many more, the only economic system acceptable before the Almighty is one where there is “neither rich nor poor” but we “have all things common.” Christ made no apology for teaching this doctrine when he told the rich young man to sell all that he has and give it to the poor, nor did Joseph Smith when he sought to establish the United Order in Ohio and Missouri, nor Brigham Young when he tried it again in Utah territory—nor does Alan Sparhawk when he sings the same right now. And since the Epstein class who violate children are also often the same ones who violate the poor, Sparhawk has no truck with grouping them together with those “Mother Fuckers” whom Jesus at the Second Coming is gonna make pay—which Sparhawk appears to genuinely look forward to.
Indeed, while some might assume that this track represents a final repudiation of Sparhawk’s LDS upbringing, I instead find it deeply reassuring that his faith is still strong, at least where it matters most. I’d wondered, I’ll admit: although it is absolutely none of my business and I cringe to confess that I’d let myself fixate on it in the first place, I still couldn’t help but observe that, for a solid half-decade now, Alan Sparhawk has very noticeably not been wearing any sort of undergarment in promo shots–not in the ones for Low’s final album Hey What in ‘21, nor on the album cover for White Roses, My God in ‘24, nor in the first video for With Trampled By Turtles in ‘25–he has been conspicuously wearing farmers overalls that make obvious he isn’t wearing any sort of undershirt at all.
Although I have thankfully long ceased to equate garment-wearing with personal righteousness, well, as I’d once mentioned in an old essay on Joshua James, I am keenly aware that they remain a fairly reliable indicator within our faith of one’s relationship with our most sacred ordinances. It is, again, absolutely none of my business, nor is it yours. (Maybe he has a skin condition, who friggin cares.) But if he no longer wears his covenants on his skin, he clearly still wears them on his heart, perhaps even in spite of himself: he obviously yearns still for the Law of Consecration in its fullness—despite all our modern attempts to water it down to just mean “serve in a calling and pay your tithing”—wherein we promise at the pinnacle of the Temple Endowment ceremony to live the United Order of neither rich nor poor among us; he just as sincerely looks forward to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (we are after all the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as Russel M. Nelson spent his entire presidency trying to drill into our heads); and if he’s grown out his hair in a manner that would never pass BYU honor code, well, like John the Baptist in the desert or Enoch in the wilderness or Elijah the Tishbite in God’s Holy Temple or Christ on the Mount, “a wild man hath come among us!” Sparhawk is in good company.
It may here be worth noting, too, that after the “JCMF” single was released in February of ‘26, Sparhawk dropped another new track in the Summer (also in a completely different genre), a drone piece recorded for something called Across the Horizon Volume 2 by Northern Spy Records, entitled “Temple Towers”:
As Sparhawk briefly explains it in the Bandcamp notes, “I’m trying to push my voice into new territory lately. Some things are found on the edge of the extremes, other discoveries are more subtle and close to the bone. This piece came from using guitar and effects underneath to color and highlight a static vocal tone. It seems to both yearn for and expand a vision I’ve had for a few years now of a tall temple and the feeling of being at its core, looking up through layers of light and ether.”
These feel like the words of one who has not repudiated the Temple, but still feels after it (Low’s most iconic album is called Secret Name, recall); the Temple, after all, is where he was sealed to his wife. Perhaps not incidentally, despite all of his claims to be “trying to push my voice into new territory lately”, this track is the one that sounds the most like Low.
The Ambient elements especially are reminiscent of their final, wild trilogy of albums—Ones and Sixes (2015), Double Negative (2018), and Hey What (2021)—that they’d recorded with producer BJ Burton before Mimi’s passing, not to mention Drums and Guns in 2007. The Drone elements, for that matter, harken back even further, to Low’s “Little Drummer Boy” cover from their classic 1999 Christmas EP, as well as their epic drone jam “Do You Know How to Waltz?” from their 1996 breakthrough album The Curtain Hits The Cast (and which they were still performing as late as 2013 in protest of U.S. drone warfare).
A Drone and Ambient track like “Temple Towers,” then, is the first track he’s recorded since his wife’s passing that legitimately sounds somewhat like Low; and call it mere armchair psychoanalysis if you want and you’d probably be right, but I still can’t help but speculate that it’s no coincidence that the first recording he’s dropped since his wife passed to sound like the sort of music he made with his wife, is named for the building where he and his wife were married for time and eternity. It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the most peaceful and calming piece of music he’s released in at least a decade, too. Sparhawk may be rightfully outraged by the wickedness and injustice of this fallen world like the prophets of old, but that’s in part, I suspect, because he intuits there is a much, much better world awaiting us, as represented by the Temple, if we repent.
I can’t help but also note that he describes the Temple in this track as a “vision,” like Joseph Smith in the grove, or Lehi and the Tree of Life. Behold, he has dreamed a dream, or seen a vision. It is a vision we all must obtain for ourselves, if we are to be prepared at all for when Jesus comes again.