Sweet Chariots

Maybe it’s the pleasure of playing music onstage again. Maybe it’s the relief of leaving old demons behind. Or maybe it’s just the time of year: these early spring weeks when sun starts to push aside snow, when birds scramble up the last of the slush piles. The time of year when winter relents — even in Duluth, Minnesota.

Whatever the reason, Alan Sparhawk sounds content. His band, the critically lauded slowcore trio Low, is back on the road. They’re touring behind 2005’s The Great Destroyer — or, rather, they’re finishing the tour that Sparhawk decided to postpone, owing to a variety of mental-health concerns. With the same heart-rending candor and gentle humor that imbue his songs, Sparhawk posted a letter on Low’s official Web site, Chair kickers.com, in May 2005.

“[F]or those of you who cling to details and think information is power,” Sparhawk wrote, “I have been speculated/diagnosed with everything from post-traumatic stress disorder, ADHD, bipolar whatever, suicidal depression/anxiety … to paranoia, laziness, OCD and good old-fashioned two-faced asshole-ness.”

Low’s show in Kansas City takes place nearly a year after Sparhawk first spoke out about his illness, and the hiatus appears to have been rejuvenating. What’s more, Sparhawk feels reconnected with The Great Destroyer, a lush masterpiece that — surprisingly, perhaps, for back-in-the-day Low fans — rocks just as much as it broods.

“I’m kind of looking forward to diving back into those songs,” Sparhawk says. “I remember being very happy with the record and enjoying playing the songs live.”

And if the uptempo bombast on a few Great Destroyer cuts (particularly the album-opening “Monkey”) comes as a surprise to some audience members, so will the fundamental change in the group’s lineup. Sparhawk’s wife, Mimi Parker, still plays the drums and provides her gorgeous, gossamer vocals, but longtime bassist Zak Sally has moved on. He’s been replaced by Matt Livingston, who also plays in Sparhawk’s side project, Retribution Gospel Choir. Sparhawk is understandably circumspect about the conditions surrounding Sally’s departure, but it’s evident that he feels no ill will toward his former bandmate. In fact, he hopes that the relationship with Livingston will be similar to that with Sally — fruitful and inspired.

“It’s going to be a new dynamic,” Sparhawk concedes. “There’s always adjustments. There’s adjustments every night when you come into a room. It’s been fun, the process has been interesting, and it’s really taught me a lot about what I do and what I should do maybe better…. The songwriting [and] the vocal connections have been interesting lately.”

Despite the lineup change, the immutable beauty of Low remains, thanks in large part to the relationship between Sparhawk and Parker. Though Low’s artistic achievement owes much to the couple’s hauntingly perfect harmonizing, the band’s longevity owes everything to Sparhawk’s and Parker’s commitment to each other.

“We live such a normal, sitting-at-home-with-kids, making-supper kind of life,” Sparhawk says. There are Norman Rockwellian elements to the marriage: Parker and Sparhawk met in fourth grade, became sweethearts in high school, and are now the doting parents of a 6-year-old daughter and an almost 2-year-old son. They live in the upper Midwest. They go to church. (Both are Mormons.) There are almost certainly play dates and PTA meetings inked on their calendar.

But it’s this juxtaposition — of home and band life, of being parents and spouses first and musicians second — that makes Low’s music so resonant. In the sweeping “Death of a Salesman,” Sparhawk lays bare the conflict between making music and making a life: They said, ‘Music’s for fools/You should go back to school/The future is prisms and math’/So I did what they said/Now my children are fed/‘Cause they pay me to do what I’m asked. But the bitterness fades with the song’s beautiful closing lines: But the fire came to rest/In your white velvet breast/So somehow I just know that it’s safe.

Even as Sparhawk gets back to the business of the band — there’s the tour, of course, and some new material in the works — he remains a family man first. He has recorded an original kids song, “Be Nice to People with Lice,” for the indie-rock children’s album See You on the Moon. (The record arrives in stores Tuesday, April 4, and also includes tunes by Sufjan Stevens, Mark Kozelek and Great Lake Swimmers, among others.)

Sparhawk’s son and daughter are familiar with their dad’s song about lice — and with everything from the Swans to church music to whatever’s climbing the Billboard Top 40. Six-year-old Hollis Mae “likes the Green Day record,” Sparhawk says, “that ‘I Walk Alone’ song or whatever — good song. Catchy as shit. When they [the kids] request something, when they’re excited about something, it’s usually in the kitchen — it’s usually because they want to do some dancing.”

Sparhawk chuckles over his kids’ musical interests, then adds that he might play “Be Nice to People with Lice” at upcoming Low shows. This is clearly a man who is having fun with music again, who can look forward and backward with equal ease.

“Recently we’ve been playing some songs we haven’t played for a long time,” Sparhawk says. “It’s just so funny how different my perspective is … everybody thinks they get wiser and wiser as time goes by. But I’m perfectly happy looking back.”

And with that retrospection comes the knowledge that things are much better now than they were last spring. “It’s been a funky year,” Sparhawk says, “with Zak leaving and my own shenanigans and whatnot.”

Sparhawk, in his charming, self-deprecating way, is cautiously optimistic. He says he doesn’t know what shape the next Low album will take, but he, Parker and Livingston have been trying out different things. “Right now, we need to go play some shows and do the best we can and see what our kids think,” Sparhawk says. “Life is moving along. I think the future right now looks hopeful.”

This sense of hope, tempered with reality, permeates The Great Destroyer and puts a cheerful lilt in Sparhawk’s voice. These days — with a healthy young family and the support of thousands of fans — the Low frontman is leaving last year’s darkness behind. Winter, it seems, is finally over.

Additional reporting by Annie Zaleski.