Mimi Parker had been dead for exactly three weeks the first time that her widower, Alan Sparhawk, stepped back on a stage. Trampled by Turtles—a nominal bluegrass band whose music has long overflowed the genre’s oft-narrow container—had released its 10th album, Alpenglow, during Parker’s final days in late 2022. So the band invited Sparhawk, a hometown inspiration who had become their champion and friend, to drive the two hours south from Duluth to Minneapolis to join them onstage at a record-release show, as he and Parker had done so many times.
In a blue haze, the band stood stoically to Sparhawk’s side while he strummed the first chords of Low’s “When I Go Deaf,” a hymn about finding grim silver linings amid the impossible ruins of oblivion. As they roared together into the song’s second half, Sparhawk repeatedly bent so far over his electric guitar that his blonde curls seemed nearly to sweep the floor, as if his body were about to break at the waist. And then, each time, the sound around him seemed to pull him back from that brink, to force him upright again. When it was over, he hugged founder Dave Simonett for a long time, as if grateful for the chance to be anywhere at all.
Thirteen months later, and another hour south in Minnesota, Trampled by Turtles held that same space for Sparhawk. They’d long talked about recording together, and soon after Sparhawk jumped on their bus as an unannounced guest during a summer 2023 tour alongside Willie Nelson, he had some songs that needed a home. During two days amid the wintry isolation of the fabled Pachyderm Studios, where the Turtles had just finished an EP of their own, Sparhawk led the band through nine songs—three he’d started with Parker but never finished, two he’d just recorded for a solo album, and four that portrayed his struggles and reckonings with life since Parker’s death. Where he had warped his voice beyond recognition on White Roses, My God, as if circuitry were enough to rewire grief itself, he sang these songs unadorned, the band’s steadfast harmonies growing like branches from his oaken tone. As improbable as it may seem, With Trampled by Turtles—a raw snapshot of perfectly articulated hurt, and the first steps of navigating it for the rest of one’s life—is one of the most compelling records of Sparhawk’s career.
The narrative start of these nine numbers actually arrives at the record’s middle, the centerpiece called “Screaming Song.” It is, as the stages of grief go, a retroactive document of Sparhawk’s fit of shock when Parker died of ovarian cancer. “When you flew out the window and into the sunset, I thought I would never stop screaming,” he sings of that moment, a faint lilt to his burly voice. Over the next two minutes, he repeatedly settles back into that primal sensation as he remembers catching his breath after each bout of paroxysms. “I’m trying to be cool here,” he offers finally, “but, inside, I’m screaming this song.” The band picks up the pace and volume, like a horse that’s broken its reins. Ryan Young’s fiddle starts to howl, as if doing Sparhawk the favor of telling everyone else exactly how fucked up he feels inside while letting the singer off the hook. For two decades, Trampled by Turtles have mostly been a very good string band best suited for summer festivals and wide-eyed singalongs; this performance gets to the knotty viscera of their old-time antecedents.
Denial and bargaining coil in “Don’t Take Your Light,” a piece for anyone who has ever felt like they are only whole in the presence of someone else, someone better. As Sparhawk repeats the title at the start, the Turtles join him like a Greek chorus, their cascading harmonies reinforcing the severity of this missing piece. “I can be grateful but be empty,” Sparhawk deadpans between refrains. “I can feel nothing/I feel everything.” This is what it’s like to be glad to be alive but resentful to know that life may never mean what it once did, to be resentful of the future when it still flutters in the wind. “Don’t Take Your Light” is the longest song here, most of its time taken by repetition and tense instrumental passages that bend into Möbius strips; its five minutes suggest a drifting endlessness, of moving ahead but never again moving forward.
Something akin to acceptance begins to emerge, though, particularly in that triptych of songs Sparhawk started with Parker. He once told me about how much administrative and logistical work she’d quietly done to prepare him for his life after her death, and this material suggests that sort of preemptive planning, too, as though she were offering him an avenue toward what’s next. “Too High” lands like a joke shared between lovers who accept and goad one another despite obvious faults; the Turtles play it with the smile and wink of understanding old friends, as if conjuring the spirit of the wry Parker. And they dance alongside him during “Princess Road Surgery,” a half-sardonic, half-sincere number about how little we can actually accomplish given the limiting factors of life, death, and the world. It feels like a shrug and a hug, shared by seven people trying to muddle through somehow, together.
The record’s moment of transcendence, or at least its truest glimpse of shared relief, arrives with “Not Broken,” not only one of those songs Sparhawk and Parker started together but also the first real star turn of their daughter, Hollis. She was crucial to Low’s story for more than two decades, giggling as an infant on Things We Lost in the Fire, touring with the band as a toddler, and occasionally appearing on their subsequent records. But after her father sings of presiding confusion and disappointment in the first verse, she cooly takes the chorus, her tone differentiated from her late mother’s only by the thinness and smoothness of youth. “It’s not broken,” she sings, her dad joining her on the last iteration, as though they’re absolving each other of everything they’ve endured together. It is a moment that both hits and holds the heart; Trampled by Turtles simply highlight it with gentle and bright picking, like the gold of some antique picture frame.
There will be those who rib Sparhawk for his seemingly pat turn toward A Prairie Home Companion territory here, just as there were those who reductively lampooned his obsession with dismantling the sound of himself on White Roses, My God. What, I wonder, do they know about grief, either at large or his in particular? Sparhawk spent a quarter-century shaping one of indie rock’s most singular sounds with the love he plainly says saved his life—then dismantling it with her in order to create, once again, one of indie rock’s most singular sounds. He is learning how to exist and work in a world where that relationship is no longer possible, where that particular light has disappeared. How could he go back to that core? If he seemed to recoil at the sound of his voice on White Roses, My God, he is squaring up to it on these songs, demanding to know where they go from here, now that the musical home he and Parker built no longer exists.
