Dhe Band Low was the product of prayer. Mimi Parker, the drummer of the trio, opened up the booklet Genesis of the band’s history in January on an episode of the Sheroes podcast, in which Carmel Holt interviews female contributors to the music business. It was one of the very few solo interviews Parker had been asked to do in her nearly thirty-year career. Otherwise, as on stage, she was the woman behind Alan Sparhawk, her husband, the guitarist who wrote most of Low’s songs. However, she had previously spoken of the fact that, seen from the outside, a classic division of labor between married couples is productive for the joint work of a band.
Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk met in elementary school in a backwater town in Minnesota and were married in 1990. Parker joined his husband’s church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to please her husband. The newlyweds asked God what to do with their life together, and the answer was the bond. In Church official memory, Joseph Smith’s discovery of the Book of Mormon, as well as the attestation by witnesses to whom Smith showed the golden tablets, serve as evidence of the power of prayer. The Prophet instructed members of his Church to seek instruction from God at every crossroads in life.
Without sheet music in the marching band
Mimi Parker had started playing the drums at school, so her husband was able to suggest that she just keep doing it. As she revealed on the Music Heroes podcast, her choice of playing an instrument in her high school’s marching band was driven by a lack of interest in learning notes. She could beat the snare drum with ease. She confessed that she had always remained lazy – so Parker had not adopted the quasi-Protestant work ethic that allows Mormons of the type of former presidential candidate Mitt Romney to participate in her election when she was converted. The percussion suits her, she said, because she’s “fidgety” by nature.
Lazy and fidgety: With this confession of a difficult child, Parker gave two keywords for the description of her style on the drums. Knocking, rattling and scraping add up to an impression of inertia that finds no rest. Turned the other way around: The restlessness that remains after almost total exhaustion cannot be resolved in progressive recipes. Alan Sparhawk may be the tinkerer and fantasist who conceived Low’s anti-bombastic or meta-bombastic displacement-suspenseful sound, but Mimi Parker laid the groundwork behind the scenes, with the tragic zigzags of her little hand. In the structure of a low song, the opposing principles of architecture and texture, outer and inner form, macrocosm and microcosm are inextricably linked: delay and movement mutually enhance each other.