Every Song I Love — 10. Low : Fly
Every Song I Love is a series where I try to write about every song that I love, or die trying. Sometimes I’ll explain why I love them, sometimes I’ll tell the stories behind how I fell in love with them, sometimes I’ll do both. Most importantly, I hope you love them too.
It’s not often in your life that your favourite singer dies, maybe once, maybe never at all. There are just two times I’ve experienced it. The first was thirty years ago when Kurt Cobain died, and the second time barely eighteen months ago, when we lost Mimi Parker of Low.
It’s only in recent years that I’d begun to think of her as my favourite singer, even though I had been a fan of Low for a long time. I first heard one of their songs on the John Peel show back in the 1990s, and mentally filed them away as a band I should try to listen to at some point. I then failed to do so for a number of years. Improbably, it was a party that bought Low back into my life. I was chatting to a girl who I had a bit of a crush on, and she happened to mention she liked the band. I feigned more interest and knowledge than I truly had. I wasn’t the best at making conversation at that time, but music was a way I hoped I could make a connection.
The crush was unrequited, but the next time we met she handed me a cassette tape with Low’s albums ‘Things We Lost In The Fire’ on one side and ‘Secret Name’ on the other, keen at least to share her love of this band with me. It would be an exaggeration to say this moment changed my life, but I listened to that tape repeatedly, and Low became one of my very favourite bands. ‘Laser Beam’ was the song that I loved the most, an especially minimal song from a band famed for being so. Almost nothing but Mimi’s stunning voice, Low distilled to their essence.
I was lucky enough to see the band live at the Union Chapel in London later that same year, and I’ve never heard a crowd so silent as when they performed that song, every single soul in the building lost in the beauty of the moment. One of the greatest shows, or indeed experiences, of my life.
I bought every Low album from that point on, and was never disappointed, although Things We Lost In The Fire remained my favourite. I drifted away from the band a little in the early 2010s, partly because C’Mon and The Invisible Way were not my absolute favourites from their catalogue (although still great records by most band’s standards). Mainly though it was because I didn’t have so much time on my hands. By the time 2015’s Ones and Sixes came around I had a wife and a toddler and a serious job, and didn’t have the time to listen to as much new music, and the album almost entirely passed me by.
I never forgot about Low, but they were not close to the forefront of my mind, until one day in June 2018 when they dropped a triptych of songs from their new album, Quorum/Dancing & Blood/Fly. This was unlike anything they had released before. The tracks were wildly experimental, full of distortion and electronics, the songs bleeding into each other, but still recognisably themselves.
It’s a cliche to describe a record as stunning, but this really was. And no moment more so than when Mimi’s vocals drop in on ‘Fly’. In all my years of listening, her voice had never sounded more beautiful than when emerging from this strange new world that Low had created, contrasting and complementing it simultaneously. I can compare it to nothing other than pure sunlight breaking through a stormy sky. I listened to these three songs again and again, especially Fly, awaiting the Double Negative album. When the album came out, it was widely acclaimed as their finest (which 25 years into the band’s existence is quite a feat), and Fly was the highlight.
I spent the next couple of years revisiting their back catalogue, to find my love for them had grown in my absence, finding new delights in every corner, a greater appreciation for songs and albums I had unfairly neglected. When the follow up to Double Negative came out in 2021, it was not quite as bold a leap forward, but an equally good record. I try to avoid rankings, but I came to think of Low as my favourite current band, and Mimi as my favourite singer. I had tickets to see them at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds in November 2022, and I’m not sure I had ever looked forward to a gig so much.
Gradually though, news started to come out that Mimi was seriously ill, and shows started to be postponed. We held out hope that she would start playing live again, but as more shows were cancelled, and the news became progressively worse, the only hope we had was that she would survive. It was not be. We lost Mimi Parker to ovarian cancer on November 5th 2022. My favourite singer had died, again.
Back when Kurt Cobain died, I was a very different person, a teenage boy filled with rage and confusion, and my response to his death was anger. Anger at the world, anger at the media that had harangued him, anger at those who didn’t feel his death as strongly as I did. It was not a particularly constructive reaction, but I didn’t know how to deal with my feelings then. Especially grief, which I had been fortunate enough to avoid in my young life.
When Mimi Parker died, I experienced it very differently. The overwhelming feeling was sadness. Sadness for her family and friends, and most especially her husband and bandmate Alan, and their children. When Kurt Cobain died, if I am being brutally honest with myself, I didn’t really care about his friends and family, I cared about myself, a self-obsessed adolescent. I cared about them on some abstract level of course, but didn’t really feel it deeply. By the time Mimi died, I had lost friends, I had lost family. Sudden unexpected deaths, as well as those that had been a long time coming. I had experienced grief enough to truly feel for those going through it now.
This didn’t stop me missing her though, if it’s possible to miss someone you never knew. We never truly know the musicians whose work we love, but we especially didn’t know Mimi. She stayed out of the limelight, taking the backseat in interviews, letting Alan run the band’s Twitter account. She really only existed to me as that stunning voice.
It’s that voice I think of when I think of her, and the song that I think of the most is Fly, and those words
“Leave my weary bones and fly”
I’m not a religious person, although Mimi was. I don’t believe there is anything after this life for us, but I hope very much I am wrong. I hope somehow, somewhere that Mimi lives on, that she was able to leave her weary bones and fly. If not, at least her voice and her music keeps her alive.
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Originally published at http://markjwray.com on May 20, 2024.
