Grief can sometimes make you retreat. Familiar comforts can be appealing when the massive weight of it presses down and feels like it will never relent. But what if you’re an artist, needing to express yourself at this particular time in your life, and the ways you are used to doing so are inaccessible reminders of that same anguish? Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker had a life together for decades, and a creative life together as Low for most of that time. After Parker died in 2022, there is simply no option for Sparhawk (who has long been upfront about how he relied on Parker’s ear and sensibility in their work together) to work in the way he was used to. As he’s said in an interview, “I’m trying to use my voice, but I don’t want to hear my voice, so I needed to find another voice.” If the superlative final few Low albums were in part accounts of the duo forging a new vocabulary, White Roses, My God sees Sparhawk trying to do so once again under the most wrenching conditions.
Even though the music here can on first contact seem like a radical break from Sparhawk’s past work, it stems from the domestic and close at hand. Sparhawk has shared that the main tool used to create the vocals here is a TC-Helicon Voicetone C1 pitch correction pedal, one of the devices they got for their kids to play around with. (Yes, the well-known AutoTune software does pitch correction. No, the music here was not made using AutoTune except insofar as the name of the software has become a generic stand-in for pitch correction.) At times he creaks or squawks, mutters or gibbers. Finding several new alien tones to express himself in, Sparhawk also found songs streaming out of his consciousness. The result isn’t completely a one-man show; kids Hollis and Cyrus contributed backing vocals and bass respectively, and Sparhawk co-produced with Nat Harvie. But the result does feel as much like the unfiltered expression of one human being as any solo acoustic singer-songwriter record does.
The synths and drum machines Sparhawk employs often feel deceptively bouncy and bright in tone, although the minute-long lament “Heaven” clearly indicates that if Sparhawk had wanted to aim for the tear ducts throughout these 35 minutes, he could have. Even so, those pieces are assembled in ways that can be foreboding and harsh. Some tracks, like the ebulliently bubbling “I Made This Beat,” lock purely into the joy of creating (in this case partly by repeating the title to the point of pure texture), but most remain gnomically private. The clattering slide that opens “Can U Hear” builds to an almost slow-motion darkwave climax with squalling vocals bouncing around over goth-y synth pads. “Station” feels like gentle synth-pop periodically subsumed by a drone that rises up from beneath it. “Brother” blends in a steady, sparse guitar part from Sparhawk until the whole track lurches in sympathy with his wails.
The result is a record is suffused with grief without ever drowning in it (or, for the most part, addressing it directly in the lyrics even when you can parse them out). White Roses, My God is probably best summed up by “Feel Something”’s arc from pleading “can you feel something here?” to affirming “I think I feel something here” as warmly rounded tones and occasionally gnashing drum programming cycle away. Long term fans wanting to hear more of the Sparhawk they’re used to probably don’t have long to wait; live, he’s been playing one set of this material and another of more conventional, angry/grieving songs with ‘clean’ vocals, and he’s been working on an album with Duluth band Trampled by Turtles backing him. But none of that should overshadow just what a rare and precious thing this is, the sound of a man fighting his way through the stasis of mourning with whatever voice he can find, in whatever forms it finds him.
Learning more and more about pitch correction, auto tune, melodyne, and miming/lip syncing from Fil from Wings of Pegasus. His Youtube channel is well worth watching. It is hard to find any recording artist who doesn't use at least pitch correction. This and auto tune are industry standards now, whether artists like it or not. Even on those talent shows! Whether a shock or not, huge artists like T. Swift mime large portions of live shows. We push and push for perfection in vocals and criticize any normal human blip in performance and the industry response is to create-out the diversity. We are all going to sound like computer-generated voices and midi music in no time. Emotions and style are produced by pitch deviations. Fil's analysis of Mick Hucknall singing Stars is brilliant. What sounds pleasant to the ears is being slightly sharp or flat. On a personal level, I am taking vocal lessons from an opera singer and it's fascinating. I am not a musical genius, nor do I have aspirations of changing careers, but so interesting to learn!
That’s amazing! Kudos to you.
There was controversy about 15 years ago or so, when SACD’s became more popular and very high fidelity recordings could be played back by the audiophile consumer. Mainly the controversy was in the classical world on whether pitch correction took away the performer’s virtuosity. If one could correct for pitch, couldn’t you also correct for a scratch, or poor vibrato, or shortened duration?
The problem was that classical pieces are recorded in one take, and often the take is 20-30 minutes long, or longer. You can’t ask an orchestra to play a piece 20 times because of a pitch mistake; there’s not enough studio time. It’s even more stark with solo or chamber music recordings. Old recordings will show variations in duration, pitch, crescendo, rubato etc. and it’s all part of history. That’s the beauty of it. That’s how you can hear different recordings of the same classical music piece and identify the performer (and often the room they recorded in).
So it was tacitly understood that pitch correction was going to be used, but it was never to be a crutch. Classical musicians would never, ever use a backing track in performance. This is what auditions are all about, what performance is about, not the visuals but the audio.
Pop music is an entirely different beast where vocal distortions are very common, even as an effect. The instrumental tracks are almost always recorded separately from voice nowadays. A lot of effects are added in engineering and post-production, so we get usually a very autotuned product with incredibly precise tempi (probably only F1 drivers and classical musicians have that kind of time sensitivity lol).
Fil from Wings of Pegasus is really good! Worth watching!
It's been hard recording my vocals without using pitch correction but I know it will be worth it! I am getting close to completing my newest song and music video! I can't wait for you all to see and hear it!
Tired of vocal takes that just aren’t quite there? chakamusic.com is your secret weapon. Perfect your pitch, smooth out inconsistencies, and create professional-sounding vocals every time
I think I’ve been watching too many Wings of Pegasus YouTube videos because I just caught myself trying to imagine my cat’s meows with pitch correction.
Yesterday I searched ‘[specific current pop star] “pitch correction”’ and got zero hits. So I searched ‘[specific current pop star] “autotune”’ and got one hit (well, three hits of the same review posted in three places).
…is it truly the case that no one on the searchable internet is discussing, in technical or weirdly judgmental ways, whether a popular album released a few months ago was produced with pitch correction or autotune? Or is search even worse than I thought?
