Alan Sparhawk Gets By With a Little Help From His Friends

With Trampled By Turtles makes one wonder why. The record is deeply moving, often pulsing with powerful forward momentum, driven by Sparhawk’s unadorned voice like a herald calling out that something heavy this way comes. Of course, it arrives—especially in the bruised ecstasy of “Screaming Song” and the mournful “Don’t Take Your Light.”

“Some of the songs are the first things that fell out of me in response to loss and grief,” Sparhawk says over the phone from the Quad Cities, on tour with Circuit des Yeux. “Some of them are pretty pointed, and I really felt the duty to do those songs justice, to honor them for what they were and what they came from. White Roses, My God was literally just my head exploding and me running away from the guitar and from my voice and trying to figure out some way to let this explosion out of my skull, this screaming, you know? And this thing with the Turtles is the first breath.”