Alan Sparhawk peforms at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on Jan. 20, 2025. Photos: Vanessa Solis.

SAN FRANCISCO — There was an unexpected question-and-answer portion of Alan Sparhawk‘s performance Monday night at Great American Music Hall.

“Do you need any help figuring anything out?” the founding member of Low asked the crowd about halfway through.

After a moment of silence, someone shouted, “What do we do?”

Sparhawk picked up his phone and read a quote from the late film director David Lynch: “‘Don’t fight the darkness. Don’t even worry about the darkness. Turn on the light and the darkness goes,'” Sparhawk said, quoting the director’s 2006 autobiography, “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.”

Alan Sparhawk peforms at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on Jan. 20, 2025.

The concert took place hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as 47th President of the United States. The show was part of Sparhawk’s tour promoting White Roses, My God, the Duluth, Minnesota native’s first solo album since his bandmate and wife, Mimi Parker, died of ovarian cancer in 2022. So it was easy to imagine everyone in the theater that night was trying to cope with some form of darkness or another.

The first half of the show featured songs from Sparhawk’s latest. During these tracks, he bounced around on stage, singing through voice-modulating software that rendered his voice machine-like at times and unnaturally soulful at others. Songs like “I Made This Beat” offered up thudding bass and a combination of live and programmed drumming. They evoked a futuristic sound comprised of ambient Radiohead vibes mixed with swirling psychedelic hip-hop akin to Swedish rapper Yung Lean.

About six songs into the set, Sparhawk removed his shirt to reveal his signature overalls and donned a white guitar before playing a very different version of “Heaven” than the one that appears on his latest album. The stripped-down performance featured Sparhawk’s vocals without the vocal effects for the first time in the evening. It was hard not to read the song, as well as the several that followed, as directly addressing the pain of his wife’s passing.

“Heaven/ It’s a lonely place if you’re alone/ I wanna be there with the people that I love,” Sparhawk sang.

On an unreleased song titled “Screaming,” Sparhawk seemed to return to his grief, singing, “When you flew out the window and into the sunset, I thought that I would never stop screaming.” At its conclusion, he moved around the microphone while singing long sustained notes, creating a gauzy and ethereal sound.

Drummer Eric Pollard, who records as Actual Wolf, sang backing vocals that often sounded disarmingly similar to Mimi Parker’s on songs like “Don’t Take Your Life Out of Me” and “Get High,” a song from Sparhawk’s side project, Derecho Rhythm Section.

Sparhawk was joined by his son, Cyrus, on bass. Introducing a cover of Roy Ayers’ “Liquid Love,” Alan Sparhawk said, “Cyrus brought me this song, and I knew I needed to work harder,” before launching into the slinky funk.

Alan Sparhawk peforms at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on Jan. 20, 2025.

“You’ve been through difficult things before,” the headliner said before the encore. After lamenting how Low had been unable to promote its final album, Hey What, on the West Coast before Parker’s death, Sparhawk delivered a very different version of the album’s opening song.

“White Horses” was stripped of its studio sorcery and relied instead on Sparhawk’s sparse guitar and haunting vocals. As the band closed the set with a similarly stripped-down version of “Days Like These,” the relevance was striking,

“When you think you’ve seen everything/ You’ll find we’re living in days like these,” Alan Sparhawk sang. The song grew with discordant stabs and unexpected noise, an unexpectedly apt musical metaphor for the chaos to come.

Circuit des Yeux performs at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on Jan. 20, 2025.

Earlier in the evening, Circuit des Yeux (Chicago vocalist Haley Fohr) performed a mesmerizing set that showcased her dynamic vocal range. Fohr stalked the dimly lit and smoky stage in a black formal dress and controlled much of the music from a bank of equipment at center stage.

The singer moved nimbly between a low deep baritone howl and soaring highs, all over a wash of synthesizers and drum machines. Fohr’s vocals approached the lushness of Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard, as well as the caustic vocal chaos of Diamanda Galás as she sang songs from her next album, due out in March on Matador Records.