Jeff Tweedy, Wilco; producer, The Invisible Way
Low goes really far back in my family – my wife had a rock club in Chicago called Lounge Ax, which Low would play all the way back in the 90s. I was always a fan – I never really knew them personally until Nels Cline joined our band, and he was friends with Alan [Sparhawk], so Alan started coming around to see us play. We just got to be friends and at some point we toured together, and they asked me to produce a record with them, and I guess that’s when we became pretty close, or closer than just being fellow travellers.
I think most people would look at Mimi and not estimate that she was a serious artist. I don’t think she put on any kind of pretension – there was nothing about her that read as anything other than normal midwesterner. That is my favourite thing on earth, when normal people reveal their depths of emotional understanding, and her poignancy was enhanced by the fact that she was so casual about her genius.
I’ve never seen anybody be that casually brilliant. She was a giant – when I close my mind’s eye and imagine her voice, it rings the clearest to me of any voice I’ve heard in my life. Her voice was so indelibly defined. There’s something truly sacred about the way she sang and savoured notes, almost as a form of meditation – the way that she and Alan could breathe together and make this music that was secular church music, or something. Being around it and witnessing it is just astonishing, because it was so effortless and it was with zero pretence. For Mimi, it was just a way to live.
Low, Alan, Mimi, have just been for me, for a long time, a bar to aim for – to make music that makes me feel the way their music makes me feel. Even before I met them their music was doing that for me, and certainly after working with them there was an added amount of inspiration in being accepted by them.
The thing I keep thinking about Mimi is that she savoured every note, and I’m glad – there wasn’t a single note that was ever rushed, and that gives me some comfort, knowing that she had the presence of mind to sing with such grounded appreciation of each note she got to sing.
