A Great Time to Be an Empath, the seven-song debut from Minneapolis’s Panel, is a grief record. Some might not notice that at first, but you’ll hear that at once if you’ve lost someone, especially recently. It’s like one of those notes played at a pitch only people a certain age can hear.
Vocalist/bassist Annie Sparrows wrote the record while her aunt (“my favorite person”) was dying from a disease called progressive supranuclear palsy, which slowly seized her muscles. Opening track “Breakdown” lays that progression bare: the journey of someone’s vision going, when they start falling down a lot, when they’re losing a bunch of weight. “Her body was breaking down, and the end of it is, like, her death,” Sparrows says.
Another thing you should know about “Breakdown” is, it’s kind of a bop.
“If you listen to it, you can kind of hear the stages of grief, but I also didn’t want it to be like, ‘SHE DIED!’” Sparrows says of Empath, which is full of fuzzy, catchy, punkish songs that rarely stick around longer than two minutes. She wanted to leave room for folks to feel however they wanted to about these tracks.
“‘Solid Start’ is a good example of something that could be anything, right?” she says. “But what it is is when you go to a bad funeral and there’s, like, a host of some kind—whether it’s a priest or whatever—that lists the things that the person did. ‘This person was a baker, and this person died in a car crash.’”
Sparrows, a longtime local musician whose past projects include the Soviettes, didn’t know what these songs would become while she was writing them; it was at the urging of her friends and bandmates in Bermuda Squares that she assembled longtime friend and collaborator Kat Naden (the God Damn Doo Wop Band, Strait A’s, Yesterday’s Numbers), Zac Mayeux (Visual Learner, Notches, Texture Freq), and Justin Nelles (Lifestyle Shakes, Lutheran Heat) to record. (Mayeux has since been replaced by Drew Schmitz, who recently relocated from Texas, where he played in bands like Cruddy and Empty Markets.)
A Great Time to Be an Empath doesn’t exactly feel like a grief record. There’s no wallowing. Its energy is productive. The holler-along vocals on “Life Is Strange” are defiantly (and maybe delusionally) joyful in issuing truisms like “Time goes by/Time just flies/Then you die.”
And there’s a good reason for that: “I don’t like feelings,” Sparrows laughs, her bandmates cackling alongside her. “I hate them.”
Even the album’s title, A Great Time to Be an Empath, creates some sarcastic emotional distance. It is not, we don’t have to tell you, a great time to be an empath. (Is it ever?)
Sparrows remembers writing the songs while trying to keep it together for her kid and her family. “I got really mad, I got really sad, I was a disaster for kind of a long time,” she says. “I think that’s pretty common when you lose a parental figure.”
Working through that pain via song, and recording with friends like Naden—they’ve known each other for 30 years, work together at Naden’s shop Duck Duck Coffee, and volunteer at Extreme Noise alongside one another—helped Sparrows's process.
“You wanna help your friends go through grief and stuff when they’re doing it,” says Naden, acknowledging that the two spend a lot of their time together. Some might think it’s too much, but there’s a trick there, too.
“With both of us not enjoying feelings, it actually keeps us quite distant from each other,” she grins.
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