Mike Sparrow's 'Bored in the South'

In December 2011 a man sent me a wink on a popular online dating site. He told me his name was Greg, that he was 37, and worked as an investment banker for Deutsche Bank. Then he sent a picture. I immediately knew it was not his. Why? Because it belonged to a musician named Mike Sparrow who passed away too soon. Sparrow only released one album called Bored in the South that included original songs like I Love Women and Love Songs. This incident was certainly strange but it reminded me how artists leave us too soon with so much left in them.

Sparrow’s lyrics are raw and explicit. He suffered from manic-depression for years and some say it’s in his songs how much the condition reverberated in the words. There is a sheer honesty and poignancy in Sparrow’s intonations. He was only around 26 or 27 when he passed away and it’s sad to hear the intensity, sounding so full of life, belong to a man who won’t ever perform his wrenching I Love Women live again. When I listen to Sparrow I can’t help but want to know what else he could have sang to us.

The chorus should have been: Don’t love me because I’ll be leaving. Sparrow rambles about this not being a song he wanted to sing but it’s his own. Don’t dare love me he warns. But some did and do. This southern rocker could have been on the verge of something but no one will ever know. All we have is one album that spurts tunes that are fast and hard, soft and sorrowful, and end much too soon just like Sparrow did.

You know you found a keeper of a song when it’s an immediate anthem to describe a situation in your life. The kind you sing to yourself when a moment calls up the lyrics with a reckless abandon. For me, Sparrow’s I Love Women is it, Sparrow evokes the stern caution my first love once said to me when we first got together, better than my first love himself.