Charlie Parr

With Special Guests Mama's Broke and Marisa Anderson

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Charlie Parr

Charlie Parr’s new album, Last of The Better Days Ahead, is a collection of powerful songs about how one looks back on a life lived, as well as forward on what’s still to come. Its spare production foregrounds Parr’s poetic lyricism, his expressive, gritty voice ringing clear over deft acoustic guitar playing that references folk and blues motifs in Parr’s own exploratory, idiosyncratic style.

“Last of the Better Days Ahead is a way for me to refer to the times I’m living in,” says Parr. “I’m getting on in years, experiencing a shift in perspective that was once described by my mom as ‘a time when we turn from gazing into the future to gazing back at the past, as if we’re adrift in the current, slowly turning around.’ Some songs came from meditations on the fact that the portion of our brain devoted to memory is also the portion responsible for imagination, and what that entails for the collected experiences that we refer to as our lives. Other songs are cultivated primarily from the imagination, but also contain memories of what may be a real landscape, or at least one inspired by vivid dreaming.”

On his Smithsonian Folkways debut, there’s something resoundingly new. The faithful will find an even more intense focus upon the word, and folks new to this titan of international folk-blues will discover poetry so clear and pure it feels like he wrote it with an icicle on a window. Over the course of a prolific career spanning 13 full-length albums, the Duluth virtuoso has earned a passionate following for his strikingly candid songwriting and raw stage presence.

Parr’s work digs deeply into his personal experiences with depression and the existential questions that weigh on it. “Parr is a master storyteller,” said PopMatters. “One can’t help but come back and marvel at his ability to make us believe that we know each of [his] characters or that, maybe, there’s some part of them in each of us.” Mojo said of his most recent effort, “Parr continues to spin life’s small details into profound lyrical observations of acceptance and wonder….the further adventures of a guitar-picking great.”

Born and raised in Austin, Minnesota, Charlie Parr first grabbed a guitar at age 8. To date, he has never had a formal lesson, but wows crowds with his incredible fingerpicking on his 12 string baritone resonator, guitar, and banjo. All that locomotive melodic work is simply the scenery in the tales he’s spinning lyrically. Early in his career, Parr was employed by the Salvation Army as an outreach worker. He spent his days tracking the homeless in Minneapolis, providing blankets and resources. But they offered him something greater in return. The experience completely rewired him and left him with a newfound respect for human resilience. And along the way, he collected stories from the folks he would meet. These characters continue to show up in Parr’s songs even today.

Throughout Charlie’s music you can hear his sense of place. These are songs from the iron country. They are tales from the paper mill. You can hear the fisheries and the Boundary Waters. In Last of the Better Days, you are met by someone who prizes quiet reflection over hustle and who shuns distraction for a long walk in the woods. “It’s one thing to be able to say that I’m not what I own or what I do,” says Parr, “but it still leaves behind the original question of what am I unanswered.”

Mama’s Broke

Mama’s Broke have spent the past eight years in a near-constant state of transience, pounding the transatlantic tour trail. They've brought their dark, fiery folk-without-borders sound to major festivals and DIY punk houses alike, absorbing traditions from their maritime home in Eastern Canada all the way to Ireland and Indonesia. Nowhere is the duo's art-in-motion approach more apparent than on their long-awaited sophomore record, Narrow Line (May 13, 2022 on Free Dirt Records); it's the sound of nowhere in particular, yet woven with a rich synthesis of influences that knows no borders. The eleven songs on Narrow Line burrow deeply, with close harmony duets, commanding vocals, and poignant contemplations on cycles of life, including birth and death. Tinges of Americana stand side-by-side with the ghosts of Eastern European fiddle tunes and ancient a cappella ballad singing, melding into an unusually accessible dark-folk sound. A careful listen of Narrow Line invokes an ephemeral sense of place—whether real or imagined—inviting us to take comfort in the infinite possibilities of life, whether or not we ever choose to settle down.

For a group defined by constant touring, it’s not surprising that the two artists that make up Mama’s Broke, Lisa Maria and Amy Lou Keeler, met on the road. As Lisa remembers it, “Amy was driving her old Mercedes from Montreal to Nova Scotia and I was looking for a ride. We spent the 17 hours in the car talking almost exclusively about music. By the time we reached Halifax we started playing together, and within a week or two became a band.” Both coming out of traveling communities that are focused on music and protest, the two owe the way in which they move through the world to the integrated and self-sustaining nature of DIY culture and activism. It was a busy life that took them on a roundabout annual touring schedule running between Canada, the United States, Ireland, the UK, and Europe. In each country, they built grassroots DIY communities to support their music or moved along the pathways of communal organizing that sustained other touring artists.

The driving force behind this band is – and has always been – the commitment to challenge borders between people, places, and traditions; while encouraging freedom of expression and community through music.

Marisa Anderson

Marisa Anderson is a wanderer at heart, creatively as curious as she is proficient. On Cloud Corner, Anderson’s music is boundless. Rooted in American folk music, her pieces are inspired by 20th century classical and West African guitar techniques. The results are revelatory. Written and recorded in a period of political and personal upheaval, the album was created as a refuge, an ode to stillness in an era of ceaseless noise. Marisa Anderson’s Cloud Corner is an album of remarkably intimate beauty, tranquility in times of turmoil.

Anderson’s composing is indelibly tied to her process of recording. As her own engineer, Anderson is able to develop her pieces while recording, shifting from song to song as inspiration strikes. After at times months of ruminating on musical and conceptual ideas, she improvises hours of material which then is often whittled into the concise, richly textured compositions. As the pieces of Cloud Corner developed, a distinct mood began to settle over the album, with long reverb tails, cleaner tones, and lightly bouncing rhythms evoking air, wind, breath, and the sky. Themes continued evolving as she recorded, as Anderson began embellishing pieces with varied instrumentation, from the warble of her Wurtlitzer keyboard to the staccato plucks of the requinto jarocho.

Anderson is able to evoke vivid visuals through her music, and Cloud Corner draws on personal experience for those images. A great example is the sorrowful “Angel’s Rest,” a eulogy to one of Anderson’s favorite trails near her Portland home, which was devastated in 2017 by fire. “Sant Feliu de Guíxols” elicits the beauty of the coastal Spanish town. It is a quietly and consciously happy song triggered by a conversation with a fan who accused Anderson of only playing sad songs. Anderson uses a slide and incorporates microtonal elements on “Lament,” a piece inspired by images of the Syrian refugee crisis. The palpable emotional weight of these pieces are all invariably tied to Anderson’s capacity to create such vivid imagery with her composition, timbre and tonal choices.

Marisa Anderson’s experience in a myriad playing styles and keen abilities as an improviser are perfect skills to satiate her appetite for new approaches to composing. The backbone for her music is her undeniable mastery of North American traditions of country, folk, and blues. Cloud Corner sees Anderson using those skills in new forms from the Classical canon such as the fugue and ostinato. Traversing further still, guitar phrases on tracks like “Slow Ascent” and “Surfacing” owe a debt to Tuareg style of guitar playing. Anderson was influenced by artists she played or recorded with such as Mdou Moctar, Kildjate Moussa Albadé, and Ahmoudou Madassane. Inspiration was also drawn from unique stringed instruments Anderson utilized such as the requinto jarocho and charango, which helped flesh out the riff of “Lift."

The solo guitar work of Marisa Anderson owes its familiar tones to her awareness of history and her mastering of her instrument, yet it is completely new. Marisa Anderson filters musical history through her own personal experiences, as a traveler in life and in music. A curious and gifted player, Anderson has spent over 35 years of playing forging her singular, instantly recognizable voice. Marisa Anderson’s Cloud Corner is hopeful in the face of any discord, a resplendent diverse sound sanctuary that shines, a mirror of the horizon it looks towards.