Charlie Parr - Last Of The Better Days Ahead

 

Charlie Parr's Smithsonian Folkways label debut

Fans who have been following Charlie Parr through his previous full-length albums and decades of nonstop touring already know that the Duluth-based folk-blues songwriter has a way of carving a path straight to the gut.

Parr's 2021 album, Last of the Better Days Ahead, is a collection of powerful new songs about how one looks back on a life lived, as well as forward on what's still to come. It's 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.

Here 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.

"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.

When it comes to what it all means, Parr says it best: "Last of the Better Days Ahead is a way for me to refer to the times I'm living in. 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. The album represents one full rotation of the boat in which we are adrift-looking ahead for a last look at the better days to come, then being turned around to see the leading edge of the past as it fades into the foggy dreamscape of our real and imagined histories."

Side A

1. Last of the Better Days Ahead

2. Blues for Whitefish Lake, 1975

3. Walking Back from Willmar

4. Anaconda

Side B

1. Everyday Opus

2. On Fading Away

Side C

1. 817 Oakland Avenue

2. On Listening to Robert Johnson

3. Bed of Wasps

4. Rain

Side D

1. Decoration Day

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