charlieparr.com

What's New

• On October 11th Charlie will release his first work of fiction through Southwestern Wisconsin-based Ramshackle Press. Readers are treated to a deep dive into the big picture of a group of Charlie’s songs. Like the old, well-hewn gospel songs, there is both darkness and light. There are tales of childhood, families, cantankerous uncles and aunts, and slightly lost individuals. Through keyholes opening into rays of light, the reader watches the lives of everyday humans unrolling in unheroic yet poetic and unvarnished ways that those that love Parr’s songs will cherish. As Abraham Smith writes in the book’s introduction, “It's a great plenty and promises plenty more. I know I feel a delicious undertow on the final page; can't wait to start again at word one; and then to find a good walking stick for Charlie's next river road of Prose.”
>>>PRE-ORDER HERE (orders ship October 11th)

• New album 'Last of the Better Days Ahead' is now available on CD, LP, and digital. Order/stream HERE.

“'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.”

• Check out the new video for "817 Oakland Avenue" that was created by the immensely talented Drew Christie. Drew's work has been featured in The Criterion Collection, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Sundance TV and Vanity Fair among others: