Charlie Parr has spent a career on the road as a musician in what he calls “an itinerant lifestyle.” He’s brought his distinctive country blues style to all parts of the United States and beyond, often traveling via a minivan that becomes his home during his travels. So, it’s noteworthy that his latest album, “Little Sun” with Smithsonian Folkways, is rooted in a sense of place— whether that be Nicollet Avenue, “a bar downtown where they play the blues,” a spot to watch the sunset in New Mexico, or the shores of Bear Head Lake.
“One thing that I miss in my life is the feeling of belonging to a neighborhood,” Parr tells me in a phone interview.
Born in Austin, Minnesota, Parr lived in Duluth for 25 years and is now based in Saint Paul. Growing up, he recalls his mother using the word “neighbor” as a verb. “She talked about neighboring,” he says. “I think about it a lot. I’m grateful and very lucky to have a lot of really good friends— and they’re kind of all around the world. I look at them as being in kind of a very large extended neighborhood.”
Parr sprinkles his observations about people and their connection to where they live with his latest songs. There’s a woman who blasts her boombox and dances on her porch in wooly socks in a song called “Boombox.” Another song, “Stray,” tells the story of a man down on his luck: “I hear he’s lost his family,” Parr sings. “Or they let him wander away/Can anyone speak on his behalf? Or has someone rigged the game.”
“Little Sun” opens with a song called “Portland Avenue.” It’s about a woman named Annie. “After the third time they picked her up/No one here has seen her since/And I’ve got an apartment full of her stuff,” Parr sings.
He tells me he originally wrote the song to be about Alzheimer’s, where the person isn’t necessarily physically gone. As he continued to work on it, the story “got a bit fuzzier and messier,” he says. It evolved to become less about a specific person or topic, “so the listener can bring their own lives a bit easier,” he says. “It can just be about someone who just kind of walked away and never came back again.”
While Parr is moving from place to place performing, he uses a voice memo app on his phone, or he jots things down in a notebook that lives in his glove compartment. That art-making co-exists with survival. “I found that trying to navigate things that you need— places to sleep, hygiene, whatever it is— suddenly it all feels like one giant thing,” he says. “It keeps me just kind of wanting to go home because I’m lonely. I don’t have my dog.”
“Little Sun” marks Parr’s second project with Smithsonian Folkways, but also an entirely new approach to making an album that he hasn’t used before. “I’ve never had the opportunity to work with a professional producer,” he tells me.
In this case, he teamed up with Tucker Martine, from Flora Recording and Playback studio, in Portland. Martine has worked with Rosanne Cash, Modest Mouse, and The Decembrists. “It was a really interesting process that I got to learn about and take part in. I was thrilled,” he says.
Previously, Parr’s album recordings took about as long to make as it took to record the songs. This time, the process took three weeks of work. “We were in the studio for 10 hours a day for over a week,” Parr recalls. “The amount of time to get everything right— I wasn’t expecting that.”
On the first day, Parr showed up with the lyrics already written, and the arrangements done. He’d sent Martine demos of the songs and had ideas for instrumentation. “I didn’t want to spend time in the studio writing— it felt like it would be an expensive way to write a song,” he says.
From there, he was part of a creative process that involved choosing different sounds and listening back to what Parr and the other musicians had created. “That felt really good to me honestly,” he says. “It was a good surprise.”
On the album, Parr plays electric guitar, and two kinds of harmonica. “Guitars are really weird and personal things,” he says. “I started playing resonator guitars as a teenager and they suit the way that I play really well. I play in a staccato percussive kind of way and that instrument really responds to that style. It doesn’t have a ton of sustain, it’s got a lot of attack.”
Parr tells me songwriting is a way for him to communicate. “I’m not an articulate person when I’m speaking, but I feel like I can make myself understood with songwriting,” he says. “I’m a big advocate for letting people feel like they can express themselves in their own way and not forcing them into conforming with the way that other people feel like they need to express themselves.”
Parr’s last song on the album is called “Sloth,” which may be surprising coming from someone who has had as much success as Parr has had. He’s released 18 albums, his music has been featured on a hit TV show (Reservation Dogs), and he’s toured internationally. But Parr says he identifies with the character in the song.
“I kind of do them on my own time,” he says. “I dropped out of high school based on the same kind of proclivities. I didn’t really want to leave the basement of my parents house because my guitar was there. And it’s never really changed. If left alone, I’ll just sit in the house and practice the guitar and write songs.”
Parr’s new album, “Little Sun” releases on March 22. You can find it in LP or CD form here. He’ll play at First Avenue on May 3 with Marisa Anderson. More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.
