Charlie Parr will release Rooming House on 16th October via Smithsonian Folkways. It is his twentieth album, a seven-song folk opera set in the Upper Midwest, and Parr has shared an animated video for the title track.
Rooming House follows a group of people through a shared home: communal kitchens, drafty hallways, the makeshift families that form under one roof. Parr lived in Minneapolis rooming houses for years, and those memories fed a wider look at economic insecurity in America, at the choices people make around poverty, illness, unstable housing and social services that keep disappearing. The other half of it is the decency that survives all that — shared meals, borrowed favours, small acts of generosity. Parr plays his blues-rooted acoustic guitar throughout, with Dave King of The Bad Plus on drums.
Parr on the title track:
“‘Rooming House’ is where the listener is introduced to the characters in this musical play while they’re going about a normal evening of preparing food together. A terminal illness is introduced here, too, kind of another character or at least assuming the role of one, when our hero realizes that the pain he’s feeling is more than food poisoning. There are two movements to this song, divided in time by something less than a couple months and on the album by just three songs, and Dave King and I played the entire thing as one song so we had to fade it out in the middle and fade it back in later.”
Watch the video which was animated & illustrated by Drew Christie:
KLOF has reviewed both of Parr’s previous Smithsonian Folkways albums. David Pratt called 2021’s Last of the Better Days Ahead “an engrossing, captivating album from a tireless innovator”, with blues-playing “of the highest virtuosic calibre”. Danny Neill reviewed 2024’s Little Sun, the first Parr album to carry a producer’s hand in Tucker Martine’s, as “a very welcome evolution”, full of “instantly classic-sounding songs”. A folk opera built around a single house is another step away from the one-take, in-and-out method that defined most of his earlier work.
Pre-Order Rooming House (October 16th, 2026 via Smithsonian Folkways): https://orcd.co/charlie-parr-rooming-house
Parr tours the Midwest and East Coast in November, with dates in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Nashville, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Toronto and Indianapolis.
Charlie Parr Tour Dates
August 21 – Madison, WI – The Edgewater Hotel
August 22 – Trempealeau, WI – Historic Trempealeau Hotel Restaurant and Saloon
August 28 – Superior, WI – Cedar Lounge – Earth Rider Brewery Taproom
August 29 – Ontonagon, MI – Porcupine Mountain Music Festival
August 30 – Austin, MN – Austin Artworks Center
October 30 – Minneapolis, MN – State Theatre
November 4 – Milwaukee, WI – Vivarium
November 5 – Green Bay, WI – Meyer Theatre
November 6 – Berwyn, IL – FitzGerald’s
November 7 – Chatfield, MN – Chatfield Center for the Arts
November 10 – Nashville, TN – Exit/In
November 11 – Asheville, NC – Eulogy
November 12 – Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle Back Room
November 13 – Vienna, VA – Jammin Java
November 14 – Philadelphia, PA – MilkBoy
November 15 – Brooklyn, NY – Union Pool
November 18 – Hamden, CT – Space Ballroom
November 19 – South Burlington, VT – Higher Ground Ballroom
November 20 – Toronto, ON – Horseshoe Tavern
November 21 – Pittsburgh, PA – Club Cafe
November 22 – Indianapolis, IN – HI-FI