Charlie Parr doesn’t take himself too seriously. He lets his music speak for itself. At his Nashville show at Mercy Lounge Thursday, the Minnesota singer-songwriter was working the merch table by himself until time to go on stage. He opened with “Walking Back from Willmar” from his newest release Last of the Better Days Ahead from Smithsonian Folkway Recordings. So many of his songs, like this one, feature the lost and lonely, the down and out.
Parr confided that he was caught out in the rain himself and had to put on his dry but dirty clothes for the show. No one, least of all Parr, seemed to mind. Throughout the evening he alternated between songs from the new album and cuts from early projects, all showcasing this troubadour’s eye for the individual, his ear for a good story.
He related his own recent experience, sleeping in the driveway of friends in Asheville, waking and feeling uncertain whether he was at the right house. (He was.)
Hailing from Minnesota, Parr said he had heard from his son, who reported twenty-two inches of snow back home; Parr told him he wasn’t interested in snowfall when he wasn’t anywhere near it.He told the crowd that during the pandemic he had time to practice guitar and read books, but didn’t “get to practice bantering.” His son, in his twenties, didn’t want to serve as a sounding board; he said his fifteen-year-old daughter told him, through the closed door, “just text me and I’ll tell you if it’s any good.”
Banter was beside the point through the evening, as Parr’s song spoke for him. He sang “On Stealing a Sailboat” from his 2019 eponymous album and what he called his “mysteriously titled ‘817 Oakland Avenue’” with a haunting intro on his trademark resonator guitar, asking “Can you remember what it was like when all the world was filled with light? Spread it around.”
He also played “Rain” and the title cut from Last of the Better Days Ahead, reminiscing about a ’64 Falcon. The songs seem to stand balanced between the present and the past. After singing “Cheap Wine”:
All these old ladies come here and buy cheap wine
ain’t no better than all these bums come in to buy the cheap wine…
Parr said, “I’ll try to play something upbeat. Well, it’s faster so you don’t notice it so much.” Then he added, “I haven’t written my ‘Walking on Sunshine’ just yet. I’m going to wait until I’m sixty.” He followed with “Anaconda,” from the new album, another song about a character whose “options were slim.”
“Remember Me If I Forget,” from Stumpjumper, questioning the conventional wisdom handed down by his grandfather, was followed by another cut from the new album, “Blues for Whitefish Lake, 1975,” set in a “small outboard in need of slight repair” on a fall evening, recalling his father’s face and “the last shirt I saw him wear.”
The clean, stripped-down acoustic guitar was the perfect accompaniment to the haunting lyrics. Parr was followed on stage by the band Dead Horses, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Lead singer and guitarist Sarah Vos plays with Daniel Wolff on upright bass, joined by a drummer. In addition to their original singles, such as “Birds Can Write the Chorus,” released in February 2020 on a five-song EP, they also covered the Don Williams-Emmylou Harris duet “If I Needed You.” They closed their set as Parr joined them on stage for “Lost Highway.”
At the end of the evening, Parr was back at the merchandise table making time to meet his fans.