Music Review: Charlie Parr, ‘Last of the Better Days Ahead’
Charlie Parr’s Last of the Better Days Ahead album artwork, 2021.
Can music be both meditative and urgent? Can a song have forward and backward momentum simultaneously? Can a deeply personal album feel like it’s about all of humanity? Can lyrics yield multiple interpretations that all feel equally true?
I’m struggling to write this review. I want to make points that feel contradictory. I’m confused and intrigued by how satisfactory descriptions elude me.
Charlie Parr’s new album is unmistakably a Charlie Parr album—it bears many of his hallmarks and a sound only he could create—but there’s something unusual about it. Despite its often propulsive pace (thanks to his signature rapid-fire fingerpicking); the emphatic, urgent delivery of his vocals; and the ample lyrics about walking, driving, working, and traveling … there’s a stillness to it.
The stillness makes sense—inspired by something his mother said comparing a shift in perspective as you age to being adrift in a current, Parr himself describes the album as representing “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.” Still (no pun intended), the album is surprisingly stimulating. Listening to it, there were moments I felt drawn to the edge of epiphany, but not a realization I could put into words, just a feeling of how despair and pain, beauty and generosity, mortality and eternity are so intertwined they’re almost the same thing.
I could write an essay about each song, but in the interest of not writing a War and Peace–length review, I’ll focus on a few standouts in Last of the Better Days Ahead.
Charlie Parr at The Electric Fetus. Photo credit: Carol Roth, 2021.
One fascinating element of Parr’s songwriting is his loose and unusual rhyming structure. There’s such a driving rhythm to his songs I don’t often realize how irregularly he uses traditional rhyming couplets or quatrain format, and how his verses often contain near-rhymes in surprising places. The title track of this album eschews rhyming almost entirely until the end. Throughout the song, words spill out in an insistent rush, as if the message about letting go of material attachments is too pressing to worry about rhymes: “Because now it’s all so stale and you feel so very old like you’ve taken all your chances and tossed them all aside for some stupid piece of metal like shiny bits of trash that line the stolen nest of a greedy neighborhood crow.”
While that first song scorns the significance of physical belongings, the next track illustrates the value of intangibles: experiences and memories. Slower and minimal in its instrumentation, “Blues for Whitefish Lake, 1975” finds Parr retracing a perfect day on the lake with his father, immersed in memories (“concentrate on the face of my father / concentrate on the last shirt I saw him wear”) while grounded in tactile and visual details of the present (“The steps are all but gone now / Rotten to my tread / I cling to branches to keep from slipping…”).
That theme of being in the moment comes back even more strongly later in the album with “On Fading Away.” Also on a boat ride in the rain, the narrator savors discomfort (“I was soaking wet from the night before / shivering to the bone but I was moving just the same”) and comfort (“The rhythm of the water put me out just like a drug”) with equal relish. And another rain-soaked song, “On Listening to Robert Johnson,” focuses closely on the transformational experience of hearing well-loved music coming through a stranger’s window at night.
Charlie Parr. Photo credit: Shelly Mosman.
Parr’s written many first-person story songs about blue-collar workers and desperate, isolated people, but the empathy ratchets up to new levels in “Everyday Opus.” In unadorned but vivid lyrics, the narrator walks us through a couple days in his life as a night-shift worker who lives alone in a house he doesn’t care about in a neighborhood of people he doesn’t know. Each line pierces the heart, and the chorus addresses your inability to downplay or separate from his plight: “Walking in these shoes isn’t as easy as you’d like ... We all have to struggle and hold it as our truth.”
“Everyday Opus” is far from the only empathetic portrait of others on the album: “Walking Back from Willmar,” “Anaconda” and “Rain” also recount struggles of people from different walks of life facing various hardships. For such an introspective album, there are an unusual number of songs about the struggles of others—although, even as I write that, I realize that’s not surprising coming from Parr, whose “last day job,” as the magnificent poetic liner notes from Abraham Smith recount, was doing homeless outreach in Minneapolis and Duluth. It seems that for him, introspection contains the world.
While much of the album is asking us to sit with pain and isolation, it also contains a roadmap for mending our connections with the rest of the world. “817 Oakland Avenue” encourages listeners to share everything they have, both intangible gifts (hope and joy) and creature comforts (food and shelter): “It’s true about love / It’ll die if it’s covered up / It’s got to be all given away / So we can all feel the heat of its rays.”
I know Parr loves avant-garde music, which he explores through Portal III (a trio comprising him, bassist Liz Draper and drummer Chris Gray), but I’ve never sought it out—my idea of out-there is amplifying a banjo with a pickup! As a result, I have no idea if the last track on this album, “Decoration Day,” is representative, but it sure sounds experimental to me. I don’t normally enjoy listening to 15 minutes of slow, sparse, instrumental music, but after the intense journey of this album, it felt right—it gave me time to absorb all the stories and lessons I’d taken in over the previous 50 minutes. I’m surprised to say this, but “Decoration Day” is staying in my playlist of favorites right along with the rest of the songs.
Buy Last of the Better Days Ahead on vinyl, CD or as a digital download:
Check out Parr’s prolific touring schedule:
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!
