Charlie Parr Announces New Folk Opera Album ‘Rooming House’ & 2026 Fall Tour Dates

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Charlie Parr returns with a new album, Rooming House, via Smithsonian Folkways on October 16. The guitarist will tour the Midwest and East Coast around the record, previewed today with the title track, this fall.

Built from his experiences living in Minneapolis rooming houses, Parr’s new seven-song set interweaves vignettes to tell the tale of “ordinary people navigating hardship and finding strength within a fragile yet vital sense of community,” as per a press release. Rooming House marks the singer-songwriter’s 20th studio album.

Charlie teamed up with drummer Dave King (The Bad Plus) to cut Rooming House, melding his folk guitar with King’s dynamic, genre-blending percussion style. News of Rooming House arrived with the album’s 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,” Parr stated. “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 Drew Christie-animated video for “Rooming House” below:

Charlie Parr is hitting the road around Rooming House. The Minnesota native kicks off the trek at the State Theatre in Minneapolis on October 30.

Parr will also hit Milwaukee, Nashville, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Toronto and Pittsburgh, among other stops. The tour concludes on November 22 at the Hi-Fi in Indianapolis.

Tickets go on sale Friday, July 31 at 10 a.m. local.