Charlie Parr Shines Brightly Under A ‘Little Sun’

Working from home has become more common over the last several years. Last Friday evening at First Avenue in Minneapolis, Charlie Parr held a concert that in many ways mirrored working from home.

As he indicated from the stage, the venue is one where he feels comfortable at work.

“First Avenue is kind of the living room for Minneapolis music,” Parr told the packed audience.

First Ave is a home-away-from-home of sorts for Parr, the 57-year-old Minnesota native who has performed at the venue several times, including when it was empty for livestreamed performances that took place while many were forced to work from home.

Parr was accompanied onstage by an ace band made up of friends and collaborators. Also onstage next to Parr was a lamp, the kind you would find in someone’s home, providing a stark and cozy adornment.

“See it’s meant to be like you’re looking into someone’s living room,” Parr told the First Ave audience. “It’s meant to be non-performative. It’s meant to be like, ‘oh, there’s some people sitting around their living room, and there’s a lamp and everything.’ I just wanted to reiterate my vision.”

It’s fitting that Parr, who sat barefoot on one end of a long semi-circle of musicians with his back turned to a third of the audience, gets to work in a home-like setting every once in a while. Relentlessly on tour or picking up gigs around Minnesota, Parr puts in the work that it takes to be a working musician in 2024.

‘I still like [touring] as much as I ever liked it,” Parr told me a few weeks ago while on tour in North Carolina. “I love performing. I love being on the road and I love all the folks that come out to the shows. This is the life I wanted and I get to have it, but I get tired now and need a break and need to recharge and hit the road again. I’m happiest when I’m kind of living in the moment.”

Parr’s decades-long career has fostered a devoted following in and around Minnesota. As I told the singer-songwriter when we spoke, he would be on the current Mount Rushmore of Minnesota musicians. Parr frequently credits the influence and mentorship he received from the likes of “Spider” John Koerner, Dave “Snaker” Ray, and Tony “Little Sun” Glover, integral folk and blues figures whose legacy looms large in the Twin Cities.

Recalling the early stages of his career, Parr told me:

“A few nights ago I was talking to a fellow at a show that we were reminiscing about the ‘80s. I played shows in the ‘80s, not a ton of them because folk music hadn’t had the revival. The second or third folk scare hadn’t happened yet.

“We were out there with an open stapler and a goofy flyer from Kinko’s. Hammer flyers up over the punk rock flyers to see if someone wanted to come to a coffee shop and see stupid folk music. And they didn’t, but at the end of the day we still got to sit down at this coffee shop and play folk music and it made us happy.

“A couple of young people at a show asked me questions about old music and about guitars and about folk music and about ‘Spider’ John Koerner and I could see by the look on their faces that this was important.”

Little Sun, which is Parr’s 18th album, shares its title with the nickname of the late Tony “Little Son” Glover. On Friday, before performing the Little Sun title track, Parr dedicated the song to Glover. I asked Charlie about Tony’s importance, not only to him, but to the Minneapolis music community.

“Tony was, besides being an amazing musician and making a lot of music ever since the early ‘60s, he was generous and kind,” Parr said of Glover. “He would talk to all of us, he would answer all of our questions. He wasn’t a curmudgeonly old blues singer. He was kind and generous. He was a good writer. He wrote about music. He thought about music. You could go to Ginkgo’s and find him sitting there at a cup of coffee and, and you can go up and he’d say, ‘Sit down and talk for a while.’

“And that generosity is why I named the record after him – kind of encompassing love of music in general, and not just blues music or just folk music – the man loved music. Period.”

Glover was supportive of Parr, serving as an early musical mentor and their relationship became integral to Parr as a musician and person. Glover, who died in 2019 at age 79, was a pier of perhaps the most famous Minnesota musician, Bob Dylan, and is said to have helped Mick Jagger learn to play harmonica.

“When I did shows with Tony, or went to see Tony, or talked to Tony, he was kind and generous and supportive,” Parr said. “I can’t really even tell you what that meant to me. It meant the world to me. It wasn’t just me, he was in the community of the Twin Cities.”

Released by the esteemed Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Little Sun the album is a collection of eight new Charlie Parr originals. Unlike previous records, this one was not recorded live in the studio, instead Parr chose to revisit a more deliberate approach, recording parts separately, which he tried on his last album, 2021’s Last Of The Better Days, but unsuccessfully scrapped in favor of tracking that record live.

Sessions for Little Sun were held in Portland, Oregon at producer/engineer Tucker Martine’s Flora Recordings facility. This was the first time Parr and Martine – whose impressive credits include recording My Morning Jacket, Modest Mouse, The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, The National, Spoon, Neko Case, The Jayhawks and many others – worked together, but the collaboration proved instantly fruitful.

“I love Tucker,” Charlie told me. “I gotta say he was fantastic. Even before we met in person, we talked on the phone a bunch, we found a bunch of records in common that we both liked.”

Portland was hit with a massive snowstorm during Parr’s time there in January 2023. Unusually bad weather for that part of the country, the snow just seemed familiar to Parr.

“Portland wasn’t expecting that much snow,” Parr recalled. “So I think it was a shock to them. I thought it was great.”

Parr recorded Little Sun with contributions from keyboardist Asher Fulero, bassist Victor Krummenacher, guitarist Marisa Anderson, drummer Andrew Borger and vocalist Anna Tivel. Paired with the outstanding instrumental performances are Parr’s captivating vocals singing his typically literary and poetic lyrics.

Neighbors and neighborhoods permeate the record and the liner notes accompanying Little Sun. Parr pulled from his experiences growing up in Minnesota as well as his current situation in examining the role of neighbors and neighborhoods.

“When I was working on those songs and even recording the record, the problem wasn’t that I was having a neighborhood, it’s that I didn’t have one and maybe I missed it,” Parr explained. “I was raised in a neighborhood. I was raised in a working class neighborhood. All the packing house workers, everybody on the block worked in the packing house, and all the kids were all latchkey kids because the folks didn’t come home until 6 p.m., so we’d get out of school and we’d all play together.

“My mom used it like a verb. She talked about ‘neighboring.’ That was a big part of my growing up. And even when I lived in Duluth, I tried to participate in the neighborhood that we were bringing up our kids in so they would get to feel that. And then it just kind of disintegrated, you know?

“And it’s my fault. I chose to be an itinerant touring musician, so now the neighborhood is massive and my friends live hundreds and hundreds of miles from one another. So I guess maybe part of that talk about neighbors and neighboring is just because it’s part of my life that I currently miss.”

Being a good neighbor requires a certain amount of empathy for the other members of your community. Empathy is another theme that often surfaces within Parr’s lyrical work. The Little Sun song “Stray” expressly defends the need for empathy. Parr’s last “real” job was 22 years ago when he was employed by an organization doing outreach for unhoused people. With “Stray,” Parr address the plight of those less fortunate folks who can be seen on streets and neighborhoods across the country, singing:

How can you say there’s a stray
In the middle of your town
He can feel the anger in your eyes
Where empathy should be found

“I think empathy is a learned skill,” Parr confessed. “More than it’s just something you’re born with and I think you can learn it at any time in your life. You just really need to put in the work and do it. I think it’s incredibly important and overlooked and [in] our current political landscape, sometimes people view it as a weakness. I’ve seen evidence of that and I think that’s really sad. I work hard at it.”

The presence fostered across the album’s eight tracks comes across as calmer and more at peace than Parr’s prior efforts. When I asked Charlie about presenting himself as less haunted and less tortured he responded positively, and described what contributes to the ongoing evolution.

“That makes me really happy to hear because the last record, The Last Of The Better Days Ahead, that was really intensely personal,” Parr responded. “Some of it was pretty tough, and maybe some of it really should have been kept to myself, but this record, it feels like I kind of garped out a lot of stuff with the last record that needed to get garped out. Now, I feel like this record is more creative.

“I feel like I’ve created more. I feel like I wrote more. I got past a thing and lately I’ve been writing a lot. I’ve been writing fiction. I’ve been writing songs and they don’t feel so painful. Certain songs from the last record or from my career going back, I have never been able to play them live because it’s painful. I probably should have gotten a therapist instead of writing songs. But this record, I can play every song on this record live and I feel like each song has its narrator that’s not me.”

All eight songs on Little Sun were performed in album sequence to start Friday’s show at First Ave. Joining Parr for the occasion was Little Sun contributor, acclaimed guitarist Marisa Anderson (who Charlie called “my personal guitar hero”). The impressive roster of others performing alongside Parr (and the lamp) consisted of vocalist Andrea Webber, drummer JT Bates, washboard player Mikkel Beckmen, fiddler Mary DuShane, bassist Liz Draper and keyboardist Ben Cosgrove.

The vibe on stage was loose and relaxed, which was not surprising after Parr explained to me that he was going to do minimal preplanning beyond trusting the musicians to come to work and get the job done.

The second part of the First Ave concert was made up of songs pulled from various sources within Parr’s deep catalog. Singalongs commenced with the attentive crowd eager to participate and integrate with the musicians on stage. People from neighborhoods near and far came together to watch the musicians at work, and for a few hours, built an empathetic community inside the storied starred venue.

At around 10 p.m., I overheard a couple saying goodbye to another couple, explaining they had to leave early to embark on the hour-long drive back to St. Cloud. I got the sense they were not the only ones with a lengthy drive ahead of them that night, heading back to their homes across Minnesota after seeing a quintessential Minnesota musician make one of the best-known Minneapolis venues his workspace and home for a memorable night of music new and old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC2brdf3D14

“There’s a thing about getting older that you hear all about, how uncomfortable it is initially, and then you can either accept it and grow into it or you can fight it the rest of your life,” Parr told me. “And I feel like I came to a point where I understand that now. I understand that acceptance is going to be an essential part of my growth right now, because I’m growing older and that’s just how it’s going to be.

“And I’m grateful to be older and not dead.”

First Avenue Show – Taped by Tommy The Beard