Singer, songwriter, and guitarist Charlie Parr will release new album Rooming House via Smithsonian Folkways on October 16, 2025. Described as a “folk opera”, it marks his 20th album and may be his most ambitious work yet.
Around the core of seven songs, the narrative “draws listeners into the lives of ordinary people navigating hardship and finding strength within a fragile yet vital sense of community.” Set in the Upper Midwest, the album is brought to life by Parr on vocals and guitar, and Dave King (The Bad Plus) on drums. Rooming House “paints an intimate portrait of people searching for dignity in circumstances often beyond their control.”
The album’s title track, “Rooming House” is out now, alongside an animated video. Parr has announced a November Midwest/East Coast tour that will include dates in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Nashville, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Toronto, Indianapolis and more.
Rooming House unfolds as “a collection of interconnected vignettes” centered on a shared home and the people who pass through it. Parr’s own experiences, and years spent living in Minneapolis rooming houses, became part of a “larger meditation on economic insecurity in America and the difficult decisions countless people make simply to survive.”
Parr says of 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.
While the album’s themes may seem heavy, it also “refuses to look away from struggle while celebrating the resilience found in everyday lives and the communities built when there is nowhere else to turn.”
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
