Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
“‘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,” Charlie Parr says of the cinematic title track and first single from his new album, ‘Rooming House,’ a conceptual folk opera set in the Upper Midwest, arriving October 16 via Smithsonian Folkways. “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.”
Animated & Illustrated by Drew Christie
Charlie Parr - guitar and vocals
Dave King - drums
“‘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,” Charlie Parr says of the cinematic title track and first single from his new album, ‘Rooming House,’ a conceptual folk opera set in the Upper Midwest, arriving October 16 via Smithsonian Folkways. “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.”
Animated & Illustrated by Drew Christie
Charlie Parr - guitar and vocals
Dave King - drums
