Charlie Overman - Charlie Overman - Red - VINYL LP

Over the last couple of decades, Charlie Parr has crisscrossed the world on tour more times than one can count. He also has released over a dozen albums of his songs, acclaimed for their poetic simplicity. Little Sun, his most ambitious album to date, was recorded with Tucker Martine (The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, My Morning Jacket) and features Parr augmenting his raw and affecting songs with stunning full-band arrangements. The remarkable backing band here includes Marisa Anderson, Victor Krummenacher, Andrew Borger, and Asher Fulero. Masterfully channeling the philosophical and transcendental qualities of the blues, Parr takes us on a journey through the winding streets of his imagination.

Given it's color by a pastorally evocative scoring of oboe and small orchestra, the Idillio Concertino lives up to it's name with calm and gentle cantabile writing throughout in Wolf-Ferrari's most neoclassical vein. The composer's declared idol was Mozart, and all three of these works seek to recover something of a timeless beauty which many locate in Viennese Classicism. InchWhen a piece of music touches our heart,Inch said Wolf-Ferrari, Inchwe do not need to understand why it does so indeed it is something that should not be understood, even were it possible to do so. We do not need to be botanists to perceive the beauty of a forest! In art, it is sentiment, not reason, which determines our reaction. Art does not desire an audience of initiates, a congregation of the faithful, but a pure and open heart.Inch This newly recorded album is for every listener who feels likewise. The solo instrument for the Suite-Concertino is the bassoon, but the dreamy mood prevails in the long-breathed opening Nocturne, which is followed by a quick, strumming scherzo, a lovely heartfelt Canzone and a gentle concluding Andante. This pair of concertos from 1933 is complemented by one of Wolf-Ferrari's best-known instrumental works, the four-movement Serenade for Strings which dates from a full 40 years earlier, before the composer embarked on an operatic career. In this precociously mature work- written at the age of 17- Mozart is even more clearly a guiding light, as indeed he was for the composer's contemporary Busoni, who lends his name to this chamber orchestra based in the northeast of Italy.

Charlie Parr's 2021 album, Last of the Better Days Ahead, is a collection of powerful new songs about how one looks back on a life lived, as well as forward on what's still to come. It's spare production foregrounds Parr's poetic lyricism, his expressive, gritty voice ringing clear over deft acoustic guitar playing that references folk and blues motifs in Parr's own exploratory, idiosyncratic style. When it comes to what it all means, Parr says it best InchLast of the Better Days Ahead is a way for me to refer to the times I'm living in. I'm getting on in years, experiencing a shift in perspective that was once described by my mom as 'a time when we turn from gazing into the future to gazing back at the past, as if we're adrift in the current, slowly turning around.' Some songs came from meditations on the fact that the portion of our brain devoted to memory is also the portion responsible for imagination, and what that entails for the collected experiences that we refer to as our lives. Other songs are cultivated primarily from the imagination, but also contain memories of what may be a real landscape, or at least one inspired by vivid dreaming. The album represents 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.Inch