Front Parlour Ballads

Front Parlour Ballads is the eleventh studio album by Richard Thompson, released in 2005.

Front Parlour Ballads
Studio album by
Richard Thompson
ReleasedAugust 2005
Recorded2004
StudioTrellis Sound, Pacific Palisades, California
GenreContemporary folk
Length46:47
LabelCooking Vinyl
ProducerRichard Thompson, Simon Tassano
Richard Thompson chronology
Live from Austin, TX
(2005)		 Front Parlour Ballads
(2005)		 Grizzly Man
(2006)
Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
SourceRating
Metacritic75/100[1]
Review scores
SourceRating
Rolling Stone [2]
Allmusic[3]

His 2005 release on the Cooking Vinyl label was a literally homemade album. Thompson's aim was to create an album that sounded small and intimate. Front Parlour Ballads has been hailed as his first solo, all acoustic album since 1981 but strictly speaking it's neither of those things - percussionist Debra Dobkin plays on two tracks, "Let It Blow" and "My Soul, My Soul" and Thompson himself adds electric guitar to the same two tracks.

Thompson had a small studio built in his garage at home and recorded the tracks onto his laptop computer, adding overdubs as he deemed necessary. Even Dobkin's contributions were recorded in the same way.

Thompson did not expect to sell many copies of Front Parlour Ballads. The critics, as usual, acclaimed the new release, but rather more surprising were strong early sales in both the U.S. and Britain, and Front Parlour Ballads debuted in the indie charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Track listing

All songs written by Richard Thompson

  1. "Let It Blow"
  2. "For Whose Sake?"
  3. "Miss Patsy"
  4. "Old Thames Side"
  5. "How Does Your Garden Grow?"
  6. "My Soul, My Soul"
  7. "Cressida"
  8. "Row, Boys Row"
  9. "The Boys Of Mutton Street"
  10. "Precious One"
  11. "A Solitary Life"
  12. "Should I Betray?"
  13. "When We Were Boys At School"

Personnel

References
  1. "Front Parlour Ballads by Richard Thompson". Retrieved 3 October 2016.
  2. Ringen, Jonathan. "Richard Thompson: Front Parlour Ballads : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone". rollingstone.com. Archived from the original on 2008-04-21. Retrieved 1 September 2011.
  3. Deming, Mark. Front Parlour Ballads at AllMusic. Retrieved 1 September 2011.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.