INTERVIEW
The Minnesota blues legend joins us, with a beautiful Mule Resophonic guitar in hand, to talk about the ritualistic nature of playing, the cathartic power of improvisation, and how slowing down can really help you hear the music
It’s before soundcheck in a cool (in both senses) cellar at Bristol’s Exchange venue and prolific blues stalwart Charlie Parr is part way through a UK tour, his first since the pandemic. We immediately get to talking about tour exhaustion and finding the time to play guitar, something Charlie has managed to remain consistent with for decades. “Yeah, playing guitar is something I do every day, no matter what,” he says, firmly. “The nice thing about lockdown was that I got to practise – because when you’re touring you never get to do the kind of practice that you do at home. Soundchecking and performing are definitely not practising; your focus is on something different and the rest of the day is spent travelling, so you can’t play.”
Charlie’s dedication to his instrument is clear, which must have made the time after breaking his shoulder in 2018 particularly difficult. “I destroyed my shoulder falling off a skateboard,” he grins. “When I was 15, I was made out of rubber, but this time I could hear everything in there just [crunching sound]. It was gone! The morning after the accident I realised it would be the first day in decades that I hadn’t played a guitar. Every day I would play – even if I was really busy, I would poke at it a little bit – so it felt devastating.” He pauses a moment. “There’s this part in [1973 novel] Breakfast Of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut where he’s talking about a painter who says that nothing matters except putting paint on canvas. All of the selling and crap doesn’t matter – you could put them in a space capsule with a canvas and paints and they’d be happy. I feel that way about guitar playing. If I get to touch the strings and play a little lick and make some sounds, that’s all I’m after. Everything else is gravy.”
But there’s plenty of gravy, too. Charlie has put out 16 studio albums, plus compilations and collaborations. His most recent release, last year’s Last Of The Better Days Ahead, is a beauty, deliberate in pace and sparse in arrangement, with a reflective nature that is in keeping with many people’s moods after the past couple of years. “This record was all written in the first months after the lockdown began,” Charlie tells us. “But it was always going to be a more inwardlooking album and I think my writing has been leaning that way for a little while. It’s because I’m feeling ageing hard… I don’t remember in my 30s and 40s thinking, ‘I’m 35 years old,’ but now
