Charlie Parr is a nomad. He and Frances McDormand could share a five gallon pail and trade shifts at an Amazon warehouse in Georgia until Christmas. But just like the cast iron skillet you never wash in fear it will lose its flavor, countless days spent on the road have made troubador Parr’s latest record Last of the Better Days Ahead, and his live performances something to behold.

The Minnesota (even better, he’s one of us) folk-blues critter said in a recent interview that he doesn’t “ride freight trains or eat squirrels,” but we’re not so sure. According to liner note lore, Parr has played over 200 shows a year, stopping to wash his shirts in truck stop sinks—his pants are “made from other pants,” and “there might be a bobolink in his beard.”

And the poetic zeitgeist around his most recent release, Last of the Better Days Ahead (Smithsonian Folkways 2021), along with his Mosquito-Coast visage, point to pavement palate, all the way. It’s an authenticity that brings this album alive as a low-to-the-ground, visceral and alt-ethereal chronicle of what was, what is, and what might be for Parr’s characters. Characters who seem to always be on the edge of despair and sadness, served up with just a hint of resilience.

Last of the Better Days Ahead travels the road, and the characters that populate this travelogue all could be from the same town, or parts unknown. Parr himself currently is hard-touring down the highway through the cradle of the Civil war in support of the album. An album Parr recorded at Real Phonics Studios in Cleveland, Minnesota, which is somewhere near . . .Minnesota’s Whitefish Chain? No, but more on that later.

Parr played a recent gig in Asheville, North Carolina, at a place called the Grey Eagle, which looks seriously serious about its music. The Avetts have played there. Chuck Brodsky, The Lemonheads and Chris Smither all came through the Grey Eagle in November. So like the Radisson (speaking of Frances McDormand), you know it’s gotta be pretty good.

Based out of Duluth, where the gales of November come early, and water and the horizon blend together on one of four sides (as he puts it), Parr is a north-country poet with the sonic soul of Koerner, Ray and Glover. Last of the Better Days Ahead spins like a journey through hard country, and you might be sitting on Charlie’s lap as he tells stories about life.

The cottage in “Blues for Whitefish Lake,” one of the true gems here, isn’t for sale—nothing is for sale here, it’s abandoned. Like the last shirt Parr saw his father wearing, it’s long gone. But the narrator, steering what must be an old, old Lund—is Minnesota-bound determined to walk back through that old cottage if he can just locate it along the fading shoreline. Of course he can. It’s whether he actually can revisit the past, and face his own mortality, that’s the real question. Parr himself is the narrator here by his own admission--but he’s re-written the story. In his version he doesn’t get to troll dardevle spoons and catch pike on the way home with dad. “Blues for Whitefish Lake” is a must listen for any one who has ever run an outboard, spent time at cabins, visited lakeside bars, or watched a sunset on a Minnesota lake. It’s sonic shore lunch.

“Everyday Opus” is the story Mike Cooley’s kid racer in the Drive by Truckers’ “Daddy’s Cup” might have told, had daddy not given him some purpose and direction. In an eerily similar sonic setting, Parr’s loner janitor is as restless as Cooley’s adrenaline junkie, but has nowhere to wheel. No engine to disassemble. No one to push to the rail. Those days, if they ever were, are gone. All he has is every day, unknown neighbors, and “dodging all the bricks” that are breaking out his lights. No, there isn’t a lot of hope in “Everyday Opus,” but this doesn’t stop it from sounding great.

And there are brighter moments on Last of the Better Days Ahead, none more so than “817 Oakland Ave” which reminds that it only lives if you give it away, so spread the good stuff in life around. There’s a video for this one on Youtube—which seems un-Parr like, but hey.

Tony, the tramp in “Walking Back from Willmar”—a main-street regular who absolutely rides trains and eats squirrels--despite the locked church door and the “cold, cold ground,” can shrug and smile a bit. The stray dogs in town love him. He’ll maybe head south when the weather comes. He has some secrets.

But most of the hope on Last of the Better Days Ahead is understated, requiring a harder look. There’s rain, there’s cold, and a resigned drift down rail lines and rivers, crossing deserts, and sleeping in crates. But there is a resilience to Parr’s music as well. In these characters’ world, “time is a game played by smarter beings,” but Robert Johnson’s blues still play like perfect poetry at sunrise—harsh and sweet—on a morning coming down.

The load out, fade-down-the-road of the album is “Decoration Day” (another vague Truckers nod here?) a fifteen minute iron-range meditation—to which you just are better off committing—as the album’s actual opus. Try to keep your eyes on the horizon, until the sun goes down. It’s many pieces of music in one, with local virtuoso Liz Draper on stand-up base. Roll with it, and see what you find—or what finds you.

Circle your calendars because Parr will be doing a Sunday residency at the Turf Club in St. Paul for five dates in January. Then he’s back on the road, heading to the U.K. and the cradle of World War II— the Netherlands and Belgium, come Spring. What the highways and hedgerows will bring him will be determined, but I hope he stops for pommes frites and a warm bath once in a while. At least….once in a long while.