Front Parlour Ballads
Front Parlour Ballads | ||||
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Studio album by Richard Thompson | ||||
Released | August 2005 | |||
Recorded | 2004 at Trellis Sound, Pacific Palisades, California | |||
Genre | Contemporary folk | |||
Length | 46:47 | |||
Label | Cooking Vinyl | |||
Producer | Richard Thompson and Simon Tassano | |||
Richard Thompson chronology | ||||
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Professional ratings | |
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Aggregate scores | |
Source | Rating |
Metacritic | 75/100[1] |
Review scores | |
Source | Rating |
Rolling Stone | [2] |
Allmusic | [3] |
Front Parlour Ballads is the eleventh studio album by Richard Thompson, released in 2005.
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
- "Let It Blow"
- "For Whose Sake?"
- "Miss Patsy"
- "Old Thames Side"
- "How Does Your Garden Grow?"
- "My Soul, My Soul"
- "Cressida"
- "Row, Boys Row"
- "The Boys Of Mutton Street"
- "Precious One"
- "A Solitary Life"
- "Should I Betray?"
- "When We Were Boys At School"
Personnel
- Richard Thompson - electric guitar, acoustic guitar, mandolin, accordion, bass guitar and vocals
- Debra Dobkin - percussion
References
- ↑ "Front Parlour Ballads by Richard Thompson". Retrieved 3 October 2016.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Deming, Mark. Front Parlour Ballads at AllMusic. Retrieved 1 September 2011.