Front Parlour Ballads by Richard Thompson

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.