Front Parlour Ballads

Front Parlour Ballads
Studio album by Richard Thompson
Released	9 August 2005[1]
Recorded	2004
Studio	Trellis Sound, Pacific Palisades, California
Genre	Contemporary folk
Length	46:47
Label	Cooking Vinyl
Producer	Richard Thompson, Simon Tassano
Richard Thompson chronology
Live from Austin, TX (2005) Front Parlour Ballads (2005) Grizzly Man (2006)

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	75/100[2]
Review scores
Source	Rating
Rolling Stone	[3]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[4]
Allmusic	[1]

Front Parlour Ballads is the twelfth studio album by Richard Thompson, recorded in 2004.

Released on the Cooking Vinyl label in August 2005, Front Parlour Ballads was literally a homemade album. Thompson's aim was to create an album that sounded small and intimate. It was hailed as his first solo, all acoustic album since 1981– but strictly speaking it's neither of those things – percussionist Debra Dobkin played on two tracks ("Let It Blow" and "My Soul, My Soul") and Thompson himself added 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 his own overdubs as he deemed necessary. 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.