Front Parlour Ballads is an album by Richard Thompson released in 2005.

His 2005 release on the Cooking Vinyl

Cooking Vinyl

Cooking Vinyl is a UK-based independent record company, founded in 1986. Its original orientation was toward contemporary folk music—notably Billy Bragg, and Michelle Shocked's Texas Campfire Tapes, recorded on a Sony Walkman, one of its first releases...

 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

Laptop

A laptop, also called a notebook, is a personal computer for mobile use. A laptop integrates most of the typical components of a desktop computer, including a display, a keyboard, a pointing device and speakers into a single unit...

, 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

Indie (music)

In music, independent music, often shortened to indie music or "indie" is a term used to describe independence from major commercial record labels or their subsidiaries, and an autonomous, Do-It-Yourself approach to recording and publishing....

 charts on both sides of the atlantic.

Track listing

All songs written by Richard Thompson

1. "Let It Blow"
2. "For Whose Sake?"
3. "Miss Patsy"
4. "Old Thames Side"
5. "How Does Your Garden Grow?"
6. "My Soul, My Soul"
7. "Cressida"
8. "Row, Boys Row"
9. "The Boys Of Mutton Street"
10. "Precious One"
11. "A Solitary Life"
12. "Should I Betray?"
13. "When We Were Boys At School"

Personnel

• Richard Thompson - electric guitar
  Electric guitar
  An electric guitar is a guitar that uses the principle of direct electromagnetic induction to convert vibrations of its metal strings into electric audio signals. The signal generated by an electric guitar is too weak to drive a loudspeaker, so it is amplified before sending it to a loudspeaker...
  
  , acoustic guitar, mandolin
  Mandolin
  A mandolin is a musical instrument in the lute family . It descends from the mandore, a soprano member of the lute family. The mandolin soundboard comes in many shapes—but generally round or teardrop-shaped, sometimes with scrolls or other projections. A mandolin may have f-holes, or a single...
  
  , accordion
  Accordion
  The accordion is a box-shaped musical instrument of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone family, sometimes referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist....
  
  , bass guitar
  Bass guitar
  The bass guitar is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb , or by using a pick....
  
   and vocals
• Debra Dobkin - percussion