Parlour Ballads is the new album from Jon Boden, a piano led record full of sentimental ballads that tie together parlour music and folk song. Parlour Ballads seeks to awaken the sound of the old, well loved, slightly out of tune domestic piano and to reunite it with (or introduce it to) songs that might feel glad of the acquaintance.

“Parlour Music” is a genre that has been much derided over the centuries. Its heyday was the Victorian era when many middle-class houses had pianos and many children who could sight- read piano scores to a high level, musical literacy being highly prized. Parlour songs were composed and disseminated through sheet music, to be performed in private and public houses alike, but with an air of respectability not found in the music hall repertoire. This practice continued well into the twentieth century until technological advances supplanted the printed stave as the primary means of musical transmission.

“My great-great-grandfather Alphonse Cary (1848-1922) ran a music shop in Newbury and would, for a fee, perform the latest parlour songs, recording himself (accompanied on piano by a colleague) onto wax cylinder there and then for the customer to take away. Sadly I have yet to find any surviving cylinders of his voice.

I have been toying with the idea of a piano-based folk album for many years. Although I consider myself a competent-at-best pianist (my sight reading would certainly not have passed muster in the middle class Victorian parlour described above) I adore playing piano and have probably spent as many thousands of hours trying to get to grips with it as I have the fiddle or the guitar. In particular I love using it to accompany slow, sentimental ballads such as several of the tracks on this album”

Jon Boden is the stand out performer of his generation of traditional folk music, but he is an artist whose repertoire extends far beyond the boundaries of the genre.

Most recognisably he is the lead singer of the multi-award winning folk juggernaut Bellowhead, headlining shows at the Royal Albert Hall and selling hundreds of thousands of records. Jon also performs in his duo Spiers & Boden with John Spiers and has most recently toured with Eliza Carthy. Alongside his solo work and shows with the Remnant Kings he has been commissioned to compose and arrange for the likes of the Royal Shakespeare company.

Parlour Ballads was produced by long time collaborator Andy Bell and features The Remnant Kings – Sam Sweeney, Ben Nicholls, Rob Harbron, Sally Hawkins & M G Boulter. Paul Sartin was a key member of the Remnant Kings for ten years and was involved in the early developments of this album and we can hear his influence across the record.