Why John Prine Matters

When John Prine passed away of Covid-19 in early April, I wrote on Facebook:

"For 45 years, my songwriting method has been:

--Write enough of the lyrics to frame out the song.

--Sit down with the guitar, accept the first thing that comes out, and hang the lyrics on it.

--Then alter it so it doesn't sound so obviously like my songwriting hero, John Prine."

When Maire Anne read it, she said that while she loved John Prine too, she was surprised at what I'd written. After all, she said, she rarely hears me play John Prine cover tunes, we don't often listen to his music in the house, and we'd never gone to see him live.

It was a completely valid observation.

I had to think about it.

Let me give you the pre-listen argument (that is, before I went back and listened to the entire JP catalog). If you're a singer-songwriter, the reason why John Prine matters is that he is the physical manifestation of the argument that songwriting not only matters, but that it can be everything—that even if your voice isn't great and your guitar playing and chordal skills are nothing out of the ordinary and you don't have a Justin Bieber face, if you diligently craft memorable songs and sing and play them without compromise or a hint of artifice, you can find your audience, move people with your material, develop a following, and maybe even have a career.

There. I said it, and I find tears welling up as I type it. Really, I probably don't need to say another word.

Prine wasn't part of that big first wave of my exposure to singer-songwriters—Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, CSN, and Neil Young—that washed over me in junior high, augmented by Jackson Browne and Dan Fogelberg in high school. I believe I came to Prine sometime in my first few years at UMass. I'd been writing songs since I was about 13, most of them centered on love and heartbreak, most of them flowery and not very good. Hearing Prine's first album when I was about 20, I was so blown away by the sparse lyrics and simple fingerpicking in the songs "Sam Stone" and "Hello In There" that my writing style shifted instantly in that direction. To this date, there's still no greater single influence on my writing. In the late 1970s, I wrote a song called "My Grandpa" that wears this right out on its sleeve.

But not long after that, I hung a right into rock and roll where I remained for nearly 20 years. I didn't pay much attention to singer-songwriter music, and became more enamored by things like Elvis Costello's wordplay. If Prine had a new song that recieved airplay, I heard it, but other than that, he sunk below the radar for me. I thought about him in the way that Sam Elliott describes "The Dude" at the end of "The Big Lebowski." It was good knowing he was out there, The Prine, takin' her easy for all us songwriters. Sheesh. I sure hope he makes the finals. Something like that.

When I returned to doing singer-songwriter music in the mid-1990s, I regularly went to the open mic at Passim in Cambridge. One of the regulars was Mary Gauthier, who began playing a song of hers called "I Drink" ("Fish swim / birds fly / lovers yell / mamas cry / old men /sit and think / I drink"). The simple lyrics, fingerpicking, and three-cord structure, combined with Mary's twangy singing and speaking voice, were so reminiscent of John Prine, at least to me, that I wondered how she could get away with it. Of course, she wasn't "getting away" with anything; it was the first of many great songs of Mary's that resulted in her having a career. Ten years later, former Passim director Betsy Siggins put together a benefit concert with John Prine, Mary Gauthier, and my departed friend, Fall River singer-songwriter Michael Troy, a triple-triumph of voice, craft, and authenticity. 'Till the day I die I will regret missing this show.

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At the start of this post, I made it sound like I actively ape John Prine in my songwriting. I don't. It's more that there are two modes I slip into when I'm lazy. One is "sounds like Prine" mode. The other is "sounds like Neil Young's 'In The Field of Opportunity It's Plowin' Time Again' " mode. When I find that I'm writing something in "Prine mode," I WILL add a bridge or a refrain that's more chordally complex than what he'd do to set it off. When I find myself in the "Field of Opportunity" mode, I simply junk the song.

But there's no denying the influence of Prine's rhyming and economy of language on my writing. In "Hello In There," Prine wrote:

"It'd been years

Since the kids had grown

A life of their own

Left us alone"

It takes a while to appreciate what's novel about this. There's nothing inventive about rhyming "grown," "own," and "alone." What makes it quintessentially Prine is that none of these rhyming words have the accent. The accents are two syllables before:

"It'd been years

Since the KIDS had grown

A life OF their own

Left US alone"

This makes the song incredibly conversational and intimate, hiding its craft in plain sight. It's one of the things that fell on my ears when I first heard it and made me think "holy crap, this is something new."

There's a direct line between this and a verse in a recent song of mine, where the accent on the third line is on the word "third," not on the final rhyming word:

"It's the vote that's been hacked

It's the deck that's been stacked

I might have a third act

But I doubt a fourth"

I smile to myself when ever I sing "third act," knowing full well where it comes from.

Content-wise, most songs are ABOUT something. They may even be linear enough that they tell stories. Not all of them, of course; some songs are evocative instead, leaving YOU to try to figure out what they're about. I think of Jackson Browne's "Something Fine" and Neil Young's "Harvest" as evocative songs. Their beauty is in their mystery. You could, in fact, argue that Prine's best-known song, "Angel From Montgomery," almost falls into the evocative category. But regardless, it's the combination of Prine's authentic-as-hard-work voice, along with simple words, simple chords, and a great melody, put together in a way that creates a Mondrain painting, its genius cloaked in its simplicity.

Melody is the most underrated part of singer-songwriter music. Yes, the major currency of the artist-audience transaction is intimacy and connection via the writer singing his or her own material, and no it doesn't melodically need to be Cole Porter, but songs with good melodies are more likely to be memorable than songs with bad ones, and Prine was astonishingly good at this. He could wring a memorable melody over three chords like no one's business. When you hear Prine start to sing a three-chord song you've never heard, you think "Oh here's another one that sounds like 'Paradise,' " and by the end of the song, he's got you and you want to hear it again. It almost isn't fair.

Structurally, most of Prine's songs are exceedingly simple. Most eschew the ubiquitous ABABCAB (verse-refrain-verse-refrain-bridge-verse-refrain) format and run without a bridge, consisting simply of verses and a refrain. (Interestingly, most of Bob Dylan's best-known songs are bridge-less as well.) Chordally, most Prine songs actually ARE three-chord songs, maybe with a 4th passing chord. There are never "jazz chords," not even a major 7th. Prine typically either strums or uses a standard Travis pick with the thumb doing an alternating bass. However, in the intros to many of the Travis-picked songs, he fingers some of the high strings on the off-beats, between the thumb-picked bass notes. Sometimes he's playing the melody, as he does in "Souvenirs," sometimes he's implying the melody or containing part of it, as it does in "Hello In There," but in either case, I think it's an identifiable part of the sound of some of his best songs.

Few songwriters have the sense of aplomb (self-assurance, confidence with style) that Prine has with his lyrics. In the opening verse of the brilliant "Speed of the Sound of Loneliness," he says:

"You come home late and you come home early

You come on big when you're feeling small

You come home straight and you come home curly

Sometimes you don't come home at all"

That's a great bit of songwriting, both the playful "early/curly" rhyme and the less-obvious interior "late/straight" rhyme. But then to drop the refrain:

"So what in the world's come over you

And what in heaven's name have you done

You've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness

You're out there running just to be on the run"

It's just jaw-droppingly good, and so accessible. Who hasn't felt that they've been out there running just to be on the run? And that's the thing about Prine. There are just so damned many of these lines that you hear and think both "damn that's a great turn of the phrase" as well as "damn that's great observation."

Let's talk about "Angel From Montgomery" again for a minute. Folks have written about the rule-breaking nature of this written-by-a-man-in-a-woman's-interior-voice song, about how its appeal is its universal sense of existential dread, and about how it's the poster child for the "songwriting is everything" argument. Regarding that last point, I actually think the opposite. I think that, unlike nearly every other great John Prine song, the song never would've gotten legs without Bonnie Raitt not only singing it, but doing a changed version of it. She sings a proper major 3rd in the verse, on the "I AM an old woman" note (instead of Prine's bluesy flatting of the 3rd). And, crucially, her version removes those odd annoying eighth-note rhythmic drops in the verse and refrain to make the song more accessible, leaving only a half-measure drop at the end of the refrains. It drives me crazy whenever I hear a coffeehouse performer play it and get the rhythmic stutter-steps wrong. This was never Prine's go-to song for me, but if it was his meal ticket that paid his rent (and it probably was), then I thank the universe for providing it. That having been said, it is moving beyond words to see recent videos of now-70-year-old Bonnie sing it, as the "I am an old woman" opening line has taken on an almost cosmic resonance.

The other thing about Prine's songwriting is that he is very funny without being pegged as a "funny songwriter." This is something that most singer-songwriters would kill for—to be taken seriously, but not so seriously that your humor is rejected as being out of character, nor to have your serious songs rejected because people expect you to be funny. And it's satisfying that, since funny songs are funniest when there's an audience laughing, on Prine's 3rd album "Revenge," the song "Dear Abby" is a live recording with just Prine and his guitar in front of a large audience.

Lastly, if I'm going to talk more about Prine's influence on me (and I guess I am), I'd have to add how he handles his vocals. He doesn't have a great voice, but it's HIS voice, and it needs to only be good enough to not distract from those exceptional lyrics. The folksy twang in both his speaking and singing voice I assume came from his parents being from Kentucky even though he was born and raised in suburban Chicago. As a guy born on Long Island and living most of my life in Massachusetts, I've often longed for a nasal Americana twang that seems to give one a leg up toward rootsy-sounding authenticity. I don't have one and I won't fake one, but I HAVE picked up two habits from listening to John Prine songs. One is enunciating syllabic transitions sharply so there's some rhythmic effect to them. The other is clipping the ends off notes, which serves two purposes. The first is that, if you don't have a great voice, why hold a note? The second is that it naturally draws attention back toward the lyric. There. Now you'll never be able to listen to me sing without doing an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like point-and-shriek.

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I spend a lot of time in the garage doing automotive work. There's a laptop connected to a sound system in there. Usually I'll just leave an internet radio station on, but sometimes I'll select an artist and do a deep dive. Not long ago I stepped through the Steve Earle discography, and found that I liked just about every album, returning to several of them for repeated listenings. Before that, I stepped through Townes Van Zandt, unearthing some gems that made me put down the tools and just listen. This week I did the same with John Prine, starting at the beginning and methodically working my way through to the present.

And...

When listened to this way, it's really not very good. I was actively disappointed.

Hear me out.

The first album is, of course, legendary. It has the almost criminally good combination of "Illegal Smile," Hello In There," "Sam Stone," "Paradise," "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore," and of course "Angel From Montgomery." It deserves every bit of the legend, even if the recording is reverb-heavy, as a lot of stuff was back then. The story that Kris Kristofferson heard him in 1970 and helped get him signed to Atlantic Records is completely believable, and if John Prine wrote nothing else new for decades, those six songs alone would make him deserving of accolades. And as great as that first record was, Prine put out a lot of great material after it, so I don't think it's like, say, Jackson Browne's or James Taylor's first records, where you can argue that they never equaled it.

And you can't help but like the final album, "Tree of Forgiveness." I mean, it's the last one, and you have to love that great—and prophetic—final song "When I Get To Heaven" ("Gonna have a cocktail / vodka and ginger ale / gonna smoke a cigarette that's niiiiine miiiiiiles long / gonna kiss that pretty girl / on the tilt-a whirl / 'cause this old man is goin to town"). And, in these Trumpster-riddled times, you have to appreciate "Caravan of Fools."

But overall, making records in a studio isn't what a singer-songwriter naturally does, and taking one guitar and one vocal like a singer-songwriter does live and recording it isn't what a record label naturally does. In fact, I'd argue that the difference between a singer-songwriter and a recording artist is that the singer-songwriter struggles to make records that convey the same sense of intimacy that they convey live, whereas the recording artist tries to do live shows that convey what's on the record. I haven't read Prine's biography, nor the online articles about his recording history, but to me, listening to the first 30 years of John Prine albums, they sound haphazard; clearly the labels were trying to get him to wear suits of sounds that didn't fit him. The earlier records are twangy and kind of shit-kicky, some of which works, much of which doesn't. Much of the late 70s through 90s stuff sounds like someone is spinning a Twister dial for sounds. The bluesy slow-burn of "I Ain't Hurtin' Nobody" works fine, but many things don't, at least not for me. Even songs I love like "It's a Big Old Goofy World" and "Some Humans Aren't Human," are tough to listen to in their original synthesizer-drenched versions. It's ironic that the album "The Missing Years" waits until the final spectacular track ("Jesus: The Missing Years") to give you something that's just Prine and his gutar, at which point I wanted to hug the computer. It's not until you reach the 2000 album "Souvenirs" (new versions of his classic songs) where they're handled with the light touch you'd expect of a contemporary singer-songwriter album, and the album has a fairly uniform sound.

And it's not only the production of much of the material that's problematic. It may be heresy to say, but many of the songs themselves really aren't all that memorable. You know a great John Prine song when you hear it, and it's not that EVERY great John Prine song has to have that mid-tempo Travis-picked feel you hear and instantly identify, but, well, let's just all agree that most of them do, and there were fewer unheard ones than I'd hoped. I did put my tools down when I heard the song "Souvenirs" off the second album "Diamond in the Rough" (amazingly, I'd never heard it), but I was surprised and disappointed that this didn't happen more often, and it never really happened with any whole album the way it did for me with Steve Earle.

Ouch.

But you know what? It doesn't matter. And here's why.

When I was listening to the albums on Youtube in the garage, when each one finished, Youtube would link to a live John Prine performance. Initially I found this annoying; if anything, I thought, in this age of algorithms, it should figure out what I was doing and simply link to the next album. But it made me discover "John Prine Live From Sessions at West 54th" recorded in 2001. This is a remarkable live show—prime Prine, if you will. The instrumentation is flawless, with just him, a bass player, and another guitarist. And the live small studio setting is as intimate as it gets. In this and many other videos of his live shows, you get to hear the seamless combination of Prine's speaking voice, his stage patter, and his singing voice that, together with the brilliant lyrics, the simple chord structures, and the earworm melodies, form the core of what he was, unencumbered by mediocre selections and inappropriate production. Maybe it's unfortunate that 50 years of studio albums aren't really the best way to experience Prine (at least it wasn't for me), but so what?

Look. Every singer-songwriter I know sounds better live than they do on studio recordings, and every artist has wheat to be separated from chaff. With his passing, John Prine leaves a body of material much of which is astonishingly good. And the best of it is certainly shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of anyone who wears the badge of singer-songwriter.

Perhaps the most satisfying thing to me about Prine's career is that the long arc of recognition bent toward him, and that the awards and accolades came his way before his decline and death, including a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in January. Not surprisingly, the praise went into overdrive with his passing. The headline of the obit in the New York Times called him "Chronicler of the Human Condition." I think that's overly academic. Certainly no one listens to John Prine and thinks "man, that guy really nails the shit out of chronicling the human condition." It's certainly not the combination of craft and heart that attracted me.

But in the spirit of The Big Lebowski, I'm glad that "The Prine" not only made it to the finals, he won the goddamn tournament.

John Prine "Souvenirs" Live at Sessions From West 54th