John Prine

Essential Albums

  • Fair & Square
    Fair & Square

    After a nine-year hiatus since his last album of new material, a songwriting legend returns in fine form, with twelve originals and a pair of imaginatively executed covers. A battle with neck cancer has left Prine's voice rougher-edged than before, but the overall effect is as warm and homey as ever. Producing his own work for the first time, Prine employs mostly acoustic arrangements of guitar, pedal steel, mandolin, and accordion, with occasional bursts of electric guitar (see his honky-tonk take on the Carter Family's "Bear Creek Blues"). Highlights include the sweetly upbeat "The Glory of Love" and "Crazy as a Loon," with its wry dissection of life in three different cities of dreams. Prine has lost neither his sense of humor nor his conscience, as in the politically pointed "Some Humans Ain't Human": "Some people ain't kind/You open up their hearts/And here's what you'll find/A few frozen pizzas/Some ice cubes with hair/A broken popsicle/You don't want to go there." Listening to Fair and Square is like hearing from an old friend who's been away too long: it's thoroughly worth the wait.

  • The Missing Years (Bonus Track Version)
    The Missing Years (Bonus Track Version)

    In the late 1980s, John Prine’s records weren’t selling like they once did. So his longtime manager, Al Bunetta, made a big move, mortgaging his house to raise enough money to hire Howie Epstein—the bass player for Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers—to produce Prine’s most ambitious album yet. The result is 1991’s The Missing Years, which includes guest appearances from Petty, John Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen, and Bonnie Raitt, and features some of the strongest material of Prine’s career. Just listen to the rambling “The Sins of Memphisto,” which includes the couplet: “Sally used to play with her hula hoops/Now she tells her problems to therapy groups.” Throughout The Missing Years, Prine pulls from his own life. On “All the Best”—written as his second marriage was falling apart—he confesses how hard it is to truly wish the best for an ex-lover. “Everything is Cool,” meanwhile, finds him emerging from relationship rubble to start again with a positive attitude. It all leads to “Jesus the Missing Years,” a surreal story imagining what Jesus Christ did between the ages of 12 and 33—the mysterious 18-year-gap in Christ’s life that’s not documented in the Bible. According to Prine’s song, JC saw Rebel Without a Cause, then went home and invented Santa Claus (he also traveled a lot, and discovered The Beatles). Prine later said he was afraid to sing “Jesus the Missing Years” after completing it: “I thought they were going to look at me and say, ‘You’ve done it. You’ve crossed the line. You need the straightjacket.’ But if I let it sit for a couple weeks and it still affects me, it’s something I would like to hear somebody say, then I figure, my instinct is as good as a normal person.” His instincts proved right: “Jesus the Missing Years” became a fan favorite, and The Missing Years would win Prine his first Grammy.

  • German Afternoons
    German Afternoons

    For 1986's German Afternoons, John Prine hooked up with the progressive bluegrass band New Grass Revival, which returned him to the traditional folk feeling of his early career while also coloring Prine’s exquisitely bleak mid-career songs. Most of the tunes here address a love that won’t resolve itself. “If She Were You,” “Lulu Walls," and “Out of Love” are what Prine once called “classic ‘she left me’ songs,” though Prine gives them twists that separate them from hundreds of earlier tracks in that tradition. “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” imagines depression as a G-force from outer space, as New Grass conjures up a gorgeously understated track reminiscent of J.J. Cale. Few people can skirt the line between tradition and subversion like Prine. He can pull off the completely goofy “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian” and then cut a clear-eyed version of Leon Payne’s classic country weeper “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me.” The album ends with a reprise of “Paradise,” which first appeared on Prine’s 1971 debut and became one of his signatures. Back then it was a nostalgic song of home. Now he sings it as an old man’s benediction.

  • John Prine
    John Prine

    Looking back, it’s funny that John Prine was considered one of America’s Next Dylans. Rootsy guy with acoustic guitar, yeah. But beyond that, the comparison doesn’t hold. If anything, Prine’s 1971 debut offered a kind of rebuttal to Dylan’s poetic opacity, a set of songs whose philosophies were as immediate as bumper stickers and juggled subjects of existential heft with conversational wit. Be kind to old folks (“Hello in There”), smoke weed if you need to (“Illegal Smile”), beware your glass house (“Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore”), and know that behind every face lies a lifetime of aspirations and disappointments not even their beholder may understand (“Angel From Montgomery”). Produced by Atlantic Records’ legendary Arif Mardin and executed by a group of Memphis musicians who had worked with Elvis and Dusty Springfield, the album was a musically square affair—drummer Hayward Bishop later complained that finding a groove within Mardin’s prescribed confines was like trying to milk a dog. But listen to the hayride bomp of “Spanish Pipedream” or the waltz of “Donald and Lydia” (which may or may not be about a missed connection and two people pleasuring themselves to the memory of each other hours after the opportunity passed) and one hears the bridges between Nashville, Appalachia, and New York, country polish and folk ruggedness, hippie and heartland and the kind of universal humanism that knows no cultural lines. Listen to it once and you’ll sing along to a couple by the second chorus; listen again and see if you don’t hit them all.

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About John Prine

John Prine kicked off his career in a 1970s musical landscape that overflowed with game-changing singer/songwriters, but he still managed to become known as one of his generation’s most powerful song poets. Born in Maywood, IL, in 1946, he learned about folk and country music at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music as a teen and started playing around the city’s folk clubs in 1969. With the support of Kris Kristofferson, Prine landed a record deal and released his self-titled debut LP in 1971. A milestone effort containing compassionate, plainspokenly poetic future classics about dissatisfied wives (“Angel From Montgomery”), heroin-addicted Vietnam vets (“Sam Stone”), and lonely senior citizens (“Hello In There”), it quickly made Prine a cult hero. His wry humor, rootsy flavor, and rough-hewn vocal style put his messages over perfectly. Prine’s quirky work never broke through to the mainstream, but there was never a time when he wasn’t considered one of America’s finest songwriters. From the early ’70s to the present, his songs have been widely covered, with Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Cash, Miranda Lambert, and countless others expanding on his legacy. Prine had a long run of impactful albums that took him through the mid-’90s, but he didn’t release any original material between 1995 and 2005 (though he made celebrated records of covers and duets). He came roaring back to form with 2005’s Grammy-winning Fair and Square, and, after battling health problems, he released one more album of new songs, 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy shortly before his death on March 19, 2020, due to complications from COVID-19.

HOMETOWN
Maywood, IL, United States
BORN
October 10, 1946
GENRE
Singer/Songwriter

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