On tour, he doesn’t keep to a clique, as many musicians his age are wont to do, preferring instead to ferret out new voices. He took the stage for the first time at 24, and only then because he was dared to.
He was a mailman before he was a singer-songwriter, writing tunes to occupy his mind while walking miles-long routes through the Chicago suburbs. Then again, Prine has always defied convention. (“It dropped down lower and feels friendlier,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross.) Go figure. In conversation, he’s the same sunny blue-collar buddha who once said of his ratchety singing voice: “If you keep making the same mistake long enough, it becomes your style.” After bouts of cancer - one in his lung and one in his throat - his voice is raspier than ever. On his new album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” he fixates on heaven’s amenities - vodka and ginger ale and 9-mile cigarettes - while sparring with theological advice his father told him once: “Buddy, when your dead, you’re a dead peckerhead. He’s still every bit the Taoist poet who sang about what it might be like to cozy up to the skylight and talk to God - “Father forgive us for what we must do / You forgive us we’ll forgive you.” Nowadays, his nose is just a little closer to the glass. But it might just be a magic trick.īecause unlike so many household names, Prine, 72, has somehow been bettered, not bittered, by age. When I told friends I was interviewing Prine, the ones who didn’t beg to listen in on the call asked: “Wait, who is John Prine?” Yet, 48 years into his career, Prine is a largely unknown legend.
Goode.” Bob Dylan lists him among his favorite songwriters of all time. His self-titled 1971 album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2015, set between a John Coltrane album and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. John Prine has scrawled nearly an album’s worth of songs into the American Songbook. Wednesday, September 7th 2022 Home Page Close Menu
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