![]() There’s a lot of advice in Prine’s tale about a soldier and a topless dancer who run off together to live the good life. Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images He phrases it like a children’s sing-along, emphasizing the final two syllables of each line: “I chased a rainbow down a one-way street - dead end/And all my friends turned out to be insurance - sales men.” The imagery is trippy throughout, but it’s Prine’s ad-libbed rhymes at the song’s end that double down on the childlike wonder: “Well done/Hot dog bun/My sister’s a nun.” Such fun. Lyrics about having “the key to escape reality” and paranoid run-ins with the law might suggest otherwise, but it’s Prine’s rhythmic delivery that makes the song so inebriating. The opening track to Prine’s self-titled 1971 debut, “Illegal Smile” became an anthem for weed-smokers - despite the songwriter claiming it wasn’t really about that. She performed it movingly earlier this year at the Grammys, when Prine received a Lifetime Achievement Award. “Angel From Montgomery” became a country standard, covered most famously by Bonnie Raitt, whose slow, soulful version highlighted the song’s theme of emulsified female desire. Prine’s most widely known song is an indelible portrait of “a middle-aged woman who feels older than she is.” The song’s stripped-down country-rock arrangement belied the intricacy of Prine’s lyrics, which home in on details like the flies buzzing around the kitchen sink and the rodeo poster that sends her into a reverie of youthful recollection, and its matter-of-fact description of marital stasis and midlife depression were groundbreakingly real. Image Credit: Denise Sofranko/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images ![]() There’s really no such thing as a bad Prine song. I still tend to believe that’s the way to tackle it today.” So when you’re talking about intangible things, like emotions, the listener can fill in the blanks and you just draw the foundation. “Rather than tell them everything, you save your details for things that exist. “I think the more the listener can contribute to the song, the better the more they become part of the song, and they fill in the blanks,” Prine told Zollo. But his conversation with Paul Zollo for Bluerailroad is a master class in songwriting. Prine, modest about his talent, didn’t give a lot of interviews. Many emulated it, but only he could do it. His style, inspired by John Steinbeck, was deceptively simple. Prine wrote for working people, sad people, old people, and lost people. ![]() As he served in the Vietnam War and joined the post office as a mailman, Prine kept writing songs about his life: “Hello in There,” about the loneliness of an old empty-nest couple, the kind he encountered on his mail route, and “Sam Stone,” about a drug-addicted veteran who never really came home from the war, were just two examples. Even at that young age, Prine could channel humor and heartbreak just like his heroes Hank Williams and Roger Miller. John Prine wrote his first two songs, “Sour Grapes” and “The Frying Pan,” when he was 14.
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