Aww heck!
I have said before it was the longest time after John’s death (from complications around Covid-19 he ws the first ’star’ I heard it claim!) that I couldn’t play his music or watch him sing anything but I got there. We miss him sorely
He wrote about the problems of everyday life, about loneliness, the elderly, victims of war and those abandoned by the American dream, but did so with a blend of poignancy, anger and sudden bursts of humour. So he would sing about an injured soldier leaving Vietnam with a morphine addiction “with a purple heart and a monkey on his back”, about Christmas in prison, and then, about an advice columnist: “Dear Abby, Dear Abby … My fountain pen leaks, my wife hollers at me and my kids are all freaks.”
Bonnie Raitt, who covered one of his best known songs, Angel from Montgomery, compared him to Mark Twain for his combination of tenderness, wisdom and “homespun sense of humour”, while Bob Dylan, who admired his “beautiful songs”, commented that “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree.”
Robin Denselow / The Guardian
In a career that lasted more than 50 years, Prine saw his songs covered by an extraordinary array of different artists including Raitt, Johnny Cash, Carly Simon, Bette Midler, the Everly Brothers, Joan Baez and many more. There were lengthy periods when he failed to produce new material – partly because of his battles with cancer – but his later albums were as original as his early work and helped him to win a new young audience towards the end of his career.
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