Remembering John Prine :: Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings - Tree of Forgiveness :: ‘LAKE MARIE'

The West 54th Street Sessions - Lake Marie

 Five year anniversary of Tree of Forgiveness (yes really) and three years gone as one of the first victims of the virus (Covid-19) we remember John Prine

Here at NPR 

A 22x28 print signed by photographer and friend of John, Jim McGuire, is available to be purchased here https://www.nashvilleportraits.com/prints

A few days ago, April 4, 1995 came the 28th anniversary of this fine album bought when it came out over here:

Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings is the 12th studio album by American folk singer John Prine, released today, April 4th, in 1995. The cover artwork is by John Callahan. If there had been a vinyl copy ever released I would own it. I have hopes that Oh'Boy will soon release this on vinyl as it should be. So for now we go with Cassettes, CD's, and digital versions.

Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings was produced by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers bassist Howie Epstein, who produced Prine's 1991 Grammy Winning comeback album The Missing Years. The album features several songs Prine co-wrote with Nashville veteran Gary Nicholson and includes contributions from guitarist Waddy Wachtel and Marianne Faithfull. It was recorded, as The Missing Years had been, at Huh Sound Theater, Los Angeles and Pacifique Recording Studios, North Hollywood – which was really Epstein's house – and featured many of the same musicians that played on the previous album. However, Prine told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 1995, "I didn’t want to try to come up with The Missing Years II. Sure, it came out big and shiny, but it won’t help if you put horns on it if the songs aren’t good." Prine also admitted that he and Epstein had come to the end of their working relationship: "We kinda overextended ourselves on Lost Dogs...I think we were pretty tired of each other. At the end, we shook hands and said, 'OK, we did it.'"

"Lake Marie" is arguably the album's most popular track. The song was inspired in part by Prine's crumbling marriage and a series of grisly murders the singer remembered the Chicago news media having a field day with when he was a kid. The John Prine Shrine website quotes the singer discussing his inspiration for the song: "It's an actual place along the Illinois-Wisconsin border. There's an entire chain of lakes along there, small lakes, and I remember as a teenager growing up in Chicago, a lot of the teenagers would go to these lakes and in the summer time kind of get away from the city. Lake Marie was kind of just one that stuck out in my mind. About '59, '60, '61, I grew up in Maywood - it's a western suburb of Chicago, and we started hearing about murders that weren't related to the mob. You know, John Wayne Gacy was like, about two towns away from me and you just hear about it. The suburbs were kind of thought to be a pretty safe place at the time, and then some of these unexplained murders would show up every once in a while, where they'd find people in the woods somewhere. I just kind of took any one of them, not one in particular, and put it as if it was in a TV newscast. It was a sharp left turn to take in a song, but when I got done with it, I kind of felt like it's what the song needed right then." In 2005 Lloyd Sachs wrote that the song was "one of Prine’s masterpieces." In a 2009 interview with The Huffington Post, Bob Dylan commented, "If I had to pick one song of his, it might be 'Lake Marie'."

"Ain't Hurtin' Nobody" was inspired by one of the singer's childhood trips to the beach and would be chosen to be Prine's second music video (the first having been "Picture Show"). The optimistic "New Train" seems to celebrate a new lease on life while "Humidity Built the Snowman" is a commentary on the impermanence of relationships. Several of the songs have a harder edge than many might expect from Prine, largely due to the presence of guitarist Waddy Wachtel, such as "Big Fat Love", which producer Howie Epstein referred to as “the Aerosmith number”, and the ominous "Quit Hollerin' at Me", which reveals Prine's frustration with consumer culture and the need to escape.

~ Mike Chitwood

I love this album mostly because it contains this song ( a Bob Dylan favourite  Dylan would label Prine’s lyrics “pure Proustian existentialism,” and “Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree.”  “And he writes beautiful songs,”) and it blew me away too and still does . . . . Americana at its very best

John Prine Austin City Limits - Lake Marie

As a kind YouTuber notes of Jason Wilber here 

Jason Wilber lost apart of himself when John passed, his guitar playing perfectly complimented John's songs.  Here's another compliment from Jason:

“I was 26 when I started playing guitar with John Prine, and I just turned 50 this year. So it’s been my entire adult life,” Wilber says. “At this point, John and his wife Fiona, their boys, the band and crew, they’re all like family to me. I love them all, and I love working with them. When I look at what happens between John and an audience, I can’t deconstruct it for you and explain exactly why it’s so brilliant. But I can tell you that something amazing is happening. There’s something about his music that touches people deeply. It’s a special thing, and it’s been a pleasure and a joy to get to be a part of it for so long.”

Rest easy now John

and as ever our thoughts go out to Fiona Whlean Prine and their boys!