Music |
John Prine: Fair and Square
John Prine
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Country
A classic song doesn’t belong to its creator. It’s ours. We take it into our lives and use it for our purposes and sing it in the car or the shower — we own it so completely we might as well have written and recorded it ourselves. “My favorite song.” It’s like that.
What are the elements of a classic song? No one can quite say. But some people seem to have the knack of not trying to write them — and then rolling them out with frightening regularity. Like John Prine.
Prine was once a prodigy, the next savior of the music business. At a tender age, he was introduced to Kris Kristofferson, and the next thing he knew, Kristofferson had called him up on stage. Prine sang a few songs on a borrowed guitar. Kristofferson announced, “No way somebody this young can be writing so heavy. John Prine is so good, we may have to break his thumbs.” The legendary producer, Jerry Wexler, was in the audience. The following day, he offered Prine a recording contract.
Prine is such a natural songwriter that on his first album he used two songs he wrote when he was fourteen. At 19, he wrote “Hello In There,” a song about senior citizens that will bring audiences to tears until the end of time. For thirty years, he went his own way, pleasing himself and, in the process, delighting his loyal audience. And now, on the cusp of 60, he has a new CD that is studded with classics.
These songs have an inevitability about them; it seems there’s no other way they could have been recorded. I could cite examples until I bore you to death, but let’s look at the first few stanzas of “Long Monday,” the song I can’t get out of my head. You’ll want to hear it… listen here.
You and me
Sittin’ in the back of my memory
Like a honey bee
Buzzin’ ’round a glass of sweet Chablis
Radio’s on
Windows rolled up
And my mind’s rolled down
Headlights shining
Like silver moons
Rollin’ on the ground
We made love
In every way love can be made
And we made time
Look like time
Could never fade
Friday night
We both made the guitar hum
Saturday made Sunday feel
Like it would never come
Gonna be a long Monday
Sittin’ all alone on a mountain
By a river that has no end
Gonna be a long Monday
Stuck like the tick of a clock
That’s come unwound – again
First, the lyric line: It’s more spoken than sung. Which gives you the feeling that anyone — namely: you — could “sing” it (but maybe no one could sing it better than a guy who’s fought off neck cancer). Second, the subject: Many of us have been blessed by relationships that make a weekend fly. And then “long Monday” — you just know he’s going to stretch that “long” out, don’t you? And how about those last two lines? Isn’t that “again” — almost an afterthought, really — a killer?
Prine’s CD is so satisfying, so easy to put on the machine and play all day, so damn comfortable that it almost seemed that Prine had intimate access to my head. It was like, “These are my songs. This is how I feel. So how did this guy in Nashville come to write and sing them?” That was when I decided that I wanted to talk to John Prine. That’s usually a terrible idea — in my experience, you do best never to meet your heroes. But this thing could be arranged, and, in short order, I discovered that the smart, laid-back, endlessly amused persona of John Prine on “Faire & Square” is very close to the actual person I was talking to. Here are the Greatest Hits of that conversation:
HB: Why do these songs sound so familiar?
JP: Because this was the most comfortable I’ve ever been in the studio. I sang these songs in concert over the last 3 years. I knew they fit, I knew people liked them.
HB: “Hello In There” was an instant classic. Forty years later, can you bear to perform it?
JP: More than any other song, it gets stronger every day for me. I never tire of singing it. I don’t know how I came up with such a pretty melody. It was an exercise — to use every chord I had ever heard. I paid a guy five bucks to write it out so I could publish it. I couldn’t believe it when he played it on piano.
HB: Some of these new songs are so funny, do you laugh while you write them?
JP: I laugh at the funny lines — hey, I laugh at even the serious stuff. When it’s going well, I feel like I’m taking dictation. But I don’t have hundreds of songs waiting — you’ve heard them all.
HB: Do they come out in a rush?
JP: I type so slow I can edit as I write.
HB: You say you’re lazy. Do you feel guilty when you go for months and don’t write?
JP: I ‘m not Catholic, I’m not Jewish — I can talk myself out of feeling guilty. Because it’s easier to not write. I only love the songs I have to write. I trust a song like that — a song straight from the gut. There are some really good songs that, if you don’t write them down, someone else will.
HB: On “Fair & Square,” there’s a political song, “Some Humans Ain’t Human” — but it’s mostly funny, with only one direct reference to the President.
JP: I always felt that way about protest and politics — include it in your conversation instead of raving about it.
HB: How does that song go over in the red states?
JP: When I’m first singing about some issue, people change the subject. Later, it seems about right.
HB: What’s your daily media intake?
JP: I hardly read at all. My wife reads three books at a time, but I read “Archie and Veronica” — in the comic book form.
HB: Who do you listen to?
JP: I buy a lot of CDs, and I listen to them once. But Van [Morrison] or Bob [Dylan] or Merle [Haggard] — I listen carefully to all of those.
HB: Taking care of yourself?
JP: I have a poor diet — I’m a meat and potatoes guy. That has something to do with how I see things. There are no peas on my plate.
“No peas on my plate” is a throwaway line from a song John Prine will never write. No loss. The songs he’s written will do just fine. Not country. Not rock. Not folk. Just…songs. With no gimmicks. I guess if you write classics, that’s good enough.
