“I want you to sit down and give this a good listen. Just get a load of this cat and tell me he’s not an inspiration.”
The first John Prine song I can remember hearing was “Jesus, The Missing Years.” The album came out just two months after I was born, and while my earliest memories of music are of my dad singing “Ice, Ice, Baby” by Vanilla Ice and “All I Wanna Do” by Sheryl Crow, those songs are older or younger than I am. The Missing Years is almost my twin.
We would listen to those songs in the car sometimes when my dad was manning the radio. I must have been seven or eight when I really started remembering them, singing along to this strange version of a Bible study story, those two years between Jesus’ adolescence and ministry that the Bible doesn’t think to mention. Prine calls them missing, the church calls them silent. Those days of my life were spent mostly at Catholic school, steeped in talk of Jesus and church and the sacraments. In our house, school was something to always be taken seriously. We were to get good grades and be good (I’ve put the value of those things in the order of value they were prized in our house) and so math and studying the life of Jesus Christ were approached with the same dedication and reverence. That is to say, a whole lot of it. Even if this meant that religion was, in some ways, treated as something as daily and mundane as spelling tests.
In that context, “Jesus, The Missing Years” felt rebellious. Prine, with his thick voice, singing about Jesus getting in trouble with cops and girls, listening to The Beatles, taking pills, having babies and pork chops and divorce, was titillating. B asked me recently if I ever remember believing in God, and I said no. I do, however, remember trying to believe in God, sitting in church waiting to be moved by the spirit, waiting for the holy reverence I was told to give was going to be rewarded. At the time, I still believed that Jesus was nothing like me. John Prine told me he was just like me. As an adult, I find the song to be simply funny, a feat of condensed story-telling and imagination. I no longer sit around waiting for God to fill me up with light and “Jesus, The Missing Years” no longer feels just a little bit forbidden.
John Prine really became my music, not just my dad’s, much later on. I was staying in my college town of Hamilton, NY to work for the summer between my sophomore and junior year. Peter, the boy who lived next door and was the son of my boss, would sit in his backyard with his guitar and play music. Some of it was John Prine. Summer in upstate New York begs for country music and as the golden days progressed I listened to more and more of it.
Many days during the weeks we would drive up to the Lebanon Reservoir and jump off of the concrete pilings into the lake below. In order to make it to the jumping spot, you had to sideways shimmy, holding on to a chain-link fence. There was a dam of water right near where we jumped in and if you’d jumped wrong, you’d have slipped down the concrete lip. Some days we would instead go to Bewkes Pond, which remains one of my favorite places in the world. Back in the forest a mile, the pond was left behind when a glacier melted. It’s surrounded on all sides by a bowl of trees. Once, on a drive home from Bewkes, Peter and I were listening to country music, eating peaches and throwing the pits out the windows and into the grass and stopped to look at the cows grazing just next to the road. They batted their big eyelashes at us and we let the car idle and idle until it ran out of gas. We just coasted back into town. The summer felt lucky the whole way through like that. What could be more lazy and irresponsible than letting your gas run out so you could look at cows in a field? What could be more beautiful? All of those days are shot through with John Prine: “Big Old Goofy World,” and “All the Best,” mostly. Songs still from my twin album, The Missing Years. In 2011, John Prine was always crooning in the background in his gravelly voice (more gravelly after lung cancer, clearer before), telling us a story in the rhymed couplets of classic Americana.
When I left Hamilton to study in Spain that fall, I was bereft at having to leave the golden summer. I started listening to more John Prine because it brought me back to that small town that had begun to feel like home. In the middle of Madrid, the songs reminded me of one particular version of America with hand-spanked, corn-fed girls, men making their living goin’ fishin, the Midwest with two lakes, known as the twin lakes.
Since then, he’s been lots of things to me at lots of different times:
“When I Get to Heaven” played late at night on a weekend trip in Shenandoah. The three of us swinging on a porch swing, drinking wine while the rain pounded down on the roof. Occasionally the rain would drift under the eaves and wet us. It was October and Autumn still felt full of possibility. I was there with new friends, the wine was cold and cheap and there was no one around except us.
“Paradise” playing on the speakers at two in the morning on a drunken February night in Charlottesville, celebrating a reading I’d given of my work earlier that evening.
Listening to “Egg and Daughter Night” one morning in my yellow room in Charlottesville with B. Quarantine had just begun and John Prine was not yet dead and it felt only good to listen to the new album.
“Lake Marie” all the time, always, blasted loud in my car, driving to and from college, driving around Ohio when I visit, screaming along to his voice with the windows closed: do you know what blood looks like in a black and white video? SHADOWS!
Bruised Orange on the record player in my house now, playing softly with fairy lights on and curry bubbling on the stove.
I saw him perform only once, in Upstate New York at Ommegang Brewery. The stage was huge, the audience assembled in a big grassy field. It was a clear night in mid-June, the night before I went back to Hamilton for the writers’ conference I helped run. He was humble, dressed in black, his voice thick in a way that sounded almost like it was heavy with emotion, though I think it was only thick from the cancer that had affected his vocal chords. I don’t remember the songs that he played specifically, except that I am almost sure he played “Lake Marie,” but I remember it smelled like wet dew and French fries and I felt like crying the whole time, because I couldn’t believe I’d been so lucky to have seen him play. My friend drove me back to Hamilton that night. In the morning, that great Northeastern sun rose and I thought of that line, you got gold inside of you, well I got some gold inside me too.
If this has made you want to listen to John Prine, you can find all the songs listed here + more of my favorites in this playlist: John Prine, Be Mine.
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