Having narrowly escaped deployment to Vietnam after being drafted in the late ’60s, he wrote pointed antiwar tunes like “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore,” a biting rebuke of people who mistake faith for patriotism (“Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore / They’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war / Now Jesus don’t like killing, no matter what the reason’s for”) “Sam Stone,” which laments the lack of opportunities for Vietnam vets coming home with addictions and post-traumatic stress disorder (“The time that he served / Shattered all of his nerves”) and “Take the Star Out of the Window,” which calculates the human cost of overseas conflict (“Don’t you ask me any questions / About the medals on my chest / Take the star out of the window / And let my conscience take a rest).” Sometimes Prine directed these lyrics at an audience that needed to be shaken loose from its trust in the goodness of its government, and sometimes he sang in the first person, humanizing the struggle to get through the day. “Often Is a Word I Seldom Use,” from 1973’s Sweet Revenge (an album rife with songs about mortality, graced with cover art depicting the artist stretched out in the front seat of a car, smiling, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth), takes death and division in stride, its main character exiting a relationship (or a life) with a sneer: “I’m cold and I’m tired / And I can’t stop coughing / Long enough to tell you all of the news / I’d like to tell you / That I’ll see you more often / But often is a word I seldom use.”īetween verses about the quickness of death and the joys of life and love, Prine wrote jarring story songs and protest anthems illuminating faults in the American experiment. There’s a smirk in the delivery and a glee in the self-medication that flies in the face of the conventional (and frankly faulty) wisdom about barflies that says they’re all aching and miserable. Diamonds in the Rough’s “Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You” is a breakup song and a bar anthem that refuses to follow the rules about country-music weepers.
John Prine could be a whimsical writer, possessed of a keen sense of absurdism that drew humorists like Bill Murray and Stephen Colbert in as friends and admirers. There’s a world of wisdom and depth and humor and levity between those two milestones, years of wise, terse koans and nonsensical yarns.
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In just four lines, “Sour Grapes” - a song Prine wrote at 14, when he first learned how to play guitar, and years later included on his 1972 sophomore album, Diamonds in the Rough - voices our nagging hunger for order, and the songwriter’s lack of interest in it: “I don’t care if the sun don’t shine / But it better, or people will wonder / And I couldn’t care less if it never stopped raining / ‘Cept the kids are afraid of the thunder.” “Lonesome Friends of Science,” from 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness, tells the same story from the other side of his life: “The lonesome friends of science say / ‘The world will end most any day’ / Well, if it does, then that’s okay / ‘Cause I don’t live here anyway / I live down deep inside my head / Well, long ago I made my bed / I get my mail in Tennessee / My wife, my dog, and my family.” This is the through line joining the writer’s earliest songs to his last ones. His music was a celebration of the fullness and the randomness of life. I’ve listened to John Prine a lot this month, as the 73-year-old midwestern mailman turned Nashville figurehead fought a battle with COVID-19 that, as we learned Tuesday night, he regrettably lost. It isn’t to learn a craft or start a business, to leave behind some brick-and-mortar monument to our impact, in order to proclaim to the ages, “Look, I was here.” It’s to get good at the dash, the dash through the phases and stages of life, the dash etched in granite between our beginnings and our endings.
That’s the lesson of these maudlin days, if there is any sense to be made of them. Our bodies are intricate constructs, but fragile ones, too, prone to extraordinary feats and catastrophic failings. It doesn’t hang around and wait its turn.
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It’s wafting into windows on sirens punctuating silent nights, slicing through our illusion of calm as steel does paper. It’s peering back at us through laptop screens. It’s waiting on the other end of cell phones buzzing in the wee, small hours. Between verses about the quickness of death and the joys of life and love, Prine wrote jarring story songs and protest anthems illuminating faults in the American experiment.
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