I blame three of my former newspaper colleagues for the tears I shed when I found out John Prine was in critical condition with coronavirus and again when news broke a week later that he had died.
One co-worker who was both an accomplished musician and columnist covered his songs in his live concerts. Another was a big fan before I was (it was from his tweets that I learned both of his diagnosis and his death). The third was the guy I hitched a ride with to the 2004 Philadelphia Folk Festival, where I saw a concert that still gives me chills thinking about all these years later.
Fortunately, thanks to YouTube, I was able to relive that concert with videos of the performance and was able to discover that it wasn’t just my grief and nostalgia elevating that night in Schwenksville as among the best performances of the hundreds I’ve seen in my life with music. For as incredible a songwriter and storyteller as Prine was, he was also quite a performer who got ahold of me that night and hasn’t let go since.
I’m not usually one to shed tears over people I don’t know because they are famous or because Twitter is telling me I should be sad, but John Prine’s death – like Vic Chesnutt and Johnny Cash before him – has been especially hard to process.
I’ve been reminded just how brilliant and prolific a songwriter Prine was listening through his catalog a couple times over the past week – his performance of “Flag Decal” that night drew jeers from the crowd about President Bush but feels even more relevant now for example – but it’s the video of “Lake Marie” from 2004 that’s perhaps made me the most emotional.
The song is Prine the storyteller at his finest, talking about the history between two lakes and weaving a story of a couple trying to save their marriage. Live that night, the build up was so perfect, as it inched toward a jamming finale, Prine sing-talking one of the more memorable lines of the, “You know what blood looks like in black and white, don’t ya? Shadows, sha-dows!” before he and his accompanying guitarist added an exclamation point with an extended improvisation of the chorus.
My life is different now in almost every way than it was that night. In fact, the concerns I had then about my career, romantic life, friends, etc. seem so simple and quaint to what I’m experiencing now as a middle-aged father of two navigating this quarantine with my family and trying to figure out how best to stay healthy and safe while fretting about what the near and longer term future now holds.
It’s all really hard to fathom. Even the normal escape of music has brought sadness and the reality of the cost of this terrible virus front and center. But as we mourn the loss of Prine and so many others who have fallen victim to this pandemic, I take comfort in the words and music he’s left behind.
After all, it was Mr. Prine who sang, “sweet songs only last so long on broken radios.”
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