Just days after he shared an appreciation of his recently departed friend Hal Willner, Elvis Costello has taken to social media to write an even longer tribute to another contemporary who has falle…
. It’s one of the most richly detailed and thoughtful paeans yet to the much mourned singer-songwriter, who died April 7 at age 73.
He points out that the often health-challenged Prine “had repeatedly shown such strength and courage in overcoming the challenges of illness… that it was easy to believe that he would be returned to us, to laugh as he read all of those many quotations from his lyrics that acquaintances, strangers and his longest-lived pals have been sharing in these last days. They tell us that a world with John Prine in it has been much better than the poorer one in which we now dwell.
My own introduction was via an Atlantic Record single plucked out of a discount bin of 45rpm records on the counter of Rushworth and Dreaper in Liverpool. If John Prine had only written his initial self-titled album, his place among America’s great songwriters would be secure. In addition to “Sam Stone” and “Illegal Smile,” one might add “Donald & Lydia,” “Hello In There” and “Paradise,” unique portraits of awkward lovers, shut-ins, older people or those crushed by the wheel of industry. These were songs that no one else was writing, filled with details that only Prine’s eye or ear caught; the arcane radio, the damaged and the destitute.
A long while ago, I stumbled through a door in Wisconsin between two adjoining theatres, the one in which I was due to play the next night and the one in which John and his band were already in full flight. It is odd to regard that comparison at this distance. I think it as unlikely that Bob Dylan could have written “Hello In There” as it would be that John could have written “Masters Of War,” but they both had voices of the country, its experience and the price it paid.
I opened that taping with “Poison Moon” and “Wave A White Flag,” two of the songs that I told the audience were written when the height of my ambition was to be able to write with the economy and unusual subject matter of a John Prine song. After fine performances and conversations with Lyle Lovett and Ray LaMontagne, the natural order of things was restored as the quartet of singers performed the Townes Van Zandt song “Loretta” with Lyle and Ray taking the first two verses and John and I harmonizing on the third, before we all supported John on a rendition of “Angel From Montgomery,” which closed the show.
It is perhaps easier to imagine John writing about the child or wife sheltering from a father or a husband’s rage of frustration due to confinement or addiction, as these feel like characters both found in this hour of trial and within John’s existing songs, and from this I take comfort. Unlike a televised awards show, this event had nothing to do with record sales or fashionable trends. Still, it was the just opinion of a committee of individuals — songwriters, authors and poets — not an act of God or a Law of Physics.
Academic members of the PEN writing community and other guests spoke while Sturgill Simpson and I sang in praise of these three wonderful lyricists. John Mellencamp spoke humbly about the inability to face contacting John during a period of serious ill health through which Prine had struggled and prevailed.
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