NEW VOICE, NEW SONGS

JOHN PRINE talks to Spencer Leigh

This interview appeared in Country Music People, October 2005.

Over the last 35 years, John Prine has made thoughtful and, at times, provocative records. He came up as a singer/songwriter alongside his friend, Steve Goodman, and he wrote such familiar material as Hello In There, Angel From Montgomery and Paradise. In the 80s he moved closer to country music and wrote I Just Want To Dance With You with Roger Cook, which remains the only John Prine song to make the UK Top 20. There have been further multi-covered songs with Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness and You Got Gold. Marrying an Irish girl, John Prine became a father when he was 49, but his idyllic life was shattered when he contracted cancer. The treatment has been successful and Prine is back on the road promoting his new album, Fair And Square, on his own Oh Boy record label.

“I’m keeping pretty busy,” John Prine tells me from his Nashville home, “Having just put the record out, I’ve had to get round to all the major cities in the US. I’ve got some dates in the UK but not many and I want to do more. I’m going to be in Ireland for the summer next year and so that’ll be a better time to do them.”

And what can we expect? “I am working with my own band which comprises one upright bass and one electric guitar. Jason Wilber is on electric guitar and actually Dave Jacques comes back and forth between electric and upright bass, depending on the music. I like the upright for the upbeat country stuff. It gives it a bluegrassy feel.”

Both Jason and Dave are on the new album, which features some very strong songs but not one called Fair And Square. “When I got near the end, I realised that there wasn’t a title from one of the songs which would fit the whole collection, so I came up with Fair And Square. I thought that was the original position of the record. It came from a fair and square position. I did think of writing a song called Fair And Square to fit in with the record but then I thought that I would be chasing my tail. It’s a good title though. Maybe somewhere down the line, I’ll write a song called Fair And Square.”

Even at the best of times, John Prine had a croaky half-sung, half-rasping style. Now his voice is even deeper, but had there been a point when he thought he wouldn’t sing again? “Only before they did the surgery. They didn’t know where the principal point of the cancer was. It could have been anywhere in the throat, the neck or the tongue. Until they found it, they couldn’t tell me. They found it at the base of the tongue and they removed it and gave me radiation for the rest of the area. In the end, my voice lowered a little bit, I think for the better.” John Prine gives a throaty chuckle.

John was encouraged by the example of his friend Steve Goodman: “His whole attitude towards life was unyielding. The doctors only gave Steve six months to live back in 1968 and he lived until 1984. Cancer was at his doorstep all the time and Steve just refused to answer the door.”

John Prine’s songs were so idiosyncratic that it was hard to imagine him writing with anybody else, but his attitude to songwriting has changed with many co-writes on the album. Was this down to the way things worked in Nashville? “No, no, those guys in Nashville are doing it as a business and as I see it, they might as well be working in a factory. They write by volume. At the end of the month they have ten songs written and they hope to have one good one. I’d rather just do that one song as I have plenty of other stuff to do the rest of the time.”

So how does John pick his co-writers? “The co-writing is with guys who are friends of mine and happen to live in Nashville. These are buddies I shoot snooker with and sometimes it is hard not to write a song together. It helps me because I find it difficult to find the time to write on my own. As much as I like songwriting, I also like getting away from it. I won’t keep an appointment with myself, but if I have promised somebody else that I will be there at two o’clock, I’ll show up. It helps get things done.”

Does it mean that he has to adopt to their methods of working? “Well, that’s the plus side of it. I might take the easy way out on my own. I might lean on my strong suit. With somebody else, I might go into areas that I wouldn’t otherwise. If I’m put in a room by myself, I’m going to come out with a John Prine song, so it keeps things more interesting. I regard songwriting as a friendly argument. You argue back and forth until you have knocked off the rough edges of the song.”

He loves writing with the British songwriter, Roger Cook. “We’ve been friends for 20 years and we play snooker and go fishing. We did have one of those friendly arguments over The Glory Of True Love. I said, ‘Roger, we can’t use this title. There’s a great great song called The Glory Of Love.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. This is The Glory Of True Love.’ He can be very definite.”

Roger and John wrote the 1992 Daniel O’Donnell hit, I Just Want To Dance With You: “Well, we didn’t write it for him and I can’t remember who Roger was going to pitch it to. In the end, I did it first on the German Afternoons album and then Mary Black did a gorgeous version of it. I guess that’s where Daniel heard it and we were lucky enough to get a hit on it.”

I asked John if the best co-writer might be a rhyming dictionary. “Not for me. If I picked one up, I might use it as a joke, but I don’t need one, I really don’t. I think I got a rhyming dictionary inside of me. Usually I write very instinctively. I don’t give it a great deal of thought and I wouldn’t want to be looking for a rhyme in a book. I like making my decisions real quick and I usually find they are the right ones. The words have a melody of their own and so I get the melody at the same time.”

Prine wrote the album’s key cut, Some Humans Ain’t Human by himself. “I got a picture of a deep freeze that had been neglected in my mind. It had old things in it like frozen fish with ice all over, and the song came from that. I wrote it in a couple of hours. I got a place in Ireland and I usually spend the summers in Galway, my wife is from there. We take our children when they get out of school and we go to Ireland for the summer. Last summer I was finishing the record and thought I needed two more songs. The record was looking and sounding good and when you get to that point, you can see what kind of song you need. I wasn’t planning to make any kind of statement in the song, but the song got to a place where it needed a talking part and so I talked about what was on my mind. George Bush had made a visit to Ireland: when he went to Shannon Airport, they closed down the entire airport and brought in the army so that he wouldn’t see the protesters. It reminded me of the 60s when they would hide stuff from Richard Nixon. I made a comment within the song but the song itself was not so much of a protest. It was more about humans in general: some of them are always out to make a fast buck and some of them aren’t human.”

The song is very critical of Bush though and now Prine’s name could be on a list somewhere. “I hope so. (Laughs) What I’ve noticed is that there is a now a totally different climate in the US. I wondered at first why George Bush was in office, but having spoken to some of the people who voted for him, I don’t wonder anymore. There are lots of people who are in line with him, me not being one of them. I’m surprised that there aren’t more protest songs going on, but part of that has to do with the spin that the Bush administration put on 9/11. Anyone who had anything negative to say about Bush must be anti-American. It was Bush’s idea to start a war in Iraq and you are not supposed to say anything about not supporting the troops.”

Wasn’t it a shame that Bob Dylan wasn’t writing protest songs anymore? “It don’t matter because the ones he wrote will stand for a long time. Anyway, who can say what Bob Dylan is going to do tomorrow?”

There are two covers on Fair And Square but they are not obvious choices. First, the Carter Family: Bear Creek Blues comes from their repertoire: “My brother Dave taught me to play guitar and that was one of two records he gave me after he had taught me a couple of chords. The acoustic guitar is very prominent on their record. You could hear the guitar and imagine yourself trying to play like that. It was very direct and he thought it might encourage me – and it did.”

Then there is a song I have never heard before – Clay Pigeons by the spendidly-named Blaze Foley. “Blaze Foley is associated with Austin, Texas. He died in the 80s after being stabbed for trying to break up a fight in a bar. He was a friend of Townes Van Zandt, and Lucinda Williams wrote a song about him called Drunken Angel. Blaze wrote really good songs, one of them being If I Could Only Fly, which Merle Haggard did. I wanted to hear some other songs that he had written. Finally, someone in Austin sent me a Blaze Foley record. It included his version of If I Could Only Fly and right after it was Clay Pigeons. That sounded so much like me that I thought I had written it. That song haunted me. I learnt how to play it and taught it to my band and we did it at soundchecks. When we were making the album, I thought we could cut a version of it. I really love the song: it’s a beautiful song.”

Fair And Square is released on Prine’s own label, Oh Boy. “About 20 years ago, I didn’t want to work with any of the big labels and there weren’t that many independents. Jack Clement more or less talked me into doing this. He said that it was the one sure way I could do what I wanted, and he was right. It’s worked out to be a regular little record company. I like putting out Steve Goodman albums. We’ve found live performances that have been recorded really well and he was great on stage. He could change a set of guitar strings and keep on talking. That’s hard to do.”

Prine’s previous album was one of country duets, In Spite Of Ourselves, in 1999. “I did that because I love those boy and girl songs that you get in country music. The girl sings one line and the boy another and they come together on the chorus. You get it in show songs too, but not too many other places. I really like the country songs which are about cheating or meeting or running away. Country songs lend themselves to that and we did it on some songs that weren’t boy and girl duets before like ‘So Sad’.”

‘ So Sad’ with Connie Smith is one of the killer tracks. “Oh yeah, I could listen to Connie Smith sing all day. Her voice is such a beautiful instrument. I didn’t expect all those great singers to agree to singing with me. I expected them to be polite and say, ‘I’d like to but I’m going to China on tour.’ Everybody said yes and they showed up too. Usually when I sing with a female partner it takes some of the roughness out of my voice but not always, and you never really know until you put the voices together. In all these cases, we put the voices together and it made a nice sound.”

The album includes ‘Til A Tear Becomes A Rose’ with his wife, Fiona. “Yeah, and she just walked in the door so I’ll have to go in a minute. She’s not a professional singer but she’s Irish and they all have their party pieces. There are nine pubs in the little town where we have a cottage and there is music in all of them, every night of the week.”

Could John see himself making an Irish album? “Not particularly but I really love the music. There is a definite link between Irish and American music, but you know that. I could make an Irish album and I’d enjoy it but I don’t know how good it would turn out.”

There is a song about Fiona on the new album, ‘She Is My Everything’: “Just about. The verse which mentions Bruce Lee is actually about Priscilla Presley. I say ‘every’ so many times in that song – everything, everybody – that I put in Eveready batteries too. We use Duracell.” See what I mean about the quirkiness of John Prine’s songs, but that helps to make them great.