John Prine
Laugh until you cry… by Grayson Haver Currin.
“Prine meted out sorrow with humour in miraculous fashion.”
FOR HALF a century, John Prine found novel ways to elucidate the small triumphs and staggering tragedies of human existence. A mail deliverer-turned-Army mechanic-turned-songwriter, Prine commiserated with the veteran mortally wounded by what he’d seen overseas while lampooning the government that made him do its dirty work. A romantic who was married three times, he captured the endorphin rush that comes with new love and the depressive wash that comes with losing it. A survivor of dual cancer diagnoses, he reckoned with the inevitably of mortality (and doubts about what comes after) while extolling the thrills of living.
And then, at the start of the second verse of Boundless Love, the eighth track of what would become his final album, 2018’s The Tree Of Forgiveness, he nailed exactly what it meant to be John Prine. “Sometimes my ol’ heart is like a washing machine/It bounces around ’til my soul comes clean,” he sang, his agethin voice buoyed by glowing organs and gentle guitars. “And when I’m clean and hung out to dry/I’m going to make you laugh until you cry.” From his astonishing self-titled debut in 1971 to The Tree Of Forgiveness, Prine meted out sorrow with humour in miraculous fashion, forever finding the absurd underbelly of some existential disaster. He could find cosmic wonder in wet dreams and a belly laugh in organ donation. He might have chuckled, too, at the irony in the demand for his records following his April 2020 death, at the age of 73, from Covid-19. The surge was so strong that Oh Boy – the label he launched 40 years ago after leaving the majors – raced to keep the catalogue in print to avoid pricegouging on dead man’s souvenirs. “That’s the way that the world goes ’round,” he might have noted, quoting one of his classics. “You’re up one day, the next you’re down.”