With a new worth the wait album now delighting fans the world over, we caught up with the singular John Prine to discuss nocturnal writing, old songs and families.
Apparently, Kris Kristofferson once said that John Prine was so good they’d need to cut his thumbs off to give the others a chance. Tree of Forgiveness (reviewed here), Prine’s new record, might have him reaching for the knife draw; it’s an ace set that even the man himself enjoys. “Oh I’m very pleased with it,” Prine chuckles. “I’ve never had a record sound like this one before. I was really taking my time about making it; I mean, it’s been thirteen years since the last one. I thought I only had about four songs I really liked, but then Fiona [Prine, John’s wife] and Jody [Whelan, his son and record label director] came up to me and said ‘we think it’s time you made a record.’ So they put me in a hotel in Nashville, because they know I work better in a hotel than I do at home, and I took ten boxes of unfinished lyrics, three guitars and ukulele. They closed me up in there for a week and I slept all day and wrote all night, ordered room service at four in the morning… After forty-five years on the road, I’m more used to hotels than I am my own house.”
Once John was suitably nocturnal, he got to work forming almost a collage of an album, which is quite surprising considering the cohesiveness of the end result. “Well, I just started taking bits of songs I’d forgotten about and putting them together,” he explains. “I also wrote two or three new ones that week and finished an old one I started with Phil Spector [‘God only Knows’] back in the seventies, but somehow it all came together and in the end I came out and said ‘listen, I have ten songs that I believe in.’ I didn’t think that the songs had anything to do with each other, but I figured I’d leave that up to the record producer; I wasn’t even sure they belonged on the same record! Some of them were still so fresh that I hadn’t actually spent much time with or got to know them, because I went into the studio the week after the week in the hotel. But I guess the thing that ties them together is me, I just couldn’t see the forest for the trees.”
Any anxiety about the greenness of the new songs was soon shed once John went into the studio to record Tree of Forgiveness, with producer David Cobb giving him time and room to breathe. “What Dave did, which I thought was really good, was tell me that he didn’t want to hear all the songs until we were ready to cut,” John says. “He wanted to hear one song and wanted to use his instinct on what we were to do with it; he never asked me to change a thing. He would walk up to the drummer and the bass player and say ‘this is what I want you to play’, and then we would do the thing with just bass drums and my guitar. I sang the songs a second time, but most of the songs you hear are that first take. The most I did any of them was three times before we moved on to the next one, so it was really quick.” It’s another example of the magic of that first take. “Yeah, you get the real flavour of the thing,” John agrees, immediately. “I’ve worked with producers where they get you to do thirty or forty vocals and then cut the vocal and do all kinds of things. But I’ve never been auto-tuned, thankfully. I don’t wanna hear what I sound like in tune! It’ll pull all of the character out of my voice.”
A key theme that peppers the record is one of family, be it in the gently beautiful ‘Summer’s End’ or a dad’s advice (‘when you’re dead you’re a dead peckerhead’) in ‘When I get to Heaven’, it is there in almost every song. “Well, I lost my long-time manager and business partner [Al Bunetta] about three years ago,” John answers, after a moment. “He got ill and died eight days later, and we’d been together since 1971. He also ran my record company and we did everything together, so when he died it was a case of do we continue or sell it or what? So Fiona stepped in and started managing me and Jody came and ran the record company. I gave them a duet record For Better, or Worse a couple of years ago and they did really good with it, so when they asked for a new John Prine record, it was something I had to do for the family, and I can see that there’s family all over this thing. Finally, with everything I make, or when I’m on the road or selling records, everything goes straight to my children and my grandchildren, and that’s a really good feeling. Not many recording artists stay in it long enough to have a hundred percent control over everything.”
The conversation we have been having sheds some light on the serious themes covered on the album, like mortality and loneliness, and the humorous and contented manner in which they are addressed. “Well, fortunately, I’m going through a really great period in my life right now,” John smiles. “I’m not sure if everybody can say that when they get to seventy-one, but things are going really great. And I think it’s why I’ve been in no hurry to make a record because in the last ten years my audience has grown something incredible. But you know when it’s ‘I’d like to go see him, but where’s the new record?’ Nobody was saying that and when we played, each time we’d go back to a city, which we try to leave three years between in the US, we would pick up another five, six hundred to a thousand people. And a lot of them were young and their parents or even grandparents had played my music on car trips. It means that these songs are being passed down through a family, which is a really nice feeling and almost the true meaning of a folk song, being passed individually, instead of through a radio or TV.”
Order The Tree of Forgiveness http://smarturl.it/treeofforgiveness
UK & European Dates
JUL 31 – ROUGH TRADE EAST – LONDON – Live Instore Performance
AUG 2 – KELVINGROVE BANDSTAND AND AMPHITHEATRE – GLASGOW, UK
WITH JOHN MORELAND
AUG 3 – BIRMINGHAM TOWN HALL -BIRMINGHAM, UK
WITH JOHN MORELAND
AUG 5 – CAMBRIDGE FOLK FESTIVAL 2018
CAMBRIDGE, UK
AUG 8 – OSLO CONCERT HALL – OSLO, NORWAY
WITH TANYA MCCOLE
AUG 10 – PARADISO – AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
WITH TANYA MCCOLE
AUG 13 – NATIONAL CONCERT HALL – DUBLIN, IRELAND
WITH TANYA MCCOLE
Full Tour Dates visit here https://www.johnprine.com