There’s a run of Americana, it would seem. Prine is another artist I hadn’t heard of but I’m glad to have heard him now. He’s a bit folk, a bit country (with Side One being more American Folk and Side Two more Country). Comparisons to Bob Dylan are inevitable, and Prine even has a similar singing voice although it’s probably safer to say that Prine isn’t doing Dylan, but that Dylan and Prine are both doing Woody Guthrie. There’s a touch of Pete Seeger as well in Prine’s songwriting – witty and poignant lyrics and an eminently singable chorus, all with deep social commentary about current affairs, rather than the Louvin Brothers kind of folk about runaways and murder ballads.
Some of Prine’s songs pitch their social commentary with humour – Illegal Smile suggests a marijuana high, Spanish Pipedream is about middle-class hippy aspirations and the honky-tonk Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore skewers phoney and flamboyant “patriotism” that feels just as relevant today (although it would be “Your Maga Hat...”). Heaven, as Prine sings, is already full of the people killed in the [Vietnam] war in the name of that flag that you like to parade around.
Others are much more poignant. Sam Stone
tells of a military veteran who has become addicted to opiates, ruining him on his return to civilan life - “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm
where the money goes”. Paradise tells of a formerly idyllic rural location
ruined by industrialisation (possibly autobiographical) and there are some
tales of old age, notably Hello In There. Straddling the divide are tracks like
Donald And Lydia which features the great lyric “There were spaces between
Donald and whatever he said”, which could either mean Donald choosing his words
very carefully, or Donald putting on an outer persona to mask his inner self –
I like the ambiguity.
Yes, steel guitars crop up a lot towards
the end of the album, but it doesn’t get too Bakersfield for my tastes, and
Prine’s genius is in his lyrics; poetic, but not to Dylan levels of obscurity. Maybe
some British Heavy metal next, or something, just for a change though, please?
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