“John was very happy and grateful for the success of The Missing Years,” she said. “Winning the Grammy that year changed many things for him. John had always toured, but now the audiences were bigger and his fans joined in the celebration. We had married, and John now had the family he had longed for. He was a happy guy.”
The album was produced by Howie Epstein of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, with Benmont Tench on piano and guest vocals from Carlene Carter and Marianne Faithfull. It moves deftly between the dry ease of “Ain’t Hurtin’ Nobody” and the narrative sprawl of “Lake Marie”, a song Bob Dylan once named among his favourites. The writing itself was rooted in his friendships, Whelan Prine tells me.
“John only wrote with his friends,” she says. “Many of those co-writers are still good friends to me and the boys. He loved nothing more than meeting a friend to write and then following it up with lunch.”
A new book, Living in the Present with John Prine by Tom Piazza, also captures that side of Prine’s character. What began as a magazine profile in 2018 became a solid friendship; he and Piazza ended up on a road trip in Florida in a cherry-red Cadillac, stopping at record shops and playing guitar late at night. “John was unique,” Piazza told me. “I never experienced him as an ‘interview subject’ per se. It was always person-to-person, not journalist-to-subject, and that’s a lot of why we became friends.
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“He was a man in three dimensions, or maybe five or six dimensions. His best songs – all of his songs, really – manage to express tenderness, humour, empathy, irony and an unblinking eye for the facts of life at the same time, and he brought that combination with him onto the stage when he performed. I am not sure that John thought too much about how he would be remembered. I titled the article, and this book, Living in the Present with John Prine because that is where he always located himself.”
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Prine’s legacy also survives in the Hello in There Foundation, set up by his family to continue the spirit of empathy that ran through his music. Named after one of his best-loved songs, about the loneliness of growing old, the foundation funds organisations supporting people who are often overlooked: unhoused veterans, refugees, survivors of trafficking, communities dealing with addiction or disaster.
Whelan Prine still catches herself looking at the world as her husband would have.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about John. We shared a love of life and saw humour in the goofiest things. Sometimes I’m relieved that he is not here to witness the great hurt, pain, and lack of kindness we see around us, which would have really saddened him and hurt his heart.”
When I ask what she thinks he would be writing about if he were still with us, she answers without hesitation: “The world as it is, love, social commentary. And he would still make us laugh.”
Lost Dogs + Mixed Blessings is out on 12 September (Oh Boy Records, £10.99-£33.99).
Living in the Present with John Prine by Tom Piazza is out on 18 September (Omnibus Press, £18.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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