Your Evening Audio...Mr. Prine's Double-Edged Lyrical Sword.

Ridin'OnTheCityOf

AllYourMusicalFriendsVille

There are many things that make the work of John Prine great.

Just one of them was the way that he could write a lyric that could simultaneously evoke two opposing emotions in the listener.

Like, say, happiness and sadness or comedy and tragedy

Despite this, I always figured that Mr. Prine knew exactly how he, himself, felt about the subjects of his own writing.

Now I'm not so sure.

What changed?

Well, as so often happens, when I decide to butcher someone's song, I go searching for all the live versions I can find

This time it was Prine's 'All The Best'.

In early live versions of the tune, which was released almost three decades ago, Mr. Prine picks, hard at a festering wound when he serves up a pre-amble that mentions how he recently received 'a divorce for a Christmas'. In the immediate aftermath  Prine and a friend went out and bought an electric train that they promptly nailed to the dining room table 'just because we could'. 

It was an acid-laced commentary from a still relatively young writer that left no doubt about how he felt about the subject of the song at that time.

However, in recent years an aging Prine became much more kind-hearted and empathetic when he introduced and sang the song.

Personally, I like to think that the lyrics of the younger Mr. Prine, not to mention his funky way of dealing with an otherwise standard 1/4/5 chord progression, helped an aging Mr. Prine coax his better angel to the fore.

Then again, what the heck do I know...

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Image at the top of the post....A young Prine with another denizen of the Chicago folk scene back in the early 1970's, Steve Goodman.

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