Encountering ‘Prine on Prine’: Holly Gleason on Assembling a Book of Conversations With the Irreplaceable John Prine
10.10.2023 - 23:13
/ variety.com
Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic For the millions who loved him, John Prine was an angel from Illinois. The singer-songwriter had a 50-year career trajectory that went the full distance from being part of the “next Dylan” brigade in the early ’70s to inspiring Next-John-Prines by the thousands before his death in April 2020.
He would have turned 77 on Oct. 10, and the phrase “would have” isn’t just a figure of speech here; for all his health issues over the years, his being cut down by COVID at the beginning of that epidemic felt like seeing an oak unfairly felled in its prime.
But “John Prine” as a lingering presence, as a brand and as an aspiration isn’t going to slip away in the culture any year soon. There’s a fresh way to revisit Prine apart from the catalog of records he left behind.
Five decades’ worth of stories about and conversations with the artist have been collected by Holly Gleason in “Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters With John Prine,” newly out as a 360-page trade paperback from Chicago Review Press. Gleason grew up on him before she became a close observer as a bicoastal music journalist and confidante as a Tennessee friend (and, in passing at a key point, his publicist).
Digging through materials that sometimes never made it online, she’s included seminal Prine encounters with Cameron Crowe, Studs Terkel and the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn, on up through some of the wealth of press he attracted in his last years (including a short Variety piece about an abortion-rights charity single) and the final extensive interview he ever gave. To know him is to love him, and to love and know Prine is to spend a lot of hours in his presence via Gleason’s essential compendium,
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