“As close as I could get to smiling”: The true meaning of John Prine’s song ‘Illegal Smile’
For all of the people who want to hail Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell as the most important folk songwriters of all-time, perhaps consider that these might be among the most commonly-chosen artists to be labelled as such, and if you were to dig a little deeper, you’d find out about the beauty of writers like John Prine.
Sadly not blessed with the same levels of notoriety as the aforementioned artists, Prine’s career began with the release of one of the strongest debut albums imaginable, with his self-titled collection of country-folk tunes being as close to the complete article as you could imagine from an emergent artist. As time went on, he began to get noticed more by his peers for his songwriting abilities, yet was never lauded to the same degree by the masses, with him only ever achieving a cult status as ‘your favourite artist’s favourite artist’.
His exceptional way with words was demonstrated on this release, both in terms of storytelling and conveying deep and insightful thoughts on societal issues, but one track from this record that stood out among the others for how unusual and ambiguous its lyrics were was ‘Illegal Smile’. While the song itself is chipper in its sound, many have questioned whether the lyrics are hiding something from the listener that taps into something more profound.
Normally, Prine has operated with a sense of directness that keeps things succinct, but the entire point of this track was not to spell it out for his audience, but rather to make them guess the true meaning of it. Sometimes, it’s important to shield meaning from listeners as a means of keeping them from prying when lyrics get more personal, but it also then provokes further conversation and contemplation, providing them with an excuse for re-listening and attempting to dissect and analyse what’s really going on.
However, Prine would later reveal what ‘Illegal Smile’ was actually about, and as it turns out, the upbeat nature of the song isn’t a red herring or a distraction from a deeper or darker theme being employed. In fact, Prine really is finding himself in a state of bliss, although that’s not without having indulged in a bit of naughtiness to get there.
The truth is, the song is about Prine’s drug use, specifically cannabis, and in an interview with Life Of The Record, he claimed that these were the origins of the song’s meaning. “The song soon got a reputation for smoking marijuana, but at first that’s what it was about,” Prine explained. “I’d just be walking down the street with a kind of a half grin on my face cause my little world was fine. And I called it an ‘illegal smile’.”
However, the fact that he says “at first” suggests that there’s a little more beneath the surface to be grasped at, and in a later interview, Prine has said a number of things relating to the song that appear to suggest he took this initial feeling and added a few additional layers to it.
“This is a song about smiling,” he said, stating one of the more obvious aspects of its meaning. “It’s an old song I wrote about four years ago. Around the time I wrote it, I was writing a whole bunch of songs about death. You know, just knocking them out, one right after another, death death death death death. So I figured this might be a challenge. This is about smiling illegally because that’s as close as I could get to smiling at all right at the time.”
While he may have been tired of touching on the morbid subject of mortality, this second statement doesn’t necessarily contradict his initial claims that the song is about smoking marijuana, and if that’s what it took for him to reach this place of stoned comfort, then it’s highly likely that the song was written with these multiple meanings in mind.
