John Prine never expected to make it as a musician: “I was so nervous”
The late John Prine was a musician’s musician, and he never fostered any ambitions to become a stadium-dwelling household name. For Prine, as long as he could create music and perform in local bars, he was content, but to do it professionally seemed absurd.
Bob Dylan once compared Prine’s work to that of the influential French essayist Marcel Proust. In The Huffington Post interview, Dylan stated: “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism.” He continued, “Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene”.
He added: “‘Sam Stone’ featuring the wonderfully evocative line: ‘There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes, and Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.’ All that stuff about ‘Sam Stone’, the soldier junkie daddy, and ‘Donald and Lydia’, where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that.”
Before he became a professional musician, Prine lived an eclectic life and served in the Army before becoming a mailman. During his stint as the latter, he wrote most of his debut album, and he adored the job because it allowed his mind to wander. For Prine, life was perfect as he had the tools to be creative, and that’s all he ever wanted.
Prine made music for himself and didn’t have aspirations for it to be heard by anybody else. Creating art was his way of coping with the turgid monotony of life and allowed him to have a vehicle to express himself. During the early days of his career, it filled him with dread to listen back to his recordings because he despised his own voice. If it weren’t for people around him pressuring him to pursue his passion, Prine would have gone on to be undiscovered.
He explained to NPR in 2017: “Well, with me, my early recordings, I had a difficult time listening back to them because I was so nervous. I was kind of thrown into – I didn’t expect to do this for a living, be a recording artist. I was just playing music for the fun of it and writing songs to – that was kind of my escape, you know, from the humdrum of the world”.
He added: “And everything happened so fast for me that I became a recording artist before I knew it. And I just – when I would listen to my old records, I’d just hear this young, extremely nervous fella that made me want to run out of the room, you know, rather than listen to what he had to say.”
Fortunately, journalist Roger Ebert saw something in him. Although Prine was yet to release anything, Ebert witnessed him perform in Chicago and wrote glowingly about the concert in the Chicago Sun-Times, which generated immense coverage in the singer-songwriter that kickstarted his career.
Shortly afterwards, Prine left his job as a mailman behind and secured a record deal with Atlantic. It’s a fairytale story that likely wouldn’t happen in the age of social media, with record executives more focused on the number of Tik-Tok followers rather than natural talent. However, much to Prine’s surprise, he beautifully became a superstar.
