‘Hello In There’: The John Prine song inspired by a Beatles classic
John Prine was branded “the Mark Twain of songwriting”, but maybe they should have called John Lennon that instead.
I can practically feel the masses jumping down my throat already, so give me the chance to explain. Prine was, of course, anything but a sham or meek imitation of anyone else. There was a valid reason he was chalked up to a literary giant and won the adoring affections of many of his contemporaries, from Bob Dylan to Johnny Cash.
But when it came to one of his most acclaimed works of lyrical poetry, Prine was forced to concede that its inspiration did not fully come from his own fair hand, but that of Lennon’s. His 1971 masterpiece ‘Hello In There’ is widely hailed as champagne lyricism, an astute commentary on the isolation of ageing while having been penned at the age of only 22.
Yet you only have to look back a year prior to the song’s release to find the real muse of the songwriting coup it was based on, with The Beatles entering the fray in the form of their stratospheric final farewell, ‘Across the Universe’. That shouldn’t really come as any sort of surprise – name any artist working around the late ‘60s and early ‘70s era, and the Fabs would have imposed themselves somewhere.
However, as Prine listened to the track over and over again, he was instantly captivated by an ethereal quality which he knew he had to replicate for himself. It was Lennon’s voice which sent his head spinning the most. “He was already putting a lot of echo on his voice on different songs, you know, experimenting with his voice,” Prine explained at the time.
“It sounded to me like somebody talking to a hollow log or a lead pipe with that echo. I was thinking of reaching somebody, communicating with somebody, like, ‘Hello…hello, in there…’” Suddenly, Prine was struck with the memory of his newspaper round as a young boy, where he would visit the residents of a local old people’s home.
“Some of the people, I guess, they didn’t have many visitors. And to their other friends in the home, you were like a nephew or a grandson. I picked up on that, and it always stuck in my mind,” he mused. Thus, in the process of mining for their stories and shedding a light on the people society had forgotten, ‘Hello In There’ was born.
Something about The Beatles was always so present, so vivacious, and so vital that the sudden starkness of their ethereality on ‘Across the Universe’ truly sparked the feeling of impending doom that they were fading away. The world was about to lose its greatest rock band, but while they were crying their hearts out, there was an aging demographic whose stories were withering all too quietly.
Prine’s conscious ability to look beyond the hustle and bustle and find inspiration in the more timid corners of the world was something which turned all the heads in his direction, ironically, the opposite of what his mission had started out as. Out there in the ether, all the lives of his predecessors guided him – he just needed The Beatles to show him the way.
