John Prine’s favourite John Prine song
Expensive equipment, fancy recording studios, and the colossal power of major record labels might dominate the modern-day image of the music industry, but back in the 1960s, during the singer-songwriter boom of the 1960s, all you needed to establish yourself as a musical revolutionary was an acoustic guitar and a message. John Prine certainly checked both of those boxes.
By the time the 1970s arrived, and the “wave finally broke and rolled back,” as Hunter S Thompson so perfectly put it, an abundance of American singer-songwriters remained and, inevitably, it was the likes of Bob Dylan or Paul Simon who ended up garnering the most mainstream attention, leaving the likes of John Prine in between the worlds of widespread acclaim and cult success – your favourite songwriter’s favourite songwriter.
From his earliest efforts, Prine always had the unique ability to hold a mirror up to the ugliness, contradictions, and injustices inherent in American culture and society, but he did so with a distinct sense of humour, which set him apart from the rest of his counterculture contemporaries.
Back in 1971, for instance, he penned ‘Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore’, a searing satire of phoney wartime patriotism with the bloodthirsty backdrop of the Vietnam War. Rather depressingly, the song still resonates in the modern day, too, but the fact that it dealt with the topic with a twisted sense of humour made it all the more impactful.
Nevertheless, trying to capture the entirety of Prine’s output in one song – no matter how masterful it is – is impossible. After all, he produced 18 studio albums over the course of his existence, each featuring vastly different songwriting themes and avenues of musical inspiration. Each one of those records offered something different, so if there is any one person qualified to summarise the songwriter’s career in a succinct manner, it is Prine himself.
Tragically, the songwriter passed away in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, but years prior, in a 2007 chat with blog The College Crowd Digs Me, Prine gave something of a retrospective on his illustrious career. Namely, he selected his all-time favourite John Prine track: “I wrote a song called ‘Far From Me’ on the first album,” he recalled. “That’s always been a personal favorite of mine.”
Appearing on the second side of that landmark 1971 record, immediately after the aforementioned anti-war anthem, ‘Far From Me’ is an often underrated effort, but it remained a regular feature of Prine’s setlists right up until his untimely death. Lyrically, the song revolves around a tale of fleeting love, as the narrator seems to come to terms with the end of his relationship with a woman named Cathy.
It is an utterly beautiful track, and about as good as heartbreak anthems get. Prine, unfortunately, didn’t expand upon exactly why the song remained such an unwavering favourite of his, but it is one of those universally relatable efforts that only seemed to become more impactful as Prine himself grew older and more experienced. Even today, the song still packs the kind of emotional punch that John Prine always handled so expertly.
