John Prine wants a cigarette, but he can’t have one. In the last 20 years, he’s had cancer twice. Sometimes he considers standing next to smokers outside restaurants just to get as close to that experience as he can, that smell, that ritual. He’s 71 years old now. He could be retired from songwriting and no one would blame him. But it’s tough to quit two 50-year-old habits, so he’s got a new album out called The Tree of Forgiveness, his first collection of original songs in 13 years.
But gone is the John Prine who, in his 20s, wrote both the saddest song in the world, “Sam Stone,” and the saddest song in the universe, “Hello in There.” That sweeping heartbreak, that pain, has turned more peaceful with age. Bob Dylan once said that Prine’s “stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree.” That’s probably fair, but on this album, Prine’s writing is more economical. He doesn’t say anything he doesn’t need to, leaving the space in his songs to do it for you. He lets the mood talk.
This album does not contain a line like “Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose.” It contains lines about porches and washing machines and shadows on ceilings. But in their own quiet, ramshackle ways, they’re about being alive and what it means to be alive. There’s a hard-won wisdom to all these songs, a wisdom that can only come with age, where pork chops can be one of the most important things in the world, where joy and divinity can be found in the everyday, on a porch, looking at clouds. It takes age to realize that truth, the thing we fight so hard to find, can be mundane.
It’s the air around these songs that’s existential, a sense of loneliness and the enormous weight of time passing. When I finished this album for the first time, I thought of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Not any lines, but a stage direction: They do not move. Prine may be reflecting on the past and the future an awful lot, but this is not one of those albums where an old man ponders death. It can’t be, because Prine has always done that, and he doesn’t do it any more or less than usual. It’s just a new album by John Prine, a humble but respectable one. If there hadn’t been a 13 year absence of new John Prine songs, you couldn’t even call it a return to form, because his form has never left him.
Even with production by David Cobb, who’s worked with younger singer-songwriters Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson, Prine doesn’t pull a single stunt. This is essentially an acoustic album with the same chords and melodies Prine always uses, plus occasional spare and tasteful backing from his regular band along with folks like Isbell and Amanda Shires. The album’s just a little over half-an-hour long, and it’s all of a piece, conveying casual imagery that meanders from the hands-in-pockets wistfulness of drifting and kicking on trash cans (“Knockin’ on Your Screen Door”) to turning on the TV and looking out your window.
Throughout, he has a virtuoso grasp of understatement. On “Summer’s End,” a heartbreaker about lost love, he wrings enormous pathos out of a chorus as simple as this:
The best two songs are the ones where he didn’t use a co-writer. The first is “The Lonesome Friends of Science,” a reflection on the end of the world with a quintessentially Prine digression about how Pluto, demoted as a planet, is now an old has-been, hoping he’ll get recognized in a Hollywood sushi bar.
The other is the album’s closer, “When I Get to Heaven.” It’s a farewell hootenanny that sounds like a daydream. When he dies, he wants to do all the stuff we’d all like to do. He’s going to see his mom and his dad and his brother. He’s going to take his wristwatch off. But he really, really wants you to know exactly one thing. When John Prine gets to heaven, he’s going to smoke a cigarette that’s nine miles long.
