John Prine
Sweet Revenge

Everything that is about to happen is your fault!

John Prine is an institution of American music.

God himself, Bob to his friends, declared:
"Prine's creations are pure proustian existentialism. Mental journeys in the Midwest to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs."

I don't know about you, but I think I've only really understood the last part of the statement. But, you know, deities tend to be cryptic sometimes, I guess to mark a distance from us mortals and, above all, to justify the existence of the clergy.

Honestly, I prefer the definition given by Mary Gauthier on the occasion of the songwriter's passing in 2020:
"A brave truth-teller who, with a wink and a smile, showed us who we are. We songwriters have lost our reluctant leader."

Yes, a leader who didn't want to be one. Highly respected and esteemed in Nashville, John Prine was one of those artists deeply loved by his peers even more than by the general public.

Now, that a songwriter of John Prine's stature doesn’t even have one, I mean one, review on DeBaser is a crime. But, you know, crimes cannot remain unpunished for long.

This is your punishment.

So then: Sweet revenge, without fail!

My Light&Guide, my Dear Abby (1) who dispenses wise advice, is convinced that it is possible to identify for each artist 'The Album': “the one capable of encapsulating within its space-time boundaries the most intense and effective sensations. That record, to be clear, that once listened to, one can serenely not listen to anything else because within it there is the summation and summary of all that our artist has coined” (cit.).

In the case of John Prine, there are no doubts: this album is his debut, the self-titled album and his masterpiece.
That's why I will talk to you about the third one!

In fact, even in my vengeful fury, I am aware of my limits, and I hope that other pens (yes, I know, they would be keyboards, but I don't think it's the time to be pedantic) will pay tribute to this masterpiece as it deserves, not one that was never even liked by the milkman (2).

Reflecting on it, I am not the first unsuitable reviewer who dealt with John, considering that his career took a turn thanks to the review of a film critic who had never dealt with music.
Back then, 1970, he was still working as a postman and performed in the evening at a venue in Chicago called the Fifth Peg. Legend has it that there was a cinema nearby and that the film critic Roger Ebert, after the show, entered the venue to have a drink due, it seems, to overly salty popcorn. Ebert was so impressed by what he heard that he decided, even though it was not his field, to review it and did so with such enthusiasm that from then on, there wasn’t a single empty seat at Prine's performances.

Let's hope my enthusiasm is enough too...
Enthusiasm, yes, because, you must know, that, even if this album isn’t ‘The Album’, I adore it, starting with the self-mocking bravado of the cover: John with sunglasses, cowboy boots, and a cigarette lying in a convertible looking at us with a challenging air throwing us his Sweet Revenge.

The first album, the one others (yes, I'm talking to you!) will review, was critically acclaimed, Prine left his job as a postman and devoted himself entirely to music. Therefore, when the second album didn't receive the same reception and the record company was unhappy, John, as admitted in an interview, didn’t take it very well.
But if there's one thing that helps take life's blows better, it's humor, and John definitely didn't lack that. So how better to open his third album than by cheerfully mocking his discouragement? And so Sweet Revenge starts in style with the country rock of the title track, where we find the protagonist kicked out of Noah's Ark watching the ship (of success?) sail away, vowing (sweet) revenge.

Prine's irony doesn’t only target himself, in Please don’t bury me he takes country tropes, paying homage and ridiculing them at the same time. So, he quotes classics of the genre like Give My Love to Rose and Hand me down my walking cane using a topos like the song of the dying but stripping it of any kind of heroism, tragedy, or romance. Here, the protagonist dies trivially slipping in the kitchen and hitting his head while still in slippers, and his last words are not farewells to his beloved nor regret for a dissolute life, but a hymn to organ donation leaving his arms to the Venus de Milo, eyes to the blind and ears to the deaf (as long as they don't mind their size)

In a mix of folk, country, and rock’n’roll, very well played, Sweet Revenge is a fun and lively record.
Dear Abby even takes the form of cabaret, amplified by the choice to record it live with the audience chuckling in the background. The irony sometimes turns into cynical sarcasm, as in The Accident (Things Could Be Worse), but John is never really mean. There are also more melancholic moments, starting with the splendid Christmas in Prison and A Good Time, with its beautiful acoustic guitar solo.
Cinematic descriptions coexist with comic images and autobiographical elements in Mexican Home, where, as you almost sweat hearing about a porch on a summer day where the air is as still as the throttle of a funeral train, and smile imagining the vain attempts to find some coolness (the fan, the broom wedged in the door to keep it open) and the cuckoo clock fainting from the heat, enters, almost treacherously, the memory of the death of John's father which happened on a hot August afternoon under a porch exactly like (geographical location aside) the one in the song.

Prine's writing is characterized by simplicity and humor, a poet of the everyday direct and accessible, deeply human, unmistakably American but universal. An author who deserves your listening (and perhaps, why not, reading the lyrics) and who will repay you by offering equal parts emotion and fun.

But yes, having also "delighted" you with a partial track-by-track, I think it can be decreed that your sentence has been served.

Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis.

P.S.: In the end, things could have gone worse for you, you don’t know how lucky you are, you could have ran into that tree (3)