John Prine never liked being told what to do — least of all by scientists. “It really pissed me off,” he says, describing the moment he found out Pluto had been demoted from planet to “dwarf star.” “Back in fifth grade, I had to memorize all those planets. And now they’re saying, nope — Pluto’s just a spark in the sky.”
Of course, Prine being Prine, he didn’t just laugh about it over coffee — he wrote a song. “Lonesome Friends of Science,” one of the standout tracks from The Tree of Forgiveness, lets Pluto narrate his cosmic grievance in true Prine fashion: warm, absurd, a little sad, and deeply funny. “Somebody’s gotta say something about this,” he shrugs.
That was always his gift. A postman-turned-troubadour who could write about broken hearts, junkyards, war, strip mines, and outer space, with equal parts plainspoken wisdom and sly mischief. On The Tree of Forgiveness, Prine sounds like a man in full: taking stock, taking aim, and still tossing out jokes that make you laugh and ache at the same time.
The album came after a long drought. “I was just writing slow,” he tells me. “I thought when I get ten songs, I’ll go into the studio.” But then Fiona, his wife and manager, staged an intervention. “She put me in a hotel suite with ten boxes of unfinished lyrics,” he says. “I didn’t even know I had ten boxes.”
What emerged was a record that landed him higher on the charts — and deeper in the hearts of fans — than ever before. “It’s being accepted better than any of my records,” he said at the time, still sounding surprised.
It wasn’t that he’d ever stopped writing. “I just didn’t do anything with it,” he shrugs. “Basically, I’m pretty lazy.” There’s no romanticizing the process here. No tortured artist routines. “If I try to force it, it’s no good,” he says. “I’d rather be walking down the street and think, oh, that’s a great idea.”
That spontaneity, that gut-first songwriting, is all over Tree of Forgiveness. But make no mistake — it’s not a nostalgia trip. “There’s a little of me in all the songs,” he says, “but not enough to do anybody any harm.”
That includes the fans who still get touchy. “I used to put real names in songs,” he says, “and I’d get relatives going, ‘Is that me?’ And I’d go, ‘No, it’s just your name. Calm down.’”
His songs never really aged, even if he did. “Flag Decal,” written during Vietnam and stuffed with satirical patriotism, still hit hard enough that he sings it every night — and watched audience members walk out when they finally realized what it meant. “I guess they didn’t know what John they were coming to see,” he says, unfazed.
Not that he ever worried about explaining himself. “If it’s a joke, I hope people get it. If it’s a story, I hope they get it. But I don’t try to disguise anything.”
Still, The Tree of Forgiveness found him a little more reflective. Songs like “Summer’s End” and “Knockin’ On Your Screen Door” have the kind of emotional resonance that only sneaks up on you after decades of living. “Bittersweet,” he called it. “But it’s a pretty song.”
Prine wrote a chunk of the album with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, whose admiration for Prine bordered on spiritual. “We’d hang out, play cards at his house,” he says. “I thought we were writing for Dan’s solo record. We ended up with six songs in two days.”
Two of those ended up on Tree of Forgiveness — “Caravan of Fools” and “Boundless Love.” “It just flew out,” he says, still sounding pleased with how accidental it all was. “That’s how I like it.”
Prine had always been magnetic to younger artists — Auerbach, Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires — all of them keeping the Prine torch lit while he quietly wrote circles around them. “Jason mentioned I was an influence, so I checked him out,” Prine says. “That Southeastern record — great songs. I always listen in the car. That’s the best place.”
For all his humility, he knew the weight his songs carried. “Paradise,” his ode to coal country Kentucky, had become a kind of secular hymn in the region. “I opened and closed with it in Muhlenberg County,” he said. “Willie Nelson does that too. We’re the only two I know who open and close with the same song.”
Elsewhere on the album, there’s “God Only Knows,” a tune he started with — of all people — Phil Spector in the late ’70s. “I met him through Robert Hilburn,” Prine says, “and it was a circus. Bodyguards, screaming kids, stereo cranked to eleven.” But at one point, Spector sat down at the piano and they wrote a song together, for real. “He wasn’t goofing off. He was just a guy, playing music.”
Prine shelved the song for decades — half-finished, like so many of his lyrics — before pulling it out for this record. “Seemed like the right time,” he says.
Even the smallest lines mean something. In “Lonesome Friends of Science,” there’s a verse about his life in Nashville: My wife, my dog, my kids and me. When I joke that he put the dog before the kids, he laughs. “I tried to put the dog last, but it didn’t sing right,” he says. “The kids’ll have to wait behind the dog. At least I didn’t put the dog before my wife.”
That’s what makes John Prine John Prine — the ability to break your heart, crack you up, and rearrange your cosmic order, all in three verses and a chorus.
He never disguises the meaning, but it always feels bigger than the words. Whether he's writing about moon landings or milkmen or losing love in a trailer park, the man never misses a detail.
And if the scientists want to argue about Pluto, they’ll have to write their own damn song.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Summer's End" and "Knockin' On My Screen Door" below!
