Welcome to the weekend, gentle
readers! Let me give you a musical distraction while other websites are
recycling content and hoping you won’t notice until Monday.
Disc 1026 is…The Missing Years
Artist: John
Prine
Year of Release: 1991
What’s up with the Cover? John Prine sits against a rock
with what appears to be an illegal smile pasted on his face. This picture looks
like Ted Turner got a hold of it and coloured it in. Or maybe Prine was
photoshopped in and never actually leaned against that rock.
How I Came To Know It: A few months ago I decided to do
a serious delve into John Prine’s discography. When I started the process I
owned two John Prine albums and when I was done I owned six, including this
one. I’m still on the lookout for a seventh, 1978’s “Bruised Orange” but no
luck so far.
How It Stacks Up: I’m not sure. I bought so much John Prine so
fast I don’t properly know about three of the six albums yet. However, since
(spoiler alert) this album isn’t staying in the collection let’s assume the
others are all better.
Ratings: 2 stars
My last
review was an album that started slow and then recovered nicely. “The Missing
Years” was the opposite, starting strong and then quickly fading. Unfortunately
the fade stuck with me harder than the start.
To say John
Prine is not the most talented vocalist would be a bit of an understatement.
Fortunately, listening to Prine has never been about how many notes he can hit,
but rather about his gift for writing an effortless country tune and his talent
for storytelling.
As I
noted in the lede, the album starts out strong on both counts. “Picture Show” is a foot-tapping earworm
and while it wasn’t about anything terribly interesting, when you’re grooving
to a good tune, you can forgive Prine a moment of being merely ordinary with
words.
Better
is the second track, “All the Best,”
a song with a rolling finger picking guitar that favourably compares with Townes
Van Zandt or Steve Earle at their best. Prine shows that with a bit of age
comes wisdom, as he tells a story of a lost love. He walks the line between sadness
and acceptance, and manages (after a struggle) to land on the side of the
latter.
And
while the third song “Sins of Memphisto”
is catchy, and the song is generally solid, the goofy title presages the record’s
impending decline from there on.
Like Guy Clark, John Prine has a bit of an
annoying uncle vibe about him. You know, the guy at the family reunion who
hangs around the barbecue and tells the same corny jokes you heard him tell at
last year’s gathering.
“It’s a Big Old Goofy World” is loaded
with clichéd expressions, and painfully obvious rhymes like:
“Up in the morning, work like a
dog
Is better than sitting like a
bump on a log”
And:
“You oughta see his wife, she’s a
cute little dish
She smokes like a chimney and
drinks like a fish.”
Even
though I suspect all these clichés are deliberate, Prine is better than this,
and while there isn’t anything worse than “It’s
a Big Old Goofy World”, there are plenty more bad rhymes on the songs that
follow as well.
When the
songs aren’t being goofy, they lean to saccharine. “Daddy’s Little Pumpkin” uses an old Americana folk melody, but Prine
doesn’t do enough with it to update it or make it interesting. The guitar
playing is beautiful here (in fact, Prine pleasantly surprised me with his
skills on the acoustic throughout) but the lyrics just aren’t up to his usual
standards.
The
final track is “Jesus, the Missing Years”
is a song that I liked on my first listen but that lost its shine pretty
quickly thereafter. It is a tongue-in-cheek imagining of Jesus deciding to move
to Italy and get into some misadventures as a musician before becoming God.
There are clever turns of phrase here and I think it would have worked in 1975,
but in 1991 the hippy vibe of it all felt dated.
The
record has a ton of guest stars, including Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and
Benmont Tench, and background vocals from Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt and
Tom Petty. It is hard to go wrong with that kind of star power, and to be fair
you couldn’t say “The Missing Years” goes that wrong. It just didn’t inspire me
on repeat listens the way I wanted it to.
It did
inspire the Grammy’s though, winning in 1991 for best contemporary folk album.
Of course, the Grammies love to reward old artists making a comeback (this was
Prine’s first album in five years) and they also love to namedrop, so all those
names I dropped in the preceding paragraph wouldn’t have hurt either. God, the
Grammies suck.
“The
Missing Years” didn’t sufficiently impress me to make it to the main shelves of
my CD collection and so I’m going to reluctantly part with it. I will it to a
home where it’ll get more love. For all that, like the album’s best song I wish
John Prine all the best.
Best tracks: Picture Show, All the Best, Sins
of Memphisto
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