Word: prine
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ordinary Chicago mailbox, the kind mailmen use for stashing their extra loads while making rounds. But what were those shuffling and humming sounds coming from within? Curious or startled passers-by probably never found out, but they were made by Mailman John Prine, scrunched up inside the empty box to escape the icy wind, eating his lunch and composing his mournful songs...
That was two years ago. Since then, Prine, now 26, has quit the post office, launched into a career as a songwriter and singer, and emerged from his box, so to speak, as one of the nation's most striking new folk talents. But he is still singing the blue-collar blues. His leisurely, deceptively genial songs deal with the disillusioned fringe of Middle America, hauntingly evoking the world of fluorescent-lit truck stops, overladen knickknack shelves, gravel-dusty Army posts and lost loves. In a plangent baritone that makes him sound like a young Johnny Cash, he squeezes...
...Donald and Lydia, one of the tracks on Prine's recent Atlantic LP, Donald is a lonely Army private living in a "warehouse of strangers with 60-watt lights," and Lydia is a small-eyed fat girl reading True Romance magazines up in her room and feeling "just like Sunday or Saturday afternoon." When they make love to each other it is "from ten miles away." In Hello In There, Prine sings of an elderly couple who live together silently in the city. She stares through the back screen door, while he ponders calling up a friend...
...Prine's balladeering also includes social comment, as in Sam Stone, a song about a veteran returning from "the conflict overseas with a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back." The chorus is a quasi lullaby from a child's perspective: "There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes . . ." Another song tells of a man killed in a car accident because he had covered his windshield with flag decals: "Your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore/They're already overcrowded from your dirty little...
...Prine's most yearning songs is Paradise, which is not about heaven but a place named Paradise, Ky. "Until I was 15 I didn't know that the word paradise meant anything other than the town in Kentucky where all my relatives came from," explains Prine. The relatives migrated to the Chicago area where John was born, raised (with summers back in Kentucky) and given a high school education of sorts. "But we never took much to the city," says Prine, whose twangy accent, parted-in-the-middle haircut and beltless blue jeans mark him as a Chicago...