THE MAKING OF john prine (self-titled) - FEATURING margo price, amanda shires, erin osmon, dave prine, bobby wood and gene chrisman

Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim 

John Prine was born and raised in Maywood, Illinois. As a teenager, he took guitar lessons from the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago and began writing his own songs. After he was drafted into the army, he was sent to Germany for two years. Upon returning home, he got a job as a mailman and started performing around Chicago. Unexpectedly, he got a record deal with Atlantic after Jerry Wexler saw him perform one night. In 1971, Prine went to American Sound Studios in Memphis to record his first album, which was released later that year. 

In this episode, for the 50th anniversary, Margo Price, Amanda Shires, Erin Osmon, Dave Prine, Bobby Wood and Gene Chrisman join us for a detailed look at how the record came together. This is the making of John Prine.

Margo Price: John's first album just kind of showed that he had a gift. It's not like some people were like their early work is embarrassing or something or like, it's something that he had to work for. I think John was just like, he was touched.

Dave Prine: That first album. I think in terms of the total quality of what was on that album. Some people can't do that in a lifetime. You know, in his first album. It's like, “wow.” There's no throwaways in that thing.

Erin Osmon: There's a timelessness about this album. It has so many songs that are now considered standards.

Amanda Shires: John Prine Self-Titled: Every lesson you need in songwriting, and every lesson you've learned and have yet to learn in life. All in one spot.

John Prine: Well, I've been writing since I was like, 14, but I never thought about doing it for a living, you know. I mean, as far as I got with that was standing in front of a mirror, trying to curl my lip and look in the mirror and how I should hold a guitar, you know. I was playing around and writing for six, seven years, and one night I found myself down in a place called the Fifth Peg on Armitage Avenue, in Chicago, across the street from the Old Town School of Folk Music. I was watching an amateur thing and people was getting up and they was pretty bad (laughs). And I had a couple of beers too many so I said so, like loudly. And some guy at another table says, “Why don't you get up?” So I said, “Oh of course.” I got up there and sang “Muhlenberg County” and “Hello In There” and “Sam Stone,” and they asked me if I wanted a job as a singer. So I had to run home and write six more songs to fill up 40 minutes. That time I wrote another six songs that ended up on my first record in about two weeks.

Erin Osmon: I'm Erin Osmon. I'm a music journalist and author and I wrote a book about John Prine’s first album. It’s for Bloomsbury’s 33 ⅓ series and it comes out this November. Well, the amazing thing about this record is that it is the result of a series of happy accidents. Really, just the most brilliant coincidences happened. Prine in the beginning, at least, he was a pretty reluctant performer. He wrote songs as a hobby to kind of entertain himself. And when he was discovered, his discovery story is kind of two prongs, the first was locally in Chicago. He wandered up to an open mic night, at this club called the Fifth Peg. Some folks who worked at the Old Town School of Folk Music, they opened up this club. And so of course, the students of the Old Town School of Folk Music would wander over there for open mics and to hang out. And Prine was a student, he was a guitar student there. And so of course, when he came into the club, he thought, you know, “I'll give this a shot.” It just so happened that he sunk the room, like everyone was like, jaw dropped, “What just happened?” You know, he tells a story that, the room went silent. And it was one of those silences that I'm sure were like, seconds felt like centuries (laughs). You know, it was kind of one of those dramatic moments. But everyone who was in that room, including Prine’s guitar teacher at the time, was like, “Wow, I had no idea that that was going to come out of this guy, this like, unassuming guy from the suburbs. But this is really important.”

Dave Prine: I'm Dave Prine. I'm the oldest of the Prine brothers. I said, “Look, John, all you need is three chords. You got three chords and a capo, you can play anything on the guitar.” And so I showed him and he picked it up, like, “pow.”. And that was the start of it all. I took guitar lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music here in Chicago. And so later, I talked him into going down there and learning finger picking techniques and stuff like that. And that was just kind of the start of it, at that point, I had never heard any songs that he wrote. I don't know how soon he started writing. But I'll never forget. I don't think he was 20 yet, I think he was still a teenager. And we were playing old time music one day over at my folks house. And he said, “Hey, you know, I've been writing some songs Would you like to hear them?” And I thought, “ Oh jeez.” You know, because Chicago at that point, singer-songwriters were popping up like dandelions on your lawn. And about one out of a hundred was really good and the rest were pretty, pretty bad. It’s like, “Okay John, do your thing.” And I don't remember which one he did because it's been so long ago. But it totally blew me away. I thought, “My God, this is my brother, who I taught three chords to and now he's doing this.”  And it was incredible just to hear it. It was like, this is a whole new John,  I didn't know this guy was in there (laughs). And it’s totally amazing.

John Prine: My brother taught me a couple of chords on the guitar. And I started writing right away. I wrote a song one night and my first song took me about three hours, and went downstairs, told my mother, “I wrote a song.” And so she sat down to listen to it and I got about halfway through it, and I was picking it. And she started singing, “Will the Circle be Unbroken?” And I got so embarrassed that I don’t even know a word of that song today. So I just threw the lyrics away and I didn't write anything for a little while after that. I didn't know, I thought I had my own tune.

Erin Osmon: So when he sort of started introducing his songs to his brothers, like at the family home, I think they were really surprised like, “Oh, this is coming out of our baby brother who was like a juvenile delinquent, hanging out at the pool hall.” You know, it was pretty amazing to them. Prine is pretty quiet, introspective, there was a lot of deliberation with him in social settings. He wasn't particularly outgoing or performative. No one had imagined that John was coming up with any of this stuff, let alone had any sort of desire to perform at all. When all these happy coincidences started happening, they were so proud of their brother. I mean, they come from a lower middle class family, you know, in the western suburbs, a very modest upbringing. So to have someone from the ranks become a star is so unlikely, and so powerful. And I think that's the appeal of Prine, right, he kind of makes us believe that we can do this too Like anyone can have it, even though his talent was completely singular.

John Prine: After I learned my first couple of songs, I found it easier to make up songs than to try and learn my favorite ones, they would never sound anywhere near as good as the record sounded. So I would just make something up and I'd sing it I got tired of it. It was more or less a hobby I kept to myself. The group I hung around with, the fellas, they didn't know I could play the guitar, or make up songs. So I did it off and on for a while then kind of dropped it went in the Army, got drafted right out of high school.

Dave Prine: He was 1A in the draft. And I said, “John, go join the Navy, those guys don't have a Navy so you'll be safe. Nobody's going to be shooting at you.” And then he didn't want to spend four years and so he went ahead and got drafted in the army. And they sent him for basic down to Fort Polk, Louisiana, which was where the basic training for Vietnam was done. So he went to there with a group. And I forget how big it was, but he and one other guy got sent to Germany and the rest of them went to Vietnam. And I thought, “John, somebody up there is watching over you carefully.” You know, while they were all dealing with that hell over there, he was drinking German beer and working in the motor pool (laughs).

John Prine: I took my guitar with me over there and I started to get a renewed interest in it. The fellas would wake me up at night when they come in from drinking and ask me to play a few country songs on guitar. And it became, it made a lot of friends for me in the army. I started to write a few songs again. And as soon as I got out of the army, I went back to the post office, because that was the most the safest job I had at the time. And it was good benefits working for the government. So I was a mailman for six years, and I was, I will always say that once you got a regular route, you know what street you're on,  you’ve got a lot of time on your hands. You know, it's like being in a library with no books. So I would make up songs to amuse myself on the mail route and some of them would stick. And that's the way I wrote what became my first songs that I ended up singing publicly.

Erin Osmon: And then one night, Roger Ebert, who was the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, he wandered into the Fifth Peg during one of Prine’s performances. At this point, he'd become sort of a regular performer at the club, and he had the same reaction, jaw dropped, “Wow, this is incredible. This guy’s words are so poetic. They're so piercing. They're so evocative.” And so instead of writing his Friday film review, he dedicated that space to covering Prine. He was supposed to review a film. And he thought, “Nah that film is terrible. I'm going to review this singing mailman instead,” You know, to tell Chicagoans, “Hey, you have a new son. There's a new son of the city and his name is John Prine.” Roger was a very popular columnist and everyone would turn to the page in the paper to read his film review. And so when they saw that he wrote a music review instead, Chicago took notice. Because it's very much a town that's kind of “look after your own.” Chicago is very of itself. It sort of loves all the things that it makes, and it celebrates its sons and daughters that are sort of its creative figureheads. So when Roger Ebert paid attention to Prine everyone else in Chicago started to. Prine started booking gigs at bigger clubs. He ended up at a club in Old Town called the Earl of Old Town, which was like one of the most popular folk clubs in Chicago, and that's where Prine was discovered by Kris Kristofferson.

Jerry G. Bishop (interviewer): You were sitting at the Earl one night and Kris Kristofferson walked in and what happened there? 

John Prine: Oh, yeah, Stevie Goodman brought him over. Steve songs over at the Earl a lot with Bonnie Koloc and the Holstein Brothers and Stevie had been playing with the Kristofferson over Richard Harding's place, the Quiet Knight. He brought him over to hear some songs over there. And he was about the only audience It was pretty late at night. You know, there's a lot of empty chairs around. We're getting ready to close up, but we stayed open an extra hour. 

Jerry G. Bishop (interviewer): Did he say, “I'll make you a star, kid.”

John Prine: No, no. He just listened  to the songs. That was good enough for me.

Erin Osmon: Steve Goodman and Prine became friends when Prine became a regular performer at the Earl of Old Town. Steve was a performer there as well. Steve had a gig, opening up for Kristofferson. Kristofferson was doing a residency at this Northside club called the Quiet Knight. And Kristofferson loved what Steve was doing. And Steve played, I believe it was, “Sam Stone,” one night and Kristofferson was like, “How did you write that song? That's brilliant. Tell me about the song.” He's like, “Well, you got to, you know, you got to hear my buddy who wrote it. You know, I'm covering my buddy.” So yeah, through a series of maneuvers, Steve coaxed Kris Kristofferson, and weirdly, Paul Anka, who was also in town, the Canadian popstar, to come see Prine at this club and same reaction,  jaw dropped. “This guy's incredible. How is this guy who's a mailman in the suburbs writing these songs.” You know, it was vexing but it was exciting. Just based purely upon Steve Goodman’s enthusiasm and goodwill that he went to this club to see a mailman sing at like two in the morning, you know, after hours, it’s pretty incredible. But I think that speaks to Steve Goodman’s dedication to his friendships, you know, in the Chicago scene, and particularly his love of Prine. 

John Prine: I met Steve. Oh, after I start playing this place called the Fifth Peg. Steve, come over to check me, everybody's come over to check me out. 

Bobby Bare (interviewer): Oh, yeah, it's just a small area there in Old Town.

John Prine: Yeah that’s where a lot of them hung out, at the Earl of Old Town and Goodman, like we play over there all the time. And I'd heard his song on the radio, “City of New Orleans,” because he didn't have a record out but they'd played this one station, they played tapes of new songs. And I figured I knew what Steve Goodman looked like, you know, from listening to his voice. You know, how you kind of get a picture, I thought he's as tall skinny guy with like a college haircut, you know, kind of a long drawn out face with maybe a little goatee. And this little guy (laughs) comes down, you know, and these big, fat cheeks and everything and comes up to me and shakes my hand, he introduced himself as Steve Goodman. So I think from that minute on, man, we was just buddies like, you know, we did it all together. We conquered the musical world in New York and got record contracts within the first 24 hours we hit New York. It was all like a Lana Turner kind of story, you know.

Erin Osmon: Paul Anka, who was with Kristofferson at the club the night that they discovered Prine, he offered Steve Goodman and John Prine, two plane tickets to New York so they could go and record some demos. Because Paul Anka was like, “Well, you know, maybe I can help these guys out. Maybe I can get them a record deal. And maybe I can become their manager,” which he did. You know, he did become their manager early on. So yeah, they flew out to New York on Paul Anka’s dime. And yeah, they got off the plane and they picked up a copy of The Village Voice in the airport. And they saw that Kristofferson was performing and they were like, “Well this is an, you know, another in a series of amazing coincidences.” So yeah, they went down to Greenwich Village. Their cab pulled up in front of The Bitter End. As they're getting out, they look up and Kristofferson is walking across the street. And they're like, “What?” So of course, Steve is very outgoing and you know, he was like, “Kris, Kris, Kris!” and Kris ran over and then Kristofferson goes, “Hey, where's your buddy? Where's the mailman?” And Goodman’s like, “ Uh he's standing right here (laughs). Yeah that's how that's how quiet and unassuming Prine was, you know, compared to Goodman. But yeah, so Kris invited Goodman and Prine to perform with him that night. As it happened, it was sort of an industry showcase that night, and Jerry Wexler was in the audience and he wanted to sign Prine and so that's what happened Prine got a record deal with Atlantic.

Dave Prine: When he got the contract with Atlantic, he was just sort of in lower Earth orbit (laughs). I said, “My God, my little brother's gonna go make a record!”

John Prine: This is a song here about smiling, illegally. It’s a sing along song so you can sing along at home (laughs).

Erin Osmon: When he got the contract with Atlantic Records, they paired him with the legendary producer, Arif Mardin. And what I surmised is he ended up in Memphis because they had recently made Dusty in Memphis there. At American with that band. And I think it just made sense for them to kind of work in that setting again. 

Dave Prine: Arif Mardin was big time. He was all over Atlantic's artists and Aretha, my god, you know. So, here's John Prine from Maywood and his guitar (laughs) and you’ve got Arif Mardin? It was a huge jump. I mean, it happened so quick. He was a solo act and he’d sit down and play his guitar and sing his songs and that was rock solid. And now all of a sudden, he was in his studio with a bunch of musicians. And this full everything.

Erin Osmon: But the really fascinating thing about this session is that Arif Mardin had never made a folk record, before, the Memphis Boys, the band, they had never played (laughs) on a folk record before and really, you know, Bobby Wood and some of the other Memphis Boys, they weren't particularly fans of folk music.

Bobby Wood: This is Bobby Wood and I played on the John Prine album in Memphis at American Studio. And you know, we were used to doing really hard R&B and pop and some country but not much, and mostly rock and roll. When they came into American studio it was like, “What?” (laughs) He was just coming out way out of the bag for our type of music, you know, I just didn't know where to place him. And yeah, it definitely wasn't our bag if you want to put us in the bag of course we were in about four different bags but that wasn’t one of them (laughs). But you know, we still did our best to do a good job always, as always. But nothing against him, you know, we're just like, “Is this folk music or what is this?” (laughs)

Gene Chrisman: My name is Gene Chrisman. I played on the first John Prine album, played drums on it. John’s, it was kind of folky, in fact Bobby told me, he said, “Man, you really don't know what to play on folky type stuff.” You know, because we weren’t really into folk-type music. And I guess his words were okay. I'm not knocking the words, I just couldn't understand the folk music. I think that was my main problem.

Bobby Wood: You know, I thought his songs was great, I just didn't quite get the folk type thing that he fell into, you know. He definitely, his audience is totally different than any of our audience you know. Me being basically a melody person, I love melodies and it was kind of light on that. But you know, most folk songs got three chords, you know, that's not meaning to say anything bad. It's just like, that's the way folk music goes, you know? And most of our stuff was like Wilson Pickett, hard hitting R&B-type stuff.

Erin Osmon: They thought it was too spare and they didn't know what to do with it musically, because folk music is so much about the lyrics. So this session, it could have been a disaster, right? It could have gone really poorly, because it's a producer and a band that didn't really know where to put Prine. Like, he wasn't quite country, he wasn't quite folk. The music was so spare because he wasn't a sophisticated player, he used a couple of chords, and that's about it. So yeah, I think it just sort of speaks to the Memphis Boys’ professionalism. And they have a mission, which is to make hits for labels and if they don't deliver on that, then they’ve failed. And so I think they felt a deep sense of responsibility to do something effective with this record, even if it was sort of out of their wheelhouse.

Bobby Wood: I think a lot of stuff I did play the Wurlitzer piano on. Of course, we, as a production team, would start listening as to where to get on this project and I really didn't hear a lot of heavy piano, you know, for sure. And I kind of kept it into the lighter bag, you know, to match him. We always tried to match the artist’s voice with what we played, and not be too heavy or too light or whatever, you know. So I remember playing the Wurlitzer on a lot of stuff that we did. And sometimes, some things I think I layed out on. I didn't play because by that time, if I didn't hear something, amazing on the keyboards, you know, I just laid out. 

Gene Chrisman: You know, a lot of the first part of “Sam Stone,” it was just mostly I think guitar. Well, I couldn't really hear what I played on it, if I played anything, it may have been brushes. You know, but I didn't hear it heavy. You got drummers who’ll play just about anything, and some of them just overplay on stuff that don't need to be there is the way I feel that I feel about it. Some stuff would just get overbearing with so many feels and all this stuff and beating and banging on a ballad. And that's not that's not necessary to me.

Bobby Wood: We all worked together as a production group, you know, Elvis, even when Elvis came in, he realized right quick that there was five or six people there that was, you know, it's like two heads are better than one. And it's kind of the way we all workd, you know, we get in the studio and try different things, some stuff worked, and some didn't. So it's just kind of what we did. And back kind of in those days, for me, it was learning what not to do. And I think the rest of the guys were like that. We were kind of like the Motown guys in one sense. Of course, most of their stuff was R&B. But if they were any two of us on a record, I mean, it was going to lean towards Memphis, you know, because it's just what we did. The great thing about five or six great people in the studio minds, you know, somebody's going to be the quarterback for that day, so you just fall in and try to enhance what they're doing. And if you can't you lay out. 

Gene Chrisman: If I had to play like a slow song or something, I made lay out on a verse or something, or an intro or something and let somebody else, it’s just like when we cut “Always On My Mind” on Willie, well Bobby Wood play the intro on that and then we came in later, you know, it's just one of those kinds of songs. And that's just the way we worked them out. Yeah, we’d listen to it and say, “Well, why don't we try this or try a different feel on it or do something to it,” you know. We just never knew until we started working on it to figure out what to play. Who was going to do what, we just kind of played off for each other because we all stuck together. We was in that studio, the same bunch of players for about five years. Same guys cut on everything.

Erin Osmon: So the Memphis Boys were the house band at American Sound Studio in Memphis. American Sound Studio was one of the smallest and mightiest independent recording studios in the region. If we think about bands, like the Wrecking Crew in Los Angeles, the Memphis Boys were sort of the counterpart to the Wrecking Crew. They were the Memphis version of the Wrecking Crew. And they were known for really settling into this sort of just spectacular groove. All these guys played by feel, it was all done on intuition. They are on so many iconic recordings, so many hits. And yeah, they are just a monolith in the history of popular recorded music.

Gene Chrisman: We had a lot of people to come in and cut like Neil Diamond, Elvis, Dusty Springfield, Arthur Conley, the Box Tops, Petula Clark, Dionne Warwick, you know, B.J. Thomas. I've heard that in the five years we cut, we had 122 chart records. 

Erin Osmon: And then Prine was brand new to recording. He'd done a couple local appearances in Chicago, but he'd never been in a major studio, the setting was completely foreign and I think that he was a little intimidated. He tells stories about how like, you know, you can't tell musicians who played 10 times better than you that they're doing something wrong. I think he felt a little bit like a fish out of water and I think that they worked really hard.

Gene Chrisman: Well I heard he was scared when he first came there. You know, wasn't really sure what we thought, I don't know if what we thought about him or what, but we always got along with people, you know.

Bobby Wood: As I remember, he just went along with what we felt, and put it on tape and it sounded pretty good, you know, just the way it was every day. I knew that he was seemed to be real timid, you know, but I didn't know that he was in awe of us (laughs). Because we just come to the studio every day to do our work and then go home, you know. We worked around the clock, just about I mean, we showed up at the studio around noon went and ate and then came back around one thirty, two o'clock and started working and would not go home until the wee hours of the morning, you know, two or three, four o'clock. So that was just what we did.

Erin Osmon: Prine’s first wife, Ann Carole, talks about how he would come back to their hotel room kind of really tired at the end of the day, because they did things over and over and over. You know, trying to find the right feel and the right sound. It's really interesting. It's kind of three factions that were completely inexperienced in this setting, working together and making something that I think turned out pretty, brilliantly.

“Illegal Smile”

Margo Price: Hey, y'all, I'm Margo Price. I'm here to talk about John Prine’s first album. It talked about so many social and political themes in that first album, but he did it with such grace. It didn't seem contrived or like he had an agenda, it was just very observational in what was going on in the world and in our country and in the human experience in general. And then you've got like “Illegal Smile,” which is so covertly like a weed song (laughs). I asked him about that song a lot, and he never would give me a straight answer but the twinkle in his eye told me like that I was obviously onto something (laughs). 

Amanda Shires: Hello, I'm Amanda Shires, John Prine’s favorite. We're talking about John Prine’s John Prine self-titled record, John Prine. At the Station Inn, a few years ago, he did the whole record from start to finish in order during the Americana Awards. And I played my set before and then I joined him. At that point, I'd never heard him sing every song off the record, I've heard, you know, like his favorite ones to play at the moment. Because he kind of quit playing “Illegal Smile” when weed became more legal (laughs). 

Dave Prine: He always claimed that it wasn't about dope (laughs). And I always thought that he was joshing you. Because when he talks about it in the song, at one point, “It doesn't cost very much, but it lasts a long while.” Now, you know (laughs). So okay, you can say that was a smile. But it to me it sounds like a smile that was aided by something. So I don't know, everybody always thought that was about marijuana. Including myself (laughs). 

Erin Osmon: There's no way to prove right that it's about smoking weed, because Prine never disclosed that publicly. But I mean, Prine was hanging out in Old Town, right, which is where all of Chicago bohemia hung out, it's where all the hippies and all the head shops were. And so, you know, he had to have been very aware (laughs) of the double entendre right, the double meaning of the song. But that's the brilliance of Prine. He was very sly about a lot of things and I think that the song is a great example of that. It's hilarious like we all pick up on the double meaning right of an “illegal smile.” But you know, in interviews Prine would insist it's because he had an illegal smile because everything sort of struck him as funny or absurd like in really inappropriate settings. So like he would be the guy chuckling in the corner for reasons that people couldn't understand. And so you know, I think that's a fine telling, but yeah the double meaning of the song is undeniable. And you know, Prine was very much in that scene and so it makes perfect sense to me that it would have both meanings.

John Prine: When I started writing, I used to really, really get into another world like just walking down the street, delivering the mail or sometimes driving a car. You know, I should be paying attention to the road. I don’t know, I’d get very far away. I try and explain it to some friends. Once I had one of these spells when I was about 13, I told my parents about it and they sent me to an eye doctor but I just told them that sometimes I felt very far away yet felt like I could see things as if I was looking down into the room you know. This went on for a good long while.

Ted Kooser (interviewer): Part of the meaning behind “Illegal Smile” is that staring off into space like that, right?

John Prine: Yeah I wasn’t...the song soon got a reputation for smoking marijuana but at first that's what it was about. I’d just be walking down the street with a kind of a half grin on my face cause my little world was fine. And I called it an “illegal smile.

Dave Prine: That opening line of that song, “ I woke up this morning…” It ends he got stared down by a bowl of oatmeal (laughs). It’s like, “Whoa! That's bad.” (laughs)

Amanda Shires: “A bowl of oatmeal tried to stare me down and it won.” That's like your typical case of your Mondays right there.

Erin Osmon: I don't know many other people that can take sort of these pedestrian everyday elements and elevate them to this sense that is just hilarious and so sharp in terms of its observation You know, I think that he was just really in tune with like the day to day details that a lot of us don't even think about.

John Prine: This is a song about smiling. It’s an old song, I wrote about four years ago. Around the time I wrote it, I was writing a whole bunch of songs about death. You know, just knocking them out, one right after another, death death death death death. So I figured this might be a challenge. This is about smiling illegally because that’s as close as I could get to smiling at all right at the time. It’s kind of a sing along song of sorts. Not intended originally to be a sing along song because they kind of make me nervous. I just never been able to tell people to, “Come on everybody!” So the only reason I know this one might be a singalong song is because a couple years ago I heard some people singing along with it. 

“Spanish Pipedream”

John Prine: Blow up your TV, throw away your paper, if possible, please (laughs). That's one I had, I had these two lines I had, “she was a level headed dancer on the road to alcohol. And I was just a soldier on my way to Montreal.” And I wanted to mix those two. I wanted to mix like politics and romance, you know, up together, you know, see what come out of it.

I mean, it's about blowing up the TV, you know, going out and living in the sticks with, you know And it’s like a romantic idea and I always thought Spanish stuff was romantic. So I called it a Spanish Pipedream, I should have just called it, “Blow up your TV” cause there ain’t a word that’s Spanish in there. 

Bobby Bare (interviewer): That’s what everybody calls it anyway, “Blow Up Your TV.”

John Prine: I know, I was telling the guys in the band, I'm just gonna stop naming songs and just wait til somebody goes, “Hey, sing that song, you know, about blowing up your TV or something” and then name it then. And if they don't ask for it, I won't cut it (laughs). 

Dave Prine: It always struck me as it was a great piece of good philosophy. You know, “blow up your TV, throw away your papers, and eat a lot of peaches.” That’s all good stuff, you know,

Margo Price: I love that song, I have played that many times. And, you know, before I had kids, it was kind of always, really it was the Spanish pipedream (laughs). 

Amanda Shires: I mean, what is that, but not the dream? That's the dream. Right? That's like my whole motto for my life is the Spanish pipedream. I love that, he would open the show with it sometimes. Or a lot of times. It was like, the night is starting right! Like I planted a whole row peach trees in his honor.

Is he in that song singing about like a stripper woman? How they were written or the stories about how they came to be in existence and then and the way they change for the writer and then the way they changed for the listener. That's a kind of beautiful thing about it. Like when I hear it, I don't think about the lady so much anymore but I think about the beauty and the dream, you know. And then taking yourself back to the things that matter most like family and then teaching your own kids those same things and those same values. And I mean, at the same time it's funny, and it's true to life. I wonder what it'll be like next year. Maybe it’ll be all strippers (laughs). 

Erin Osmon: The way that I interpret it is, you know, his younger brother, Billy, he kind of got really into the hippie movement. When Billy was growing up, he had long hair. And he was playing in like electric blues bands in Chicago, like bar bands. And he would talk to his family about how he wanted to move to a commune, things like that. He was a little bit of the rebel in the family. And so for me, “Spanish Pipedream,” is John’s song for Billy. I think he's satirizing his hippie little brother a little bit.

Margo Price: I do think there is like a level of satire there for sure. And you know, like the hippies and the Cowboys were two definitely very different crowds at that time, I imagine. But John floated the line, between all of it. Yeah, “Spanish Pipedream” too is like, one of the most simple, beautiful songs that you know, I think a lot of people wish that they could write that song. And I've had a lot of friends that lgo through that, like that Prine phase where everything they do sounds so much like John and it's always really good, because, you know, he inspires that. But it's just so quintessentially Prine that I think, a lot of people can try to rip it off, but smart writers will know where it's coming from (laughs)..

“Hello in There”

John Prine: I've never really write a tune before I write the lyrics to it. Usually they just both come at the same time but I had this tune and I was gonna write a love song. And I sat down and I just wrote it, I had this song about old people.

Studs Terkel (interviewer): Oh, I don't know what to say. I think it's gonna be a classic.

Margo Price: “Hello in There,” I think that that just is also another song, it’s like, how could that be on someone's first record? To just to have that kind of scope. And even as a young person at the time, you know, I think he was just like, he was kind of this old soul in a way and he just had such a special way of looking at the world. And I think it really showed you a glimpse inside of his mind that he just had a lot of compassion and he knew how to put that into words.

Dave Prine: That was the one I think that Kristofferson made a great comment about  was “Hello in There.” And, you know, he said (laughs), “How can a kid his age have that much understanding of old folks?” One of the things that's always stuck in my mind with John was, he was really into people. All of his songs, were inspired by something that he lived through with other people. “Hello in There”, came from, at one point, he had a paper route and he delivered papers to among other things, an old folks home in Maywood. And going in there and, and meeting to these people and talking to them. And he wrote that song, and it's just astounding to hear somebody that was his age, when he wrote that song, writing something like that. 

Amanda Shires: That one’s heartbreaking. And he wrote that so young, like, you know, his dream was to be an old person. Right? He said that a lot.

John Prine: When I was little, old people used to take me real fast, for some reason. And I used to take to them real fast. And I always spent a lot of time with my grandfather, he was a carpenter, and oh for a while there, I delivered papers in an old people's home. And it kind of remind me of a tune. It was just very depressing and it was a better, more supposedly in one of the better, I mean, it was a private institution I believe. They just sat around and oh I imagined they had recreation for them, some of them, but most of them just seemed like they were kind of just waiting around to die.

Erin Osmon: This is a song where war appears. And that's a prominent theme on this album. Because John had just kind of experienced war and military service. And he sort of saw the futility in it. And I think that that is very poignantly expressed in “Hello in There.” But it's just, it's so spare, and it's so elegant in its sparseness. And another thing I love about this song, is that I feel like Prine isn't really speaking for the people. He's sort of like allowing them to speak for themselves. And I just love that.

Margo Price: Yeah, that song is one that I loved to hear him sing too. And just the specific details and, how he you know, weaves in their children and just this kind of really sad picture that he paints of this lold couple and the kids are gone, and maybe they've fallen out of love. Yeah, I don't think a lot of people were writing about (laughs), writing from that perspective again. But it was just such untapped territory. And he did it so well.

John Prine: When I wrote this song, I don't think I approached it as that I was gonna write a song about old people. I heard John Lennon sing the song “Across the Universe.” And there's a bit of echo on his voice and the guitar. I listened to the song about 20 times in a row and I thought, “Man, it sounds so neat. It really sounds like you're singing through a hollow log or something.” And I was thinking about what you would say if you stuck your head in a hollow log, like “Oh hello, hello in there.” And that developed into song about old people. (laughs) That's the process there.

Erin Osmon: The story that I love about Rudy from this song is Rudy was a dog that lived across the street from Prine and Ann Carole when they lived in Melrose Park right after they got married. And Prine would be home after work and he would hear Rudy's dog Mom, you know, call him in every night, she'd go, “Rudy!” And so he was like, “Oh, I got that. I got that.” And he wrote it down, and really became a character in the song. So yeah, I think it's like, you know, slyly political, right, kind of like his feelings about war. And it's also his brilliance with sort of capturing the everyday and transcending it into something very poetic.

Dave Prine: His tunes are fairly straightforward. They're not real complicated. Typically, three chords does the job, occasionally an extra one, but usually. But then the words, you know. At an early age, he was a very awesome poet. I mean, you listen to the words, and I always thought John could say more in one line than most people can do in a couple of paragraphs.

Margo Price: Yeah, just the details, all the names Loretta, and, you know, he just had a way of really like, kind of writing an entire novel in a short amount of words.

Amanda Shires: A life long and well-lived, all those experiences. But then thinking about how we kind of don't see these folks in the world when we're walking around looking or considering what that must be like. Just assuming old people can't hear or that they become less important. That song to me is kind of like, makes me hope that other people see old people differently when they hear that song. And I think that's probably what he was doing. 

John Prine: It’s one of my personal favorite songs, it’s come back to me in spades over the years, you know. Ever since I can remember, I always liked old people, you know. I hope to be one someday. 

“Sam Stone”

Jerry G. Bishop (interviewer): Did you know Sam Stone?

John Prine: No, just rhymed with home. 

Jerry G. Bishop (interviewer): Huh?

John Prine: Just rhymed with home.

Jerry G. Bishop (interviewer): That’s it? (laughs). Did you know somebody who was a Sam Stone? 

John Prine: Well it was more or less, I was kind of disillusioned after I got out of the Army, you know. That's what it started out to be. And that's the way the song fell together.

Erin Osmon: He was driving around the Chicago western suburbs delivering the mail with like, nothing to do but think. You know, Prine tell stories and Ann Carole told stories about him like busting in the door after work to write things down so he wouldn't forget. That's how “Sam Stone” came into the world. He had kind of thought it up in his truck, and came running in the door after work and couldn't find anything so he grabbed an insert from a pair of pantyhose (laughs) and wrote the lyrics to “Sam Stone” down on that that cardboard insert. 

John Prine: I wrote that one, I remember writing it on a mail route. I couldn't wait to get home that day so I could get the guitar out and see if it actually works on a guitar.

Erin Osmon: One thing he would say about the song is that he did not intend to write about a veteran addicted to heroin, right? Like, obviously, he had experience in the service. And then the idea of this person battling with addiction and kind of being left behind was sort of the saddest thing that he could think of, at the time, and that really fit the feeling and the sentiment of the song. And so that's kind of where he went with it. 

John Prine: I didn't sit down to write a song about a veteran on heroin, it was just the two, the two things. Well, heroin usually doesn't end any place. And it was kind of, there's kind of a just a futile feeling when you're in a service. I wasn't in Vietnam. I was, they sent me to Germany for two years. But throughout the whole Army, even when you're over in Germany, it was just you didn't feel like you're doing too much there like you had no business. And it was that plus the image of somebody on heroin and that's the only reason I combined the two more than trying to write a song about a veteran on heroin in it. And it was kind of strange that it ended up, now there's a lot of them on heroin. 

Bobby Wood: I kind of discovered the album that we did later on, you know, when some of the songs became very popular, you know. I very remember “there's a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes.” What a line, you know, as a writer. I mean, I wasn't a writer at that point but I really admired writers, you know, so, man, this guy's a great writer, you know.

Gene Chrisman: Oh heck what’s the song, “Sam Stone.” You know, I understood the first line, “Sam Stone came home to his wife and family.” And I guess there's a daddy, “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes,” that's the only two lines I can remember in that song. And I don't know why they stuck with me, but some reason they did.

John Prine: I had those two lines. That's what started the whole song off was I had that “Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios” and “There's a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes.” And I was kind of thinking of, in a way, like some political cartoons, like the humor they use in political cartoons. And I had just kind of a picture of a fellow shooting money into his arm, you know, like a rainbow of money, just flowing down into his arm. And that's where that's where I got that line. The rest of the song developed out of it, it seems. Seems if the first couple ideas of the song, then I don't have as hard a time. Like that was one of the easiest songs I ever wrote. 

Studs Terkel (interviewer): Really?

John Prine: Because after I had those two lines, the rest of the song just poured out of me. 

Margo Price: Every time I saw John perform that song live, you know, usually I'd be standing side-stage and it would just bring tears to my eyes every time. Some people can spend their whole life trying to write a song like that and never even like, touch it. But yeah, it's I mean, “Sam Stone”  is like the perfect example of being able to put a mirror up to the human experience and make it something that everybody can relate to and everybody can understand. You know, “Is it an anti-war song?” “Yeah. Probably.” But you know, a lot of people wouldn't look at it that way, because it's just so personal and you just get such a vivid picture of who he's talking about. And it's both sympathetic to, you know, it's an anti-war song, but it's also just this very personal ballad and, you know, shows you kind of how people are treated in that experience.

Dave Prine: That's probably the most powerful song I've ever heard about a returning vet from Vietnam or any badass war like that. It just really strikes home.

Erin Osmon: Again, one of those really poignant touching songs about everyday people. Because this happens all the time in America, but no one had spotlighted it, he was really the first person to do it. And he toyed with controversy with the song but it resonated with people because he was illuminating something that needed to be illuminated. And that was sort of his brilliance. And again, he was like 20 years old (laughs), when he was writing the songs, which is crazy to think about.

Amanda Shires: That's my all time favorite. Like, every time on the road, we’d play that song, or he’d play that song, I'd cry. I've got more videos of that song on my phone than any other song. I relate to that so much. My cousin who was more like a brother to me, Michael Ruark, came back after six tours of Iraq, Afghanistan, and suffered from PTSD and took his own life. But the way that he described coming back from that situation, like, it was just exactly the same thing as what my cousin went through. And it also strikes me that that song can be as relevant then and like, we haven't learned anything, really. Like, you know, “Illegal Smile,” drugs are illegal now. But we still have the same problems when it comes to how we treat our soldiers and their return. It's a tragedy that that song is still so important, but I'm grateful that it exists, you know.

John Prine: Me and about six or my buddies all got drafted at the same time, January of ‘66. It was about the time they went from 20,000 troops in Vietnam to 500,000. You know, they said it was still a conflict (laughs), that we're just over there protecting, those a half a million troops. We all got drafted and they sent some of us to Vietnam and they sent me to Germany and a couple of one of the other guys to Germany to and some of them they kept in the States. But when we all got out a couple of years later, everybody had changed quite a bit, you know, a lot of changes. This is the end of ‘67 or ‘68. And I couldn't quite piece it together what was so different about it, whether it just being away, and growing up or something or what, but like, a lot of the guys would come home from ‘Nam and I had a buddy come up from Germany a month after he got out, I call his house and he's in the Veterans Hospital having shock treatments. You know, he just went bananas. And I knew it when I seen all of his shoes was pointed the same way under his bed, that he wasn't really out of the Army. You know, had those hangers on right where, I said, “Oh, he’s in trouble.” Somebody blew reveille right now, he'd run out the window. And a couple of the other guys just had drug problems and stuff. And of course, just about everybody knew a brother or husband or son or something that didn't come back at all. But a lot of the ones that came home, they never seem like they came back, you know. A lot of them still ain’t home. And there wasn’t no parades or nothing, you know. And all of all of us, I'm 38 now, all of us kind of grew up with Audie Murphy movies and stuff like that. I used to jump all, after I saw To Hell and Back. I passed an Oldsmobile car lot on the way home and I jumped up on the hood and I shot everybody on the street. You know, but when our war comes along, all of a sudden, they just want to be ashamed of it and ain’t get no parades or nothing. So it was kind of weird. I wrote that song to kind of explain it to myself, you know what the feeling was.

Margo Price: It's just like 101 in songwriting. If anybody wants to think about writing a topical song, like go listen to “Sam Stone” and then probably put the guitar down (laughs) and realize you're never going to be that good.

“Paradise”

Margo Price: I think just about anybody in the current Americana realm, myself included, Tyler, Sturgill, I think we have all tried to rip that song off (laughs). That's a song that just feels like it seeps into your bones and it stays there, you know, and it's like, it's an ear worm too, it just like has that hook that is so memorable, but it's just like the perfect little folk song.

Dave Prine: He wrote that song for my father. He had played a bunch of his songs for my father and Dad said, “Oh, those are nice, but you got to do something that's more Kentucky.” My father, they grew up down t here. 

Bobby Bare (interviewer): You’re from Muhlenberg County, aren’t ya? 

John Prine: No, my mother and father come from there. And me and my brothers were all raised up near Chicago, Maywood, Illinois. But we used to return to Muhlenberg County a lot when I was a kid. 

Margo Price: That song I think, makes everybody think that he is from Kentucky. Because of Muhlenberg County, but I'm always like, “No, John is from Illinois.” You know, makes me really proud to be from Illinois too because I always just thought it was like middle of nowhere and a lot of people used to give me shit for like not being born in the south, or whatever. And I was like, “Hey, John Prine’s from Illinois (laughs), it’s good enough for me.”

Erin Osmon: Yeah, I think it gave voice to an entire population of people that are often ignored, or dismissed, you know, especially in today's climate, we tend to paint the middle of the country in broad strokes, which I think is really tragic, because it really erases a lot of the nuance and a lot of the diverse perspectives and lives of that region. And I think that Prine saw that, you know, I don't think that his Chicago upbringing, his suburban Chicago upbringing, totally jived with his family members in Western Kentucky, like I'm sure they disagreed on some things. But really, you know, it's about a spirit of family and about that spirit of love of family that transcends these issues that we've sort of gotten away from. And I think that this song recalls a time where society wasn't that way and I think it's really special. And I think that's why, you know, this song has become a standard, maybe more so than any other song on the album. And bluegrass combos and family pickers and you know, folk musicians will often replace Muhlenberg County with their own county or their own town, their own region, because I think its sentiment is so universal. 

John Prine: This is a song about a small town in Western Kentucky, sits down Muhlenberg County on the Green River. The name of the town was Paradise. My mother and father were born and raised down there. They got married when they was about 17 and moved to Chicago, so my father could get some work. They raised me and my brothers up there, but they always kept meaning to go back to Paradise. They kept calling that to be home, you know, and we end up spend a lot of time traveling back and forth between Chicago and Paradise. It was a pretty little place, there's only about like 48-49 people living there, you know, at one time. They were all relatives of mine. They haven’t got a whole lot else to do besides become relatives, you know. I had a lot of fun down there. Me and my cousin used to go this place that was about half a mile down the river from Paradise, there's this old, abandoned Civil War prison. Been abandoned since the Civil War, you know. We used to go up there and we use our imaginations to kill each other about a thousand times a day, you know. We made the mistake of telling this one aunt of ours, that we'd been playing by the prison. So when she found out that we’d been playing up there, she said, “You boys shouldn't go up on Airdrie Hill. Airdrie Hill is just crawling with snakes, or snakes all over that place. If you ever go back up there, again, take a pistol with you. And if you smell anything that smells like cucumbers, start shooting.” We were pretty scared. We stayed away from there for about a week and our curiosity got us. We went on back up there. It's about a 20 minute ride by boat to get there and we didn’t talk to each other hardly at all going up there this time. By the time we got up there, everything smelled like cucumbers.

Dave Prine: The recording was done in Memphis. And when they got to “Paradise,” and they needed a fiddle player, they brought this guy in from the Memphis Symphony, who was obviously an awesome violinist. And he laid down a track. And then John came back here with the original rough cut of the recording. And he played it for my father. And my father looked at him and said, “That's got to be Dave” (laughs). And so that is how it happened. So then next I had to go to a studio in Chicago and dub it. And for me, this was a totally new experience. I'm a totally self-taught old time fiddler. And I'm used to sitting on my back porch and playing with my banjo picker (laughs) and so going into a studio is a whole different animal. And before I could do that, I had to join the Musicians’ Union. So I took my fiddle and I went downtown to the Musicians’ Union. And they kind of looked at me like I’d come from a different planet. But I guess as long as I was willing to pay the dues, I was a member. So I became a union member (laughs). And then I had to go to the studio and that was a bit of a challenge because I never tried to play with a pair of headphones on (laughs). Because the fiddle goes here and the headphones are in the way but it worked. I got in a booth and I played it two or three times and they picked the one they wanted. And that's the one that ended up on the record. And there it is in all of its scratchy Kentucky glory. When I go back and listen to it now I think, “My God, that's really primitive. Isn't it?” (laughs)

John Prine: My father loved country and western music. And when I learned how to play the guitar, I'd sit in the kitchen and he asked me to play Hank Williams and Roy Acuff songs. And Jimmie Rodgers songs, Webb Pierce. And so when I got around to writing, when I was away in the Army, my dad sent me a letter, telling me that Peabody Coal had bought up what was left of the town, moved the people out, and tore the town down, because they were going to strip mine where the town was in and the joke was, that people sold their houses to him, but everybody knew that there's nothing there except sulfur. And it took Peabody 20 years and millions of dollars to find out that there wasn't any coal right where the town was.

Erin Osmon: Some people think of “Paradise” as like a parable or something, but it's actually a real true account of the events that took place in Paradise, Kentucky that sort of ruined the charm of this historic town. This energy company moved in, they began strip mining the area, which is a much more destructive form of mining than like the tunneling version of mining. They basically strip away huge chunks of land and completely kind of render the landscape, you know, unrecognizable. And so that's what Prine is detailing in that song, sort of the destruction of this this town in this area that his family's from and that his dad loved, with all of his being. Prine always talked about how his dad raised him to know that “he was a pure Kentuckian, the last of a dying breed.” They were really proud of those Southern roots. 

Amanda Shires: The longing for a home that doesn't exist anymore. Like, I don't really have that experience. But it makes me so sad to think about, you know. When I think about what if that happened, and there was no Mineral Wells, Texas anymore, or what I know of it, not just like a small change, but like, there's not really anything anymore there. It kind of makes me really sad but I think that's the point of it. But then I also wonder if that was to show that we're all connected to the places that we're from.

Erin Osmon: So after he went to Memphis and recorded his album, basically, he didn't have like a test pressing or anything yet, so he brought the tape reel that the album was on home, so he could play “Paradise” for his dad so his dad could hear it. And, yeah, Bill Prine, he wasn't a very demonstrative man, like he could keep things close to the vest. And so I think that he swelled up with emotion. And he told John, his son, “I'm going to go listen from the next room, so I can pretend I'm listening to it on the jukebox.” But really, you know, he didn't want his son to see him crying.

Dave Prine: He died in August of ‘71. Much, much, much too young. He was about 10 days short of being 56 years old, which is awful. And it was a brutal shock to all of us. He did get to hear the final mix, I think. But the album itself had not come out. I remember that was one of the remarks I made when that awful thing happened is that, “Jeez, he’s never going to get to hear the album, you know.” Have an autographed copy of it. And so on. 

“Pretty Good”

Margo Price:  For folks that have a little bit more of a quirky singing voice or you know, straddle the lane of different genres and different sounds, I really try to point to him as like a light of morality and to not get lost with gimmicks or by making flashy, shitty pop music. And, you know, John is like, he stayed true to his vision and I'm sure it wasn't always easy, but it allowed him to remain inspired his whole life and to never put out any crap. I mean, he just seemed like he followed the muse. He didn't try to abide by any formula. He didn't limit himself by the instrumentation he was going to use. He didn't try to fit into any mold because he couldn't. And I think, you know, he always was so humble. He never knew how good he was. And just even you know, hearing that he was like, nervous around those folks. I mean, I can get it you know, I can get that he was nervous because it's not like he sang like Elvis or anything, but those players just added so much.  And because his songs were so strong and they were so memorable, he didn't have to be worried about it. 

Erin Osmon: This song to me sonically rings sort of as an experiment. It's sort of like Roger Miller on quaaludes, or something, it sort of stands out in the tracklisting of this album. 

Margo Price: I love that song. It's just written so smart, where you've got this, like, simple kind of phrase that he repeats. And then he allows himself to kind of take himself anywhere with the rest of the verse lyrics.

Amanda Shires: I mean that one’s just perfect. They're all perfect. Every line of that song also goes with another line of that song, like all of his songs. You can take them apart and put them together, you can rearrange them, and it all goes together. You know how, like when you write a song, and everything relates to another thing in the song, that's not easy to do.

Erin Osmon: Yeah I think the thing to know about this song is the Prine family took annual fishing trips to Arkansas. And they went with a family, another family that was kind of a friend of theirs. And so this section about Molly, the dog is actually I think, drawn from a real experience. Ann Carole talks about it a little bit that she sort of remembered vacationing in Arkansas on these fishing trips with a family that had a dog named Molly. So yeah, it's another instance of Prine drawing from real life experience, even though he does get a little experimental in this one, which I think is an interesting mode for him because it doesn't happen too often.

Dave Prine: That was actually, some friend of his that always said that, “Pretty good, not bad, you know.” (Laughs) Again, I had a good friend and we were out one time with a bunch of people and they were asking about John. And this guy said that he hit the nail on the head. He said, “You want to know about John, listen to the words of the song. You will learn everything there is to learn” (laughs). And it was true. I mean, every song he did, you could ask him about where it came from. And he relayed, there was some experience that he’d been through. 

Margo Price: And it is, you know, it's about the groove, but it's a funky groove with poetry overtop of it. It's Dylanesque, but I think John was like, one of the only other people that could be put into that category, you know, up there with Dylan and Joni Mitchell. And, you know, there's just such a small group of people who had that range really. 

Erin Osmon: The fact that he gets a little experimental at the end, I think is kind of interesting. Yeah, it's like is this John Prine on acid? (laughs)

“Your Flag Decal Won't Get You into Heaven Anymore”

John Prine: Sing with me. This is an old spiritual, make your socks roll up and down.

I was a postman in Westchester, Illinois, and one of the publications that all of us mailmen at the time really disliked was Reader's Digest. The reason being Reader's Digest were small as a letter, but they were thick. And so you couldn't put them with your magazines, you had to carry them like you would your letters. And with about five or six Reader's Digests, you had a bundle of mail. So instead of having, say, 17 bundles of mail for your home mail route, you would have about 213 when you had Reader's Digest, because they were so fat. And we didn't like to see them come. At one time, they were like, kind of like the Columbia record club. You got Reader's Digest, if you just stopped and picked one up in the dentist office, you'd subscribe to it, you know. And so just about everybody got a Reader's Digest. So one month this is around 1969, for no particular reason, they gave every customer a decal of the American flag that was just about the size of the Reader's Digest. And I thought, “Wow, that's really odd.” There was no explanation whatsoever. They didn't say, “This is for you, because we feel strongly about this,” they just put it in there. The next day, I went on my mail route, stickers were everywhere. Bumpers of cars, on front doors, on mailboxes. And they weren't just put on, they were like, like that. Like, “That oughta show ‘em.” So I wrote this song.

Dave Prine: The other thing that he had is a very wry sense of humor. And he's able to write a protest song and slip that humor in and you don't even realize (laughs) he's protesting something until you go back and listen very carefully.

Amanda Shires: I think the wit of it too, is a way to teach without actually anybody knowing that you're teaching them anything. Just to think about something from a different person’s side.

Dave Prine: At that point, in the 60s, a lot of guys wrote protest songs, and they just kind of stood there and told you how mad they were (laughs). Over and over again. 

John Prine: Usually, protest songs are written, they're self serving. They're written for that crowd that already agrees with you. So you're preaching to the choir. If that's what you set out to do, as a songwriter, I would say mostly you would fail. You gotta keep in mind that politics don't come first, even for the people whose politics you don't like. So maybe they’ve got the same kind of white shirt on you do, you know. That might be your song. If you're looking for the big picture, you got to get a really small frame sometimes. 

Erin Osmon: Yeah. I mean, I think that he just kind of saw right through a lot of this puritanical Americanism. Especially during the Nixon era, that just rang false to him. And so I just love that he is kind of very slyly and sweetly scewering these things. And that I think that's indicative of his political nature. Later on in life, Prine would insist that he's not a very political person. But if you talk to Dave and Billy, they would insist otherwise, like their dad was like a big Roosevelt Democrat, you know, they grew up in Chicago, which is a Democratic stronghold. Dave was a precinct captain for a while for the Democratic Party. They very much grew up in this era of working class rights and social inclusion, like that was like a big part of the fabric of their being as a family. And so we hear that and I think the Prine was smart. You know, he didn't want to alienate any of his fans, right? He didn't want to make anyone feel left out, which I think is kind of strategically smart and also the way that he felt as a human being. I think that's the person who he was. So I think he was very sly, and sort of inserting his opinions, particularly on politics and social issues. But this is an example of that, for sure.

Dave Prine: That might have been one of the songs he played for me the first time I heard him play. Yeah, it’s a great song. I mean, it's John. He’s laying it on ya and it's sort of funny, it's got a lot of humor in it. You know, “stuck one right on his wife's forehead.” That was great (laughs). 

John Prine: “Flag Decal,” jeez. Man I thought I hung that song out to dry. All I had to do was wait for this administration.

“Far from Me” 

Dave Prine: On the first album, one of my very favorite songs, and I learned much later in life that it was also one of his favorite songs was “Far from Me.” That very country song.

Amanda Shires: I like that he likes that. I didn't know that that was one of his favorites. I would have guessed that that and the sadder ones like “Summer’s End.” You could just feel it when he sang it, that the emotion was always there. He makes you feel like you're not in the world alone, you know, every experience, he's not afraid to go into any of them.

Erin Osmon: So this song is drawn from a childhood experience in the Chicago suburbs. Prine is basically detailing the heartbreak of his first breakup, like with his very first girlfriend. Again, it's drawn from everyday life, everyday people, which is a Prine signature. But I love this song, I think it is like an Edward Hopper painting. You know, it's sort of like this lonely Americana. And yeah, I think it's drawn pretty directly from his experience with this girl that he broke up with. 

John Prine: Ah this song here. I kind of wrote about this, the first girl that ever broke my heart. You know, that’ll make a songwriter out of you right away. She gave me my ring back and told me that she thought maybe it needed some work done on it. And I believed her.

Dave Prine: Yeah this was a girl that worked, there was a little restaurant on 5th and Madison that he used to go to and get burgers and she worked there. And he developed quite a crush on her. And then she dumped him and that song, I mean, what guy hasn't been dumped by a girl when he got when he got a crush on. And it's perfect. I mean, anybody can relate to that thing. “She still laughs with me, but she waits just a second too long.” (laughs) Great line. 

Erin Osmon: “The sky is black and still now on the hill where the angels sing. Ain't it funny how an old broken bottle looks just like a diamond ring.” That image is also drawn from the western suburbs. Prine talks about as a kid, he would go to a nearby junkyard and sort of break bottles just for fun, kind of messing around as a boy. And then there were also this effect in the sidewalks in the area, the concrete sort of sparkle because it had some sort of element in it that made it kind of look like a series of diamond rings. So that's where that comes from. And so yeah, it's just this amalgamation of all of these boyhood feelings and experiences dropped into just a really profound song. 

Dave Prine: First time I heard that song, I thought, “My God, John, you've written the absolutely perfect country song. I can hear George Jones doing that song.” And (laughs) many years later, I said to John, “How come George never did that song?” And he says, “Well…” he says, “we shopped it to him and he came back and said it had too many words.” (laughs)

Margo Price: At times, you know, he was writing those standard country songs and he could. You know, songs like that and like I was saying, “Unwed Fathers,” where it's like, you could hear someone with a voice like Merle Haggard singing those songs. But you know, he did it so effortlessly. And you know, I think too, it's like he never limited himself on what was going to be on an album because you would have a song like “Donald and Lydia” next to “Far from Me,” and it's like, “Alright, this could be sung kind of by almost anyone in Nashville.”

Dave Prine: It's got this fantastic pedal steel in it. That was Leo LeBlanc. And he said, “We got to get a pedal steel in this.” And they had no idea what the hell a pedal steel was (laughs). This was out of the picture. And so they, I don't know how they found it, but they got Leo LeBlanc and he came in. And his steel playing is one of the things that really, really works in that song. 

Bobby Wood: We didn't know how to play country music when we were down in Memphis or the Nashville sound, you know, we had not a clue what they were doing. You know, we had to learn it when we got here, but it was totally different than the way we did records in Memphis.

Erin Osmon: Yeah, that pedal steel player is Leo LeBlanc. And he wasn't part of the Memphis Boys. He was a hired gun. He was a guy that had just come to the area from Bakersfield actually. And I think Arif Mardin brought him in thinking like, “Okay, well, this is a signature of country music, (laughs) let's try this.” It was kind of an experiment, but I think it's beautiful.

“Angel from Montgomery” 

John Prine: This is about a woman thinking about her old man, while he's at work. Cause she ain't got time to think about him when he's home.

Amanda Shires: You know, “Angel from Montgomery,” when the first line starts out, “I am an old woman,” and you hear the voice, it's like, that's the time when I realized that you could be somebody else in a song, you know. I really don't know that I've ever heard somebody do it and switch gender, you know.

Margo Price: Oh I love that. You know, I think it's also like, “House of the Rising Sun” or something where you're writing from this other perspective. And it's like, it's just really freeing to see a songwriter do that. And to write from another perspective. It definitely kind of gave me license to feel like I didn't have to write everything, autobiographical, even though a lot of people want to think everything you write is true. And that is a song that kind of shows you a great template for how to write a personal song about someone else, or from someone else's perspective.

Dave Prine: I mean, here was a very unhappy, older woman who's very fed up with a situation and it's incredible, it's incredibly believable. And it was written, I don't know how old he was when he wrote that song, but my God.

Erin Osmon: You know, the idea of this young guy, you know, this, like 20-year-old guy, narrating the life of a middle-aged woman who you know, feels older than she is because of everything she's gone through in her life is again, so profound. And so unexpected, but that's a part of his talent is like he could conceive of these characters. And the characters aren't fanciful, they're people that he feels like, he could know, you know, they're everyday Americans. And he was able to sort of step inside of these worlds and relay them to people. You know, they heard themselves in the songs.

Margo Price: “Angel from Montgomery” is a rite of passage. Any girl that picks up an acoustic guitar must learn “Angel from Montgomery” and sing it at an open mic just once. And then when you hear like Bonnie Raitt, sing it too and you know, she embodies it, and it's just so cool that he did that. Because there are so many songs that are like, you know, the opposite where it's like, the woman is the muse and so it's cool that he could do that. And yeah, showed everybody else that they could do it too. 

Erin Osmon: A mark of this album is Prine’s, deep empathy for other people that are unlike him, but that he connects to on a human level. And “Angel Montgomery,” I think is maybe the pinnacle of that on this album. And what I love about the song too is I think it is demonstrative of Prine’s tacit feminism. I don't think that we think of feminism when we think of Prine. But in this song, he's allowing this woman to speak for herself. He's not narrating her experiences through like this third party male perspective. He is stepping in to her experiences in a very empathetic way and allowing her, and by extension of that, women in general speak for themselves. And I just love that about this song. By proxy of his experience growing up with his grandma and his mother, and how close he was with them. His experience with all of these strong women in Western Kentucky growing up. These farmers who grew their own food and made their own clothes and, you know, raised the babies, like I think he had a deep empathy for the women around him and wanted to convey their experiences. And that comes out in the song in a really powerful way. 

Amanda Shires: And I think he said, I have a recording of him, he might have wrote that about his grandmother that used to give him sugar to wake up in the morning. Two tablespoons of sugar, just shove it in his mouth, I think that's true. Sometimes, not with John, sometimes I think that men can ever write women's characters, right. But John did it right in that one.

The plain spoken way to tell your feelings and then also keep people in the room with you by finding the details that mean something in the moment, like, you know, even the flies in the kitchen, you would think how am I going to sing those words in a song. But the thing is, if you stay with the intention and the emotion of the song, and you're trying to show what this person's life is like, you need the details for everybody to feel like they can be in the room with you, like a little movie. If it's just full of abstractions and just feeling words and nothing to see, it's kind of hard to see it for yourself or your see yourself inside of that experience.

Erin Osmon: Prine spent a lot of time in the home in Maywood in this multi-generational family. And you know, so things like the kitchen, things like the radio, I sort of think about this upbringing, the sort of like Norman Rockwell quality of that, and how affecting that probably was to Prine. Because we see these pedestrian images that are so effective, and it's because it's universal, like we all have that dad or that grandpa, or that hard working mother, right? And it just illustrates, the effectiveness of, of writing what you know, and leaning on the universality of that.

Margo Price: Yeah, that's such a special song and you know, just kind of again shows his brilliance as a songwriter. Where he's like, talking about flies buzzing and you know, maybe someone who's drinking themselves to death. And then he just opens up with this beautifully poetic chorus that just seems so effortless.

Erin Osmon: So, one day, Ed Holstein, John Prine and I believe Fred Holstein was there as well. They were hanging out and Ed thought maybe he and Prine could come up with a co-write and Ed, when I talked to him, he said, “You know, I was thinking something you know, like a little bit like ‘there's a hole in daddy's arm,’ you know, like something sort of, maybe a little controversial. But Prine had this line, “I am an old woman.” And Ed said, “You know, that just didn't strike me at the time. I didn't know where he was going to go with that, didn't sound like something that I would be interested in, so I passed on it.” And of course (laughs), that line, “I am an old woman” turned into “Angel from Montgomery,” And I think Ed is sort of kicking himself to this day that he passed on it. But yeah, that's sort of the genesis of the song. Like Prine believed in this first line so much that he wrote the song that became a standard. 

John Prine: Yeah, I had a buddy (laughs) a long time ago. He heard me sing “Hello in There,” a song about old people, I wrote. He wanted to write a song with me. And I like to watch this guye eat. He would eat for hours, you know, you take him to lunch and pay for it, just you couldn't believe how much this guy could eat. He was a songwriter, too, you know. So I said, “Well, what do you want to write about?” He said, “Let's write a song about old people.” I said, “I just wrote, ‘Hello in There,’ I said, “That's everything I got to say about it.” So I said, “How about a song about a middle-aged woman who feels older than she is?” And he goes, “Nah.” (laughs) So I went home and wrote “Angel for Montgomery.” He’s still eating lunch.

“Quiet Man” 

Erin Osmon: I just love this one. Because it’s just Prine in his regular guy persona. I think he's really just kind of reflecting on himself, sort of like “Illegal Smile.” Yeah. I mean, it's so simple and lovely, “Strolling down the highway with my shoes in my hand, I don't talk much, I'm a quiet man.” That's exactly who Prine is. And so I think he's just kind of meditating on that characteristic. 

Dave Prine: When he was a young kid way, way, way before this when he was a young teenager. In fact, earlier than that. He never had a lot to say. He was very quiet. And it was years later, that I finally figured out what he was doing. And that is, he was recording it all in his head (laughs). He would sit in the room with a bunch of people talking and he wouldn't say two words, except that everything they said, went into his head.

Erin Osmon: He was like a pretty shy, quiet, introverted person, you know. He took a job as a mailman so he could drive around in a truck by himself, (laughs) you know, dropping off mail. So yeah, to be sort of thrust into the setting with all these people who were big deals, who he didn't know, for Prine, it was an act of bravery. You know, it's something that maybe he didn't necessarily want to be doing. I think Goodman really encouraged him to kind of take these steps in his career. Like, for example, whenever Kristofferson and Paul Anka came to see him play at the Earl of Old Town, and then Anka offered them plane tickets to New York, Prine you know, was reluctant. Steve Goodman told stories about how Prine was like, “Well, why would we do that?” He was like, you know, “I'm doing fine here, you know, I have a fine career playing the clubs in Chicago.” He was making, I think, $1,000 a week or something under the table, as a performer and he quit the postal service and, you know, he was happy as a clam. He didn't understand why he should make himself uncomfortable, you know, going to New York and doing all of these things. So yeah, Steve Goodman was his champion and his motivator. And I think in the end, Prine realized that he shouldn't dismiss Goodman’s goodwill. And so that's why he was brave. That's why he stepped outside of his comfort zone, and went to New York and went to Memphis. And so yeah, I think without Steve Goodman, a lot of this wouldn't have happened.

John Prine: This is about people's problems. Sometimes it's nice, you know, if somebody comes up to me, you know, and they got a problem, you know, and I help them with it. Or they help me with my problems. But some people come up, and they got all these problems, you know, and they tell them to you for about an hour, and then they walk away laughing. And you're stuck with their problems for the rest of the day. So I wrote a song to explain to these people my position. It’s an unusual one. 

Margo Price: Yeah, I loved going to John's room after we would play shows, and he would just kind of sit there and you know, he would be pretty quiet and everybody would be partying or whatever in the room. But if you took the time to listen, he really did love to share about himself and he loved to tell old stories. I was definitely always kind of prodding him for information and you know, I wanted to know details about certain songs, I wanted to know why he wrote this or if this line meant a certain thing and you could get it out of him, but he was sensitive and he was thoughtful, and, you know, he was quiet, but I think that he got out a lot of what he needed to say in his songs.

“Donald and Lydia” 

John Prine: This is a song about...when I was in the Army, I was down in Louisiana most of the time, and just about every army camp in the state has a small town, right near where all the soldiers go, and usually the whole thing's made up of, you know, saloons, and maybe five or six saloons and maybe a beauty parlor and that's about it usually. And the people in these towns always kind of seemed just a little bit different. It seemed like they had to put up with a different, like, almost like a tourist town, except off season or something, because the soldiers would come to town, but they never, none of them ever wanted to really be there. So they really didn't, they’d just really raise hell, you know, all the time. And I got to thinking about the people living in these towns. So I wrote this as a love story. And I usually say it's about a couple lovers that never met. It really is, it's about two people I picked. And they don't meet in this song at all.

Dave Prine: I think that one was written, that was from the experiences he had in the Army. I think he wrote that when he was over in Germany, which would have made him 19 years old, something like that, 18,19. A lot of his songs, it's almost like watching a movie. You know, you can see it. You can see it, you can feel it, it. I don't think anybody wrote songs like that.

Erin Osmon: So I love the song because it's again, it's another example of Prine’s just brilliance with characters. You know, Donald's a soldier. He's “lying in a sea of bunk bed shaved heads,” you know, that kind of situation. And then Lydia is someone who works in the nearby town, and she's kind of this overweight loner who dreams of romance. And so he details these two sort of lonely people who maybe want love or want to be in love who are sort of having these same thoughts, but who never meet. And I think that's just beautiful and brilliant. And again, he's giving voice to these underdogs in our society, like these two folks that we overlook, who aren't celebrated in song. 

John Prine: And it's partially about masturbation too. Because I thought both these people were alone. I mean, mentally, too, they spent a lot of time just with themselves.

Erin Osmon: It's pretty controversial but just the way that he delivers it is so charming that I don't think it stirred the pot too much in the end. But yeah, I mean, he says it, he says, you know, “This is partly a song about masturbation.” Which is like, “Okay, you know (laughs). Again, but it's another part of life that people don't really talk about, and he at you know, 20 years-old or whatever, had the bravery to sort of explore that topic.

Margo Price: I know he had such a sly way of like writing about stuff like that too that a lot of people, it would probably just fly right over their heads. And then a lot of other people, if they did get it, they would be like, wildly offended (laughs). But yeah, he just he knew how to turn a phrase, he knew how to twist words like other people didn't. There should be songwriting classes on how to make a sexual innuendo like disguised in John Prine speak (laughs). 

“Six O’Clock News” 

John Prine: This is a song I wrote, jeez, quite a while ago. I don't know what I was thinking of when I wrote this. I think I was trying to write something so sad it was pretty, you know. 

Erin Osmon: So Prine had a friend growing up who was kind of a neighborhood kid in Maywood. And then years later when they were teenagers, this friend of his was kind of always in trouble, he'd end up in juvie, and so he tells a story about how his friend was in court one day, he'd gotten in trouble. And the prosecutor reveals to his friend and everyone in the courtroom that his father was his father, but his mother was his oldest sister, which is so tragic. So yeah, he was like, “You know, no wonder this kid was always in trouble. He has a troubled background. That's so tragic.” And so he took that experience of this childhood friend that he had and translated it into this really powerful, tragic sad song. 

Margo Price: He just had such a cool way of like, even if it was the saddest song ever, or there was like, some turmoil between the characters or you know, something going on, like, he could make it funny. And you need that in a life that is really dark and sometimes scary. It was cool that he could just say, something, you know, two lines and like, have a complete joke there. Yeah, if you can learn to do that in your songwriting, it's just going to be more enjoyable for yourself, it's going to be more enjoyable for your listeners. And yeah, he mastered it better than anybody probably.

Amanda Shires: You know, he was so emotionally intelligent and so just intelligent anyway and witty. I think people like that, that are so smart and also so empathetic, a person like him with a big heart, I think, sometimes, the jokes and the wit are necessary. Otherwise you're just, you know, be howling and agony and crying.

Dave Prine: That's one of those songs where, you know, there's all this sort of humorous stuff early in it, and then it hits you like a ton of bricks (laughs) when it gets to the tail end.

Erin Osmon: I mean, that ending (laughs) is such a gut punch. But I think it relays sort of the gravity of the situation, you know.

You know, this is the album that has all of the classic songs, that has all of the songs that became standards and some of his most beloved songs in his catalogue. And so for better or worse, I think, you know, he had to live with that. But I think in terms of the recording, it was difficult for him to listen to it, because, you know, he was so young and inexperienced, he didn't assert himself in the studio, he just kind of was along for the ride in a way. So I think, you know, to him, maybe it sounded a little naive, a little bit, maybe not as professional as he would have liked it to sound. But I think he recognized its importance to his success, to his bravery at that point in his life, you know, he could have easily been a guy who just stayed in the Chicago suburbs, a mailman, you know, and he would have been content with that life, to follow in his father's footsteps as a figure in the western suburbs. But it's such a turning point in his life, that I think he did have a lot of respect for the album and for the events that informed it, and particularly, you know, the generosity of Kris Kristofferson and the generosity of his best friend, Steve Goodman.

“Flashback Blues”

Erin Osmon: Yeah, the thing I think that's important about this one is just, you know, Steve Goodman came to Memphis to sort of support his friend, and he ended up doing that acoustic guitar solo on this song. But Prine was playing this as early as the Fifth Peg, when he was a performer there. He wrote this one, somewhat early. I think it's great, it's playful. There's so much gravity on this record, that it kind of leaves you with a bit of lighter air (laughs). And I think, again, maybe, you know, he's meditating a bit on himself, about how Prine always said he's really good at wasting time (laughs). He just loves to kind of cruise around and think and, you know, live in his brain. And so I think that that is illustrated here. “Spent most of my youth out hobo cruising,” right, like, he didn't do that but I think it's illustrative of his quiet life in the suburbs and everything that he was observing and recording as this sort of guide, just kind of cruising around observing the everyday. 

Margo Price: Yeah, the cover of that album, you know, it always made me laugh when I saw it. I mean, it's like he looks comfortable, but also a little out of place too, you know, it's like staged 

Amanda Shires: He'd never seen hay before in his life. Than he had to look at that record for the rest of his life, him sitting in front of hay. 

Erin Osmon: That's the album cover, (laughs) is this photographer, like trying to put him somewhere, which is the same struggle that sort of everyone had with Prine at the time. But I mean, it's a really cute picture. You know, he looks folksy and he looks approachable and it sort of embodies the spirit of the album in a way. But it is ridiculous because Prine grew up in a suburban environment, not on a farm.

Margo Price: I can see it being like a marketing scheme. And I could see a lot of people not knowing what to do with John, you know. Because it's like for those who get it, they completely get it and, you know, he's, I hate the term but he’s a songwriter’s songwriter.

Erin Osmon: So Prine and Goodman released debut albums, like within, I don't know, a few months of one another. And they helped each other with each other's albums. And it was, you know, very much this like serendipitous moment for these two friends. And so when their albums came out, Paul Anka, had someone book a short residency for them at The Bitter End as sort of like the album release celebration. And so when that happened, Kristofferson came to the shows, I think, Bette Midler was there, like this whole coterie of like New York influencers were excited about these two guys. And so yeah, they met up with Kristofferson, and he was like, “Hey, we're gonna go hang out at Carly Simon's house.” And of course, these two guys from Chicago were like, “Uh sure, you know, we'll go party at Carly Simon's house.” So yeah, they went over and it's a bunch of songwriters sitting around hanging out, but then Prine tells the story, like all of a sudden, there was a knock on the door. And you know, he didn't think much of it. Just figured it would be just another random person that Kris Kristofferson knows. But that random person happened to be Bob Dylan (laughs). Like, they open the door and it was Bob Dylan. And Bob Dylan had been recovering from that motorcycle accident that he was in, he hadn't really been appearing publicly. I think he'd done the Concert for Bangladesh recently, but not much else. And so I mean, they were shocked to see Dylan. And then yeah, Dylan comes in and they engage in what's known as a guitar pull, which is like, where you have one guitar and you kind of pass it around. And, you know, everyone kind of sings a song, and Prine is singing his songs, and then Dylan starts singing along with him. And he's like, “What?” you know, “Bob Dylan knows my songs, that's incredible!” So yeah, Dylan had gotten like an advanced copy of the record from Jerry Wexler, and loved it and loved Prine, he loved Goodman, too. And yeah, that's kind of how that happened.

This album is the sound of a middle American region that doesn't get a lot of attention that is sort of disregarded or discounted or painted with broad brushstrokes. And I love that Prine brought his specific voice, the sound of someone whose family is from the country, but who grew up in a city, same as me, same as a lot of other folks who have family in the region. And he brought that to worldwide audiences. You know, that's so important, and it's so groundbreaking. And he did that on the strength of his own identity, which I think is really special. He never tried to be something that he's not. There's no one like Prine, there's no one that sounds like him. There's no one who can write like him. Many people have tried. As musical traditions go on, there will always be notable songwriters, those notable songwriters will always talk about John Prine, you know, because he was the first to do so many of these things that people use today. And that all started with this landmark debut album. 

Margo Price: I think 50 years later, John's self-titled album was ahead of its time. And it was also timeless. And I think it just kind of shows that, like I said, he had a special gift. He didn't have to learn how to become a songwriter, he just simply was. And he's just so missed.

Outro:
Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about John Prine. You'll also find a link to stream or purchase John Prine (Self-Titled). Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"Illegal Smile"

"Spanish Pipedream"

"Hello in There"

"Sam Stone"

"Paradise"

"Pretty Good"

"Your Flag Decal Won't Get You into Heaven Anymore"

"Far from Me"

"Angel from Montgomery"

"Quiet Man"

"Donald and Lydia"

"Six O'Clock News"

"Flashback Blues"

All selections were composed by John Prine and are published by Cotillion, BMI.

© 1971 Atlantic Recording Corporation

The personnel on all the selections except "Paradise" and "Flashback Blues" is:

John Prine – vocals and acoustic guitar

Reggie Young – lead guitar

Leo LeBlanc – pedal steel guitar

John Christopher – rhythm guitar

Bobby Emmons – organ

Bobby Wood – pianos

Mike Leach – bass

Gene Chrisman – drums

Heywood Bishop (incorrectly credited on the album as "Bishop Heywood") – percussion

The personnel on "Paradise" is:

John Prine – lead vocal and acoustic guitar

Steve Goodman – harmony vocal and acoustic guitar

Dave Prine – fiddle

Neil Rosengarden – bass

The personnel on "Flashback Blues" is:

John Prine – vocal and acoustic guitar

Steve Goodman – acoustic guitar

Noel Gilbert – fiddle

Mike Leach – bass

Heywood Bishop (incorrectly credited on the album as "Bishop Heywood") – drums

Gene Chrisman – tambourine

All the selections were recorded at American Recording Studios, Memphis, Tennessee, with the exception of “Paradise” which was recorded at A&R Studios, New York, New York.

Recording engineer: Stan Kesler

Assistant engineer: Dale Smith

Remix engineer: Arif Mardin

Photography & album design: Barry Feinstein & Tom Wilkes for Camouflage Productions

Produced by Arif Mardin

Episode Credits:

Theme Music:

“Winter Cold” by North Home

Intro/Outro Music:

“Lying Awake” by North Home

℗ Meladdy Music (ASCAP)

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam