#3/1160
January 1 1986
John Prine
German Afternoons
Genre: Folk Rock
3.25 out of 5
Highlights:
Speed of the Sound of Loneliness
Yeah, I know. Not entirely sure Price should be here but here’s the thing: Pop music is splintering in the 80s in ways heretofore unseen. The dam is bursting and just about everything counts, you know? Personally, I think this is all Malcolm McLaren’s doing. His incorporation of African rhythms through Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow really opened the floodgates. And also, Talking Heads, for sure.
So, why include Price?
I’ve never really known much of his work however one of my favorite songs of the 90s is on the album. Not his version, though. It’s Nanci Griffith’s version of “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” that put the name “John Prine” in my ears. Hers is a more mournful song, the original being a straight forward country folk ditty but it’s in that simple straightforwardness and the comparison of the two that we learn and realize that the song is just so perfect.
Including Prine allows me to lay the groundwork for inclusion of bands like The Builders and the Butchers which are on the horizon…20 years down the line. Sometimes I feel like I’m listening to Jimmy Buffett but I guess that’s this album’s wheelhouse.
I’ve not returned to Griffith’s album inasmuch as the last song on it reminds me of my later daughter too much. I was listening to it a lot when she was first diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis so this is the closest I’ve been to that song in a long time.
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