John Prine - Storm Windows
#389
October 30 1980
John Prine
Storm Windows
Genre: Rock and Roll
3.5 out of 5
Highlights:
Just Wanna Be With You
One Red Rose
John Prine sounds more like Bob Dylan than Dylan does. Like this is to Dylan as Utopia’s Deface the Music was to The Beatles. Except the latter was an homage/deconstruction and this is mainly a lesser version of a sound that is going out of vogue.
Prine gets a lot of leeway from me just because of who he is otherwise I would probably say that, in 1980, this hews much closer to trad. country and we don’t need to be covering it.
The songs are all well and good but nothing that really rings my heart’s strings.
Springsteen also wrote a song called “Livin’ in the Future” and I’m struck that both of them come at the ends of heartland minstrels’ long and storied careers. Maybe that happens when you’ve been riding the Americana cum Woody Guthrie line for so much of your career, you can’t help but realize that the world you are living in is much different than the one when you were at your best. You keep doing what you’re doing because you love it and so do other people but, as it should be, you find yourself careening down the hill toward irrelevancy.
As I think about it I am reflecting on Tik Tok, the app. Because that app is allowing people who are different to show the world who they are and embrace everything from their weirdness to their maladies.
More important and relevant here, I appreciate the older people who are trying to get with it. They are fighting that fight into that long good night. They will never take it over, it will never be theirs but they aren’t afraid of it.
They are living in the future.
