And summer either ended long ago or is in full flight depending on where you are, so consider this Amnesty Week’s End. We’ll be back after Christmas with some more songs before taking a break at New Year!
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Ian Mathers: Look, as far as songwriters go I’ve thought John Prine was a genius since I was a kid playing Great Days on repeat and I was crying before I watched the video for this one, because the ways he sings “come on home” just wrecks me in a way I’m not sure I’m capable of articulating.
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Alfred Soto: These songs are tough — would a tyro hear anything worth exploring or is “Summer’s End” for fans to project their affection? Both. Boasting much of his loping grace, The Tree of Forgiveness is a worthwhile tombstone for a career should John Prine start seein’ those shadows creep across the ceiling in real time. The light Mellotron touches on “Summer’s End” let the light into the room.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: Hard to imagine Prine winning over any new fans with this; “Summer End” is a late-career single from a longtime musician, and most of its appeal comes from hearing an artist do more or less what he’s always done except with more wear in his voice and some of the ostensible profundity that comes with age. It wavers between pleasant and tepid.
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Jonathan Bradley: Prine’s gently weathered voice settles into a twilight that won’t be followed by a sunrise. “The moon and stars hang out in bars just talking,” he speaks, drawing magical realism to the honky tonk, and letting the soft edges of the scene blur into eternity. Other images, like drying clothes on a line and shadows on a ceiling, are striking for their clarity and their decontextualized vividity, as sharp as memory. The arrangement is so warm and hushed it could have fit on Lambchop’s Is a Woman record, and while it’s comforting, it also softens the starkness of the lone guitar figure at the center of the arrangement. The rote and cyclical quality of some of the lesser lyrics — St. Valentine’s Day, Easter, New Years’ — dulls and fills out the space between the more distinct moments. When a performer reaches a certain age, it’s hard not to read death into darkness, but “Summer’s End” leans into that; it is a song not bound entirely to this plane of existence.
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Edward Okulicz: I guess it’s a symbol of Prine’s influence that “Summer’s End” itself could have fit snugly on to many alt-country, or even country, artist’s records, and not just the ones who provided assists on Prine’s 2018 record. Prine’s vocals are frail, but the song’s delicate and has a strong melody, so the effect is humble and gentle more than anything. There are some striking word pictures here, but the song rests on the comparatively well-trodden — the emotive words “come on home” over a simple guitar. Whether it a literal beckoning or the soothing of a dying pillow, it’s a simple, but real comfort. I really enjoy Brandi Carlile’s spot-on backing vocals too.
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Anthony Easton: Prine has already had a pretty close brush with death, one that fried his vocals enough that he had to learn a fairly different singing style. That style is smaller, a little more broken, complicating narratives that are already very sad and often very funny. Every album he releases seems like it may be the last, and the spaces between albums seem longer, and so the question arises — is this the last one? The interesting thing is that though the metaphor is fairly clear, the death here, the mourning — is not a solitary act. Coming home might be what a beloved Father says, but for Prine it is also what the community hears. The cosmic becomes domestic — the sun and moon in the bar together drinking — but also that coming home is being embraced in a low church communion of saints kind of way. For a song about death, it is a song about how a community folds in on itself. Mom has been really sick this year, and Dad has been very unkind in Mom’s sickness, and their complications, the question of what their relationship is, has been a decades long puzzle. I have cut Dad off, but he loves Mom, and other people have also helped Mom — friends parents, members of her church, my sister, and her wife. Family and friends are taking this stressful and sad place, and crafting a kind of homecoming for her — a home coming that I am not sure that other people would recognize a year or more ago. I also decided that the place I was living is home, and that despite the months-long prep I made to move back west, it was not going to happen. I am sentimental, and country music is sentimental, and home is a hornet’s nest, and all of this is bullshit, and Prine can usually hold his sentimentality, and there are sections of this that are as tart as Prine at his best (both in production, and in writing), but the bits that destroy me, especially in this year where I tried to figure out what home was, was when he sings: “Just come on home/Come on home/No you don’t have to be alone/Just come on home.” The simplest, tiniest, language, the saddest and happiest sentiment, words as simple a child can hear, and ones imbued with a Grace, and words that make me cry — maybe because of biography, maybe because of Prine’s age, maybe because it takes decades of figuring out how to sing before one can sing well about such big things in such small ways… but I keep feeling like I am flailing in describing how this thing just fucking destroys me.
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