JOHN PRINE SHOWED ME HIS PUSSY ON INSTAGRAM!

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I love the music of John Prine. He was one of the great chroniclers of the human condition. His songs sounded best when he performed them, but they were so good that a bunch of other artists decided to have a go at them too. So you might find a Johnny Cash recording of a John Prine song. Or Bonnie Raitt. She even reckons her version of Angel From Montgomery was crucial in getting her started; getting her recognised.

There are John Prine songs that could instantly make you weep.

I regret not seeing him when he played in Wellington a few years back. I was stubborn. The venue. I wasn’t having it. So I didn’t go. A year later he was dead. Prine died in 2020, aged 73.

I had written a strange, and funny poem about John Prine in 2018. It was going to be in my debut book of poems, The Death of Music Journalism. It wasn’t really about John Prine of course — but also it was. It was about those fake profiles that befriend you on social media, or you follow a celebrity profile and it gets taken over, or it never really was the real thing.

I’d been posting about John Prine, sharing songs, just generally talking him up. I was a huge fan. I still am. You can’t ever lose that, once you hear his magic.

But then I started getting messages from John Prine on Instagram. Except of course, it was “John Prine”. It wasn’t really him. And the messages started getting really weird, really quickly.