`IT'S one in the afternoon here in Nashville, but I've been up for a good while. We've got two small babies, seven months and 17 months, so I've been up for what seems like 10 hours." John Prine, folk/country troubadour par excellence, is learning that even on the cusp of his 50th birthday there are new experiences to be savoured - and Irish ones at that. His wife, Fiona, is from Donegal, their marriage some months back the result of his being asked to play at the inaugural Point gigs, filmed as The Sessions and shown on RTE and Channel 4, over seven years ago.
"Ours has been an overseas relationship for quite a while," he explains, apropos of his domestic situation, "but I've spent a lot of time in Ireland over the past five years, so I reckon I know the country reasonably well. Fiona came over to Nashville about three years ago. And now look what's happened to me!"
A brace of children under two years of age? Most men 20 years younger than Prine would baulk at the prospect. What has been his reaction to the reality of a calm, middle-aged existence shattered by noise, nappies, and breakfast meetings at dawn? "I thought why hadn't I done this before? Children play such a large part in your life. It hasn't changed me outwardly all that much, except now I get up a lot earlier! They fill up a lot of places in your life where you previously had holes. I still wonder what I'll do when they begin to ask me questions."
Apart from writing songs about the experience, John Prine will probably give them the answers he's been proffering in his songs for the past 25 years. Not that the world's problems are being solved in these songs, but John Prine has an uncanny knack of writing about age-old differences and sorting out the shallow from the sincere, the benign underdog from the fascist dictator.
He's at his most effective in his love songs, which are a mixture of bitterness, irony, and warmth. His most recent album, Lost Dogs And Mixed Blessings (Rykodisc) contains two of his most affecting - All The Way With You, and This Love Is Real, the latter in particular as genuine a paean to matters of the heart as one could imagine. He's at his least rewarding when the simplicity of his lyrics threatens to undermine the emotional content, as on I Love You So Much It Hurts, also on the Rykodisc record.
Although his 1991 album, The Missing Years, earned him a Grammy award, money, and more fame than he could perhaps handle, John Prine used to be a trade secret, the kind of peculiarly American artist whose identity was known to a chosen few thousand. The son of a blue-collar steel worker and union boss, Prine was playing guitar and writing songs from the age of 14, his creative spurts interspersed by stints in uniform - postman and soldier.
It's a suitable enough metaphor for Prine's subsequent career: the man who refused to be strait-jacketed by conventional methods of delivery and presentation breaks free, carving a niche for himself by examining white proletarian America from a sharp but not dispassionate perspective.
HE signed to Atlantic records in 1971, releasing his compelling self-titled debut album to critical acclaim only. "At first I didn't really understand the term cult status," says Prine of those early days when he impressed many but sold to few. "The only time I ever heard that word was in relation to a band of crazy people up in the hills with guns and stuff, or a bunch of devil worshippers! So from what I understand it's supposed to mean a group of small and loyal followers, and I certainly had that right from the get-go. I could have continued on with just that throughout the years. It was enough for me to make a living, for people to listen to the music and carry on."
Was cult success enough for him, or did he secretly yearn for more than just appealing to a coterie of fans? "It would have been enough for me for about six or seven years, and then I know I'd have wanted to move up another notch. But I never was really career-oriented, where I wanted to plan and plot everything so that I'd end up playing arenas within a few years."
So this Grammy winner is quite happy playing medium-sized venues? "Yes, because they're the venues that my music, at very least, is meant to be played in," he replies, commercial pragmatism superceded by a desire to touch an emotive core. "I like playing in swell little symphony halls. Basically, it's still me and my guitar. I carry two or three band members with me, so it's an intimate affair.
I can't really see it getting too large. If I were able to play around the world in small concert halls, that'd do me just fine."
Prior to the breakthrough success of The Missing Years, when his albums were positively received but stubbornly refused to sell in vast quantities, did Prine ever feel like giving it up and going back to an ordinary day-time job? "I never felt like going back to a day-time job," he says,"but I did feel like, at different times, not pursuing a music career in a professional way. The only times I felt like that were when I thought the business side of things got in the way of the music. I'd come home off the road, and I didn't really want to see my guitar because it reminded me of long hours and gruelling tours. When stuff like that happened, I would wonder about the future.
"My guitar is always a place that I use to escape to. I pick it up and forget about everything else. I didn't want the business to turn on me, so I stopped playing music for the fun of it. So those were the only times when I thought seriously about giving it up for something else - although what that something else would have been, I have no idea.
"It's always been because of the business aspects. It was never because I felt the music wasn't being accepted well enough, or I should be playing larger places and selling more records. It was just because I didn't want to confuse matters, by getting away from playing music."
Prine says that winning the Grammy didn't radically change his life, but that the gigs were "better" and the dressing rooms "nicer".
"The best thing a Grammy does is that it takes all the stuff that's happening to you at the time, especially the good bits, and enhances it, solidifies it. Other than that, I can't really see what else it did. It was good to win, but then it was good to be nominated too." What about the effective title track, Jesus - The Missing Years? As an amusing Arlo Guthrie-type rolling narrative take on the life and times of Jesus, did John ever consider that the song might have proved offensive to certain oversensitive souls? `I got a little bit of adverse reaction to the song," he admits with a chuckle. "One guy sent me a broken CD of the album with a note saying I was helping to decay the moral fibre of the youth. Gee, I was delighted with that! I framed it. The fellow claimed he was a fan, but I couldn't believe he digested the song in the way that he did. The reaction surprised me, I have to say, but it also pleased me. But, you know, the most important aspect of this particular story was that I wasn't aware that CDs could be broken. I thought they were indestructible."
John Prine is 50 in October. Presumably, he's preparing himself for an extremely productive phase in his life and career, yet one cannot help but wonder how long he can continue to write his variation of songs on similar themes without becoming either jaded or taken for granted.
"Well, for the past three years things have been brilliant, the most exciting of times. I've never been a parent before. Things are coming together here for me at the ripe old of almost 50. It seems like it's going to be a really enjoyable time for me, playing more or less where I want to play, and selling enough records to enable me to get around. It's not like I would want to go back to anything."
