JOHN PRINE IN PENNSYLVANIA CONCERT REVIEWS 2005

The  Keswick Theatre Glenside PA
Fri June 17  support: Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez

By: Nick Cristiano
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/entertainment/nightlife/11913452.htm  
Posted on Fri, Jun. 17, 2005 
After 9 long years, new John Prine
  Kids and cancer had kept the songwriter occupied.
  Just because Fair and Square is his first album of new material in nine years doesn't mean John Prine wasn't busy during all that time. On the contrary.
  The revered singer-songwriter cut a set of country covers with Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and other noted female singers, and rerecorded an album's worth of his best old songs. And then there was the matter of raising, with his wife, two babies born within 10 months of each other, and dealing with cancer in his neck.
  "I don't know what I did before my kids were born," the 58-year-old Prine said with an amused sense of wonder from his home in Nashville. "For 49 years I didn't do anything, and then I had two kids."
  The domestic situation, more than anything, slowed Prine's usual creative process. A writer who prefers to wait for that "special mood" to strike rather than force himself to compose, he was finding less and less time when he was free enough to let inspiration hit.
  As it turned out, Fair and Square was worth the wait: It's prime Prine, full of the penetrating wisdom and wit that have always marked him as a true original. The cancer took a chunk of his neck and has forced him to sing in a lower key, but his craggy, conversational drawl fits easily against the relaxed, acoustic-textured country-folk arrangements.
  It's the same style Prine used on Souvenirs, the 2000 album that delivered new and better versions of such Prine classics as "Sam Stone," "Angel From Montgomery," and the title song. (Like his new one, Souvenirs is on Prine's own Oh Boy Records, a pioneering artist-run label he and a partner started in 1980 after his decade-long run on major labels. "They said we were crazy [to do it]... . We didn't know any better.")
  Even when he was a brash and sharp-witted "new Dylan," Prine never had a pretty voice. But the way he sings now, and the spare accompaniment, brings out the enduring, old-soul quality of his best songs.
  "I never really liked listening to my voice from the studio [recordings]," Prine said of his younger days. "I always felt vaguely uncomfortable in the studio, and I could always hear it [in my voice], even if no one else did. I feel more comfortable now.

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