So how does John pick his co-writers? “The co-writing is with guys who are friends of mine and happen to live in Nashville. These are buddies I shoot snooker with and sometimes it is hard not to write a song together. It helps me because I find it difficult to find the time to write on my own. As much as I like songwriting, I also like getting away from it. I won’t keep an appointment with myself, but if I have promised somebody else that I will be there at two o’clock, I’ll show up. It helps get things done.”
Does it mean that he has to adopt to their methods of working? “Well, that’s the plus side of it. I might take the easy way out on my own. I might lean on my strong suit. With somebody else, I might go into areas that I wouldn’t otherwise. If I’m put in a room by myself, I’m going to come out with a John Prine song, so it keeps things more interesting. I regard songwriting as a friendly argument. You argue back and forth until you have knocked off the rough edges of the song.”
He loves writing with the British songwriter, Roger Cook. “We’ve been friends for 20 years and we play snooker and go fishing. We did have one of those friendly arguments over The Glory Of True Love. I said, ‘Roger, we can’t use this title. There’s a great great song called The Glory Of Love.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. This is The Glory Of True Love.’ He can be very definite.”
Roger and John wrote the 1992 Daniel O’Donnell hit, I Just Want To Dance With You: “Well, we didn’t write it for him and I can’t remember who Roger was going to pitch it to. In the end, I did it first on the German Afternoons album and then Mary Black did a gorgeous version of it. I guess that’s where Daniel heard it and we were lucky enough to get a hit on it.”
I asked John if the best co-writer might be a rhyming dictionary. “Not for me. If I picked one up, I might use it as a joke, but I don’t need one, I really don’t. I think I got a rhyming dictionary inside of me. Usually I write very instinctively. I don’t give it a great deal of thought and I wouldn’t want to be looking for a rhyme in a book. I like making my decisions real quick and I usually find they are the right ones. The words have a melody of their own and so I get the melody at the same time.”
Prine wrote the album’s key cut, Some Humans Ain’t Human by himself. “I got a picture of a deep freeze that had been neglected in my mind. It had old things in it like frozen fish with ice all over, and the song came from that. I wrote it in a couple of hours. I got a place in Ireland and I usually spend the summers in Galway, my wife is from there. We take our children when they get out of school and we go to Ireland for the summer. Last summer I was finishing the record and thought I needed two more songs. The record was looking and sounding good and when you get to that point, you can see what kind of song you need. I wasn’t planning to make any kind of statement in the song, but the song got to a place where it needed a talking part and so I talked about what was on my mind. George Bush had made a visit to Ireland: when he went to Shannon Airport, they closed down the entire airport and brought in the army so that he wouldn’t see the protesters. It reminded me of the 60s when they would hide stuff from Richard Nixon. I made a comment within the song but the song itself was not so much of a protest. It was more about humans in general: some of them are always out to make a fast buck and some of them aren’t human.”
The song is very critical of Bush though and now Prine’s name could be on a list somewhere. “I hope so. (Laughs) What I’ve noticed is that there is a now a totally different climate in the US. I wondered at first why George Bush was in office, but having spoken to some of the people who voted for him, I don’t wonder anymore. There are lots of people who are in line with him, me not being one of them. I’m surprised that there aren’t more protest songs going on, but part of that has to do with the spin that the Bush administration put on 9/11. Anyone who had anything negative to say about Bush must be anti-American. It was Bush’s idea to start a war in Iraq and you are not supposed to say anything about not supporting the troops.”
Wasn’t it a shame that Bob Dylan wasn’t writing protest songs anymore? “It don’t matter because the ones he wrote will stand for a long time. Anyway, who can say what Bob Dylan is going to do tomorrow?”