John Prine is one of the finest American songwriters, something that he was recently recognized for by receiving the PEN award for literary excellence. Despite the fact that he’s 69 years old this year and has released over 20 albums, he’s still at it, releasing the brand new For Better, Or Worse this Friday.
The album itself is a hymn to the art and terror of marriage, the examination of the subject is stretched across 15 different tracks, each with Prince accompanied by a different female duet partner. Sure, the conceit works well for an album about couples, but it’s also a subtle sign of Prine’s continual, steady support of women within the genre.
He’s often featured female singers like Iris Dement all throughout his career, and on this record works with more contemporary female country stars too, like LeeAnn Womack, Holly Williams, Morgane Stapleton (Yes, Chris Stapleton’s wife), Miranda Lambert, his own wife Fiona Prine, and country music’s resident sweetheart Kacey Musgraves.
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While many of the tracks here hew closer to the traditional Americana and folk template, Prine’s best songs were always the ones that wandered down suburban side streets, and that’s what his collaboration with Musgraves does. Entitled “Mental Cruelty,” it portrays a tug-of-war on the subject of this behavior in marriage, with each side claiming to have experienced it at the hand of the other. It’s the kind of clever, weird and honeyed winking-hilarity that we’ve come to expect from both Kacey and Prine himself. Listen to the whole album below, but make sure to check that song out in particular.
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For Better, Or Worse is out this Friday, 9/30 via Oh Boy/Thirty Tigers. Get it here.
