John Prine recorded most of his tenth album in a guest bedroom. Howie Epstein's home studio on Readcrest Drive in Los Angeles went by the name Huh Sound Theater, and it was there, over nine months in 1990 and 1991, that Prine built what would become "The Missing Years." The album came out on September 24, 1991, on Oh Boy Records, the label Prine co-owned with his manager Al Bunetta after the major labels had moved on. It was his first studio record since German Afternoons in 1986, five years of silence that made the return feel like something more than a new release. It won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. The record makes an argument that runs deeper than any of those facts: fourteen songs arranged so that the whole becomes a single sustained meditation on imagination as the one thing that keeps a person whole.
The opener earns its place. "Picture Show," which features Tom Petty on background vocals, is a song about a young man with a very large imagination lying alone in his room with his radio on. He hears James Dean, John Garfield, Montgomery Clift. He hears the movies calling. Prine recorded it in Los Angeles, and the choice to begin there, with that image, in that city, is not accidental. The whole record is about what the mind does when the world disappoints it. "Picture Show" states the premise quietly, and then the album spends the next twelve tracks testing it.
The cast Epstein assembled for those sessions was extraordinary, and the way they were deployed matters. Benmont Tench played piano, organ, and harmonium. David Lindley brought acoustic guitar, bouzouki, harp, and fiddle. Albert Lee handled electric guitar, mandolin, and piano. John Jorgenson moved between acoustic guitar, dobro, mandolin, bassoon, and saxophone. Mickey Raphael played harmonica. Phil Parlapiano contributed mandolin, accordion, and harmonium. The arrangements are rich but never crowded, and Epstein, who was himself the bassist in Petty's Heartbreakers, kept the weight on Prine's acoustic guitar and voice. The celebrity appearances, when they come, are folded into the record rather than displayed. Bruce Springsteen appears on "Take a Look at My Heart," a song co-written with John Mellencamp, and sings like a man who wanted to be there. Bonnie Raitt joins on "Unlonely." Phil Everly lends his voice to "You Got Gold." None of them announce themselves. They serve the song.
"The Sins of Memphisto" has its own origin story worth knowing. Prine wrote it under pressure, after Epstein told him they needed one or two more cuts with nine months already behind them. They were twelve songs in. Prine went looking and came out with what biographer Eddie Huffman called one of the most remarkable pieces in his catalog. That is what the record keeps doing: it turns constraint into precision. The songs that feel most offhand, most tossed off, carry the most weight. "It's a Big Old Goofy World" runs five minutes and ten seconds and sounds like it was written in an afternoon, and it holds the album's center of gravity without straining for it.
The sequencing of the final three tracks is where the record becomes something more than a collection of strong songs. "You Got Gold," with Phil Everly, is a love song of such plain and aching sincerity that it would be the emotional peak of almost any other album. Prine places it third from last. After it comes "Everything Is Cool," a short, quiet piece recorded at The Money Pit in Nashville, which functions as a kind of clearing of the throat, a song about loss and small grace. It runs two minutes and forty-six seconds. And then, at the very end, comes "Jesus the Missing Years," nearly six minutes of talking blues in which Prine fills in the decades the Gospels skip: Jesus at the movies on his thirteenth birthday, Jesus cutting his hair, Jesus settling down with his Irish bride in Rome and writing songs, Jesus eventually keeping his appointment in Jerusalem. As Prine told a writer before the album came out, if the record didn't represent his music well, he was going to check into something else. "Jesus the Missing Years" is the sound of a man who had found his footing and knew it.
The logic of that closing sequence is the logic of the whole album. "Picture Show" opens on a young man using imagination to survive longing. "Jesus the Missing Years" closes on the same impulse applied to the largest story in Western civilization, and played for both comedy and genuine tenderness. Between those two poles, the record moves through grief, desire, humor, and time, with Prine's particular gift for finding the place where those things overlap. The Missing Years is that gift worked out across fourteen songs, in a Los Angeles guest bedroom repurposed as a studio, with a band that understood exactly what it was being asked to do. Prine died in April 2020, and the album has only grown in the years since. It sounds like a man who knew how much he had, and spent it carefully.
