The Kids Miss Him: Remembering John Prine

John Prine passed away one year ago on April 7. In March, he won two posthumous Grammys for his 2020 song “I Remember Everything.” Collin Fidler of Oh Boy Records sat down with Marianne Leek to share some memories of his “Nashville Grandpa.”

By Marianne Leek | Painting by Heather Sundquist Hall

“I've been down this road before
I remember every tree
Every single blade of grass
Holds a special place for me”
— “I Remember Everything” by John Prine

As poetry would have it, John Prine’s last song, “I Remember Everything,” debuted at No. 1 on a Billboard chart, the first No. 1 single of his career, and won two Grammys this year. Prine is an indisputable legend. During his long career, the singing postman-turned-full-time musician garnered the attention and respect of music icons such as Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, both of whom praised him as one of the greatest lyricists of our time. Dylan even famously showed up at one of Prine’s earliest shows and played backup harmonica. In January 2020, Prine received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys. He passed away on April 7, 2020, from complications due to COVID-19. 

Later in his career, Prine mentored a new generation of artists: Brandi Carlile, who sang a tribute to him at the Grammys; Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires; Sturgill Simpson; Kacey Musgraves; Arlo McKinley; Dan Reeder; Tré Burt; and Kelsey Waldon — modern troubadours for social and political change. 

Collin Fidler is among a new generation of music artists who looked up to Prine. Fidler became an intern at Oh Boy Records and first met Prine in the fall of 2015. Fidler sat down to talk with me on a little porch in Warne, a tiny, rural community in the far western corner of North Carolina. He reminisced about the kindness of a man whom Fidler affectionately described as his hero. 

The summer before Fidler’s senior year at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, he traveled to Ireland where his path came close to crossing with Prine’s. Fidler found volunteer work on an organic farm and did busking in his free time. ”Everyone would freak out when I would play a John Prine song.” Fidler recalls. “I didn’t understand why, and people would say, ‘Everyone in Ireland loves John Prine.’” It turns out, Fidler says, that he spent that summer in Kinvara, where Prine and his wife, Fiona, had a house, drinking beer at a pub where the musician liked to frequent. 

Upon returning to Nashville to finish his degree in music business, Fidler made a short list of places he might like to work. “I decided to reach out to Oh Boy Records. So I wrote this very silly, descriptive cover letter and sent my resume in, and within 20 minutes I got an email back asking me to come in for an interview. I just cold emailed them.”

Oh Boy Records was in a tiny one-room apartment on Belmont Boulevard, so Fidler walked over to the office to discuss the possibility of an internship. Founded in 1981 by Prine and his longtime manager, Al Bunetta, Oh Boy Records had temporarily shut its doors after Bunetta died in 2015. It had been primarily a family-run record label with Prine as the president, Jody Whelan as the director of day-to-day operations; Eileen Tilson, a close friend of Fiona Prine’s, as the marketing manager; and Fiona Whelan Prine as her husband’s manager. Following a short interview, they asked him, “When can you start?”

Fidler’s nine-month internship would be his invitation into the small, intimate family that is Oh Boy Records. Following his graduation from Belmont University in 2016, Fidler would eventually round out the Oh Boy team as the e-commerce and project manager.

Fidler described his first meeting with Prine like a kid meeting a favorite superhero. “He would come into the office, and I was literally star-struck. Which happened for a long time. Almost every time, really. I don’t know if it ever fully went away. But, really, the first time I got to have any sort of lengthy conversation with him was midway through my internship.” He went on to explain how Whelan approached him and told him Oh Boy Records wanted to send him on the road and to “pick out some dates.”

“I picked Portland [Oregon] and Seattle because those dates coincided with my spring break,” Fidler continued. “I got to watch the [Portland] show from the side of the stage, which was insane. I hadn’t seen John Prine since I saw Old Crow Medicine Show open up for him in Cary, North Carolina, when I was 15. At that time, I didn’t even know who John Prine was. I’m pretty sure I had to leave before the concert was over because my parents were picking me up, but that’s when I really started getting into [him]. Anyway, in Portland, I’m watching from the side of the stage and thinking, what is my life? I was 21. I was just like, holy shit! He’s one of those people that you have to see live. You might think you get John Prine, but you don’t really get John Prine until you’ve seen him live.

“So after the encore, John came offstage and he makes this beeline for me. Fiona always helped him offstage, and the two of them just headed straight toward me, and he says, ‘Collin, we’re so glad to have you with us, and we’re so glad you’re part of the team.’ That’s the kind of person he was. Here he just came offstage, the audience is still standing and cheering, and he’s coming over to talk to me. That was really the first night I got to talk to him. I was just like, ‘This is such a treat.’ I got to tell him, ‘You’re my hero, and you have been since I was a teenager.’” 

“He had the same tour manager [Mitchell Drosin] for 20 years,” Fidler said, in trying to explain Prine’s loyalty. “The whole team, including touring, was nine to 10 people. John liked it that way. He latched onto people.” 

“I think he loved being the president of Oh Boy,” Fidler recalled, even though Prine wasn’t in the office every day. “Sometimes he would pop into Oh Boy and say, ‘Let’s all get oysters.’ There was an oyster place down by our office, and we’d all just walk down there and get oysters. We had Christmas dinners that were always a lot of fun. He’d take us to Arnold’s [Country Kitchen] — that was his favorite meat and three. He was just super kind. I think the best way to describe him was just kindhearted and easygoing. His entire demeanor was like, ‘I’ll just wake up and wash the car and get some food.’ His day-to-day was just so relaxed and content. He had a kindness that permeated everything he did. Every part of him was kind. He kind of felt like my Nashville Grandpa.” 

I asked Fidler, who self-released his first album, “Down on Warne,” in 2019, if he ever had the opportunity to discuss songwriting with Prine. “I remember one time we went to get lunch with John, Eileen and Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead. Of course, you want to ask about writing music, but honestly, John and Bob wanted to talk about San Francisco traffic and working out, so that’s what we talked about. I remember when ‘The Tree of Forgiveness’ came out asking, ‘Where does this come from?’ He definitely has a craft of his own. … I remember him saying, ‘Sometimes you’re writing a song and you don’t know where it’s going, and then it’s finished.’ … Where he was eating was always a really important part of the conversation. If you had met him on any given day, songwriting would probably never come up.” 

Fidler recalled a time when he was at Prine’s house for a Fourth of July party. “I think at this point it was like 1 or 2 a.m. … John would always be one of the last ones up. There was this giant taxidermy fish hung up. And I asked, ‘John, what is that?’ It had a little plaque underneath it. And John said, ‘That was my goldfish.’ I was like ‘What? That thing is huge.’ 

And he says, ‘Yeah, I’ll tell you the story.’ Turns out a goldfish will get as big as its tank is — I didn’t know that. So someone had gifted this goldfish to him, and he had bought this aquarium tank. He said, ‘I wanted to give it a really big home.’ He was in the middle of touring, so he of course left it while on tour and had someone feed it. When he got back it was giant, and every time he would get back from touring that fish was bigger and bigger. Eventually, he went on tour, and by this time that goldfish was huge, and he asked someone to feed it. Maybe they didn’t — I don't know, but something happened and it died. He was pretty upset about it, but he decided to take it, get it stuffed, and hang it up. He takes it to this guy who was gonna do it, and the guy asked John, ‘What’s its name?’… He had never named it. John said he just kind of panicked and said, ‘Well, the kids miss him.’ So under this fish is this plaque that says, ‘The Kids Miss Him’ — like that was the goldfish’s name. Obviously, it’s a funny story, but the way he told it was just captivating. He was such a good storyteller.” 

When I asked Fidler about his favorite John Prine song, he offered his own music primer. “Since working at Oh Boy, I know every John Prine song. ‘Speed of the Sound of Loneliness’ was one I didn’t know until I started working there. I’d never heard that song, but for the first two years of working at Oh Boy, that one was probably my favorite. Same with ‘Six O’Clock News.’ … ‘Summer’s End’ is a definite standout. I love ‘Lonesome Friends of Science,’ too. And of course, he closed almost every show with ‘Paradise.’ Probably ‘Clocks and Spoons’ though, if I had to pick one.” On the night Fidler found out Prine had been put on a ventilator due to complications with COVID-19, he recorded and posted his own cover of “Clocks and Spoons” on Instagram.

He continues, “It seems like when people talk about John Prine and songwriting, it’s not broken down in any way — it’s just the way John Prine writes a song. It’s just the way he does it. There’s not a good way to figure out the structure. For instance, in ‘Six O’Clock News’ the lyrics, ‘ “God Bless this kitchen,” said the knick-knack shelf.’ That line blows my mind. It’s surrealism. It’s hard to say what his songwriting process is. Some people just see beauty. There are certain things, like building a character or knowing the right time for a song to come, or not necessarily knowing what you’re writing, but just writing. With the [album] ‘The Tree of Forgiveness,’ a lot of it was written just holed up in a hotel in downtown Nashville. He said he wrote really well in hotel rooms, and he actually writes on those legal pads.

“There was just something so poetic and beautiful about everything in his life,” Fiddler explained. “He always wanted to play Paris — his whole life. He had never played it.”

On Feb. 13, 2020, John Prine played his last show at Café de la Danse in Paris to a sold-out audience. 

“There’s something truly singular and special about John Prine. The way he led his life and everything he did was this big poem with an ‘I Remember Everything’ bow on top,” Fidler continued. “If you look at it from a macrocosmic scale, the way he lived his life was just incredible. His demeanor, his kindness, and just being lovely.”

On Dec. 29, Fiona Prine posted a picture of the handwritten lyrics to “I Remember Everything” on Instagram. She also wrote about hearing it for the first time.

“ … I had never seen John quite like this when he had a new song to bring home. He literally bounced in the door, immediately took his guitar from its case, and said, ‘Listen to this Fi … ’ He was excited and proud, but there was something else, too. As he picked the melody I could see he was emotional with tears welling up in his eyes. … John would always say, ‘No song before it’s time.’ I’m not sure if he heard that from someone else but I know he absolutely believed it to be true. It appears John knew more than I imagined about the demands of time. He left us a beautiful and timely parting gift. Thank you, John. Thank you, for Everything.”

I’d like to think that when you pluck a guitar string, the vibration continues reverberating forever, long after the sound can be heard. However, the physics don’t quite work like that. Instead, when a guitar string is played, the vibration continues until it comes into contact with an object or a person. Then the vibration is either absorbed, converted into another form of energy such as heat, or reflected back to the original source. That seems to be the way of John Prine. Thank you, John. Thank you, for everything.

Heather Sundquist Hall is an artist based in Smithville, Texas. Her work is heavily influenced by narratives, nostalgia, and details. Heather’s illustrations have become pieces of her own stories whose purpose is to preserve memories like souvenirs.