The Optical Files #97: John Prine - Bruised Orange (1978)

After the rocking excesses of Sweet Revenge, Prine smoothed it out again for the rootsy followup Common Sense, which charted better than anything since his debut but flopped with the critics & ended his relationship with Atlantic. After a 3-year break, Prine re-emerged on a new (& smaller) label with Bruised Orange, a softspoken, contemplative set of songs with bare-bones production by his longtime friend Steve Goodman, a correction from Steve Cropper's polished production on Common Sense. What resulted (from what was reportedly a frustrating gestation process) was the most consistent of John's 3-album stint at Asylum.

Bruised Orange finds Prine in as serious as mood as he's ever been, missing both the spunk of Sweet Revenge & the good humor of Common Sense. What replaces them is a sense of quiet regretfulness, which comes through even in goodnatured songs like "Fish and Whistle" ("we'll make a big wish that we never have to do this again"). The eponymous track, subtitled "Chain of Sorrow," tells the true story of John witnessing the aftermath of a train accident that killed an altar boy, who made the mistake of "walking with his back turned to the train that was coming so slow." He goes on to liken this to the experience of a shattered romantic relationship that he knew was doomed from the start ("my head shouted down to my heart, 'you better look out below'). The thing about a bruised orange is that it doesn't heal. You just have to learn those lessons & try to keep it from bruising even more.

For me the philosophical center of the record is "Crooked Piece of Time," which resurrects some of the piss & vinegar of Sweet Revenge with a rocking organ & John singing in a throatier voice than the folksy croon he uses for most of the album. The song is both an indictment of modern alienation & an acknowledgement that there's really no easy time to be a human living on this planet. I don't think it was by accident that the last time I saw Prine in concert--in November 2019, 5 months before his death--he opened the show with "Crooked Piece of Time." He was so grateful that he was still selling out theaters in his 70s, grateful for the opportunity to bring people together, but that didn't change the fact that, somehow, the piece of time we live in just keeps getting crookeder.