Tommy Prine
Bio
Tommy Prine makes his long-awaited debut with two original songs, “Ships in the Harbor” and “Turning Stones.” The two tracks are a preview of a forthcoming full-length album from the Nashville-born singer-songwriter, due in 2023.
The son of the late songwriting legend John Prine, Tommy Prine grew up in Nashville surrounded by music, art and writing. As a child, he thought all parents were musicians, as his father “going to work” meant performing shows for adoring fans and writing songs. Tommy learned to play guitar by watching his father play, copying the ways his fingers moved and inadvertently developing his own singular style. Summers in Ireland lent their own inspiration, as did 10 straight years camping at Bonnaroo. Prine’s musical tastes grew to be decidedly eclectic, spanning John Mayer, Outkast, Bon Iver, the Strokes and more.
It wasn’t until Prine reached his mid-twenties, though, that he considered a career of his own in music and began to share the songs he wrote in private with others. He was quickly met with excitement and enthusiasm for his writing, which sonically brings together colorful patchwork of musical influences and lyrically trades in existential questions and emotional explorations.
“Ships in the Harbor” is a tender meditation on impermanence and change, with Prine communicating the universal experience of loss through poetic observations of the seemingly mundane. He wrote “Ships in the Harbor” around the time of his birthday in September 2021 and considers it among the best songs he’s written to date. Of the song’s theme, he shares, “I always get super existential around my birthday. I had a thought that we, as humans, can only feel as deeply as we do — and love people and fear things and feel all the other intense emotions — because everything we experience is finite, including our own lives. So, I wrote a song about these little powerful moments and reflections in the human experience to try and capture the beauty in mortality.”
“If someone were to say to me, ‘Show me one song to explain yourself as a singer, songwriter, and artist,’ I would play them ‘Ships in the Harbor,’” he adds. “It shows the way that I look at things and see the world and process emotions. It almost feels like I didn’t even write it. It was like that song was already there.”
Grief is a major throughline of Prine’s current work, as he still grapples with the passing of his father in April of 2020. While navigating that loss has been difficult, he’s found solace in connecting through music with others who have lost loved ones.
“When I'm playing certain songs, I can literally look out in the crowd and tell who else has lost their dad,” he says. “I can immediately tell which people have experienced, specifically, losing their father. They'll come up and tell me afterwards, and I'll be like, ‘Yeah, like, I figured that this conversation was going to happen,’ because I could see their reaction. It’s been really powerful to see real-deal evidence that grief is a shared experience, and that suffering is a shared experience between humans.”
Introspection and self-knowledge also show up repeatedly in Prine’s work, as on the Ruston Kelly co-write “Turning Stones,” which asserts the importance of reflecting upon one’s experiences — especially the difficult ones. “’Turning Stones’ comes from the phrase “leave no stone unturned,’” Prine says. “It's about learning from past mistakes and bad life choices by asking yourself the tough questions, or ‘turning every stone.’ You can’t learn from those mistakes unless you put in the work and self-reflection.”
Prine found a close friend and kindred musical spirit in Kelly, who co-produced Prine’s forthcoming album alongside beloved Nashville engineer and producer Gena Johnson. Among the many things Prine respects about Kelly as a musician is his sense of melody, an element of songwriting Prine considers just as important as (if not more so than) writing lyrics.
Prine will cap off 2022 with his first solo tour, which runs across the United States through mid-November. He’ll also be heavily involved with You Got Gold, an event series in Nashville honoring the life and songs of John Prine, and will perform at AmericanaFest as an official showcasing artist.
“I feel like I've learned more about myself in the last year and a half than I ever have in my life,” Prine says. “And I think that speaks a lot to doing something that I'm passionate about. I love and respect the craft. Just hitting the road and doing what so many people before me have done and will continue to do, it's really resonated with me. I think it's transformed me into the person that I need to be.”
