John Prine Returns to Songwriting, Jaunty and Dark, on ‘The Tree of Forgiveness’

The cheerful and the bleak face off on “The Tree of Forgiveness,” John Prine’s first album of his own new songs since “Fair and Square” back in 2005. He has undergone some wear since then: In 2013, he had surgery for lung cancer, after surviving neck cancer in 1998. While at 71 his voice is gruffer and scratchier than ever, the album is unapologetic about it; vocals are recorded close-up over sparse arrangements, with melodies that relax into cozy countryish territory and sometimes stray toward speech.

Prine’s songs, as they have since his 1971 debut album, can sound both carefully chiseled and playfully off the cuff. There are whimsical moments that might just see where rhymes can lead him — “I’m gonna kiss that pretty girl/on the Tilt-a-Whirl” — but more often, his lyrics ground themselves in mundane detail on the way to pithy home truths. “Sometimes my old heart is like a washing machine/It bounces around till my soul comes clean,” Prine sings in “Boundless Love,” a near-hymn of gratitude — perhaps romantic, perhaps spiritual — on the new album.

Prine’s songwriting is cherished by fellow musicians, from Bonnie Raitt, who has been singing his “Angel From Montgomery” since the 1970s, up through Brandi Carlile, who joins him on this album for “I Have Met My Love Today,” and Sturgill Simpson, with whom he’s sharing tour dates. The producer of “The Tree of Forgiveness” (Oh Boy) is Dave Cobb, Nashville’s first-call choice for tracks built on rootsy naturalism. To back Prine, Cobb assembled lineups of mostly acoustic instruments that sound as if they just happened to get together on someone’s porch — though when a modest string section or a slide-guitar lick or a churchy organ are called for, they are always precisely in place.

The album seems to start jauntily enough, with “Knockin’ on Your Screen Door,” a Johnny Cash-style country march. But the lyrics that Prine cackles through begin with “I ain’t got nobody” and mention that his wife and family have left him; now he’s knocking at someone’s door just hoping for company, even though he knows, “You don’t got to answer.” The album ends with the jovial bounce of “When I Get to Heaven,” complete with kazoo, which Prine imagines as a place where he can open up a nightclub called the Tree of Forgiveness — and forgive a lot of people — and where he can “smoke a cigarette that’s 9 miles long.” The catch, he also recognizes, is that he has to die first.

Mortality looms throughout “The Tree of Forgiveness.” It’s played for comedy in “Egg & Daughter Nite, Lincoln Nebraska, 1967 (Crazy Bone),” with honky-tonk piano rippling behind a closing verse about dementia and deterioration in a nursing home, while “In a local cemetery/They already got your name carved out in stone.” It also suffuses “Caravan of Fools,” a haunted minor-key tune (written with Dan Auerbach, from the Black Keys, and Pat McLaughlin) with guitar picking and enigmatic lyrics that envision “the pounding of the hooves/the silence of everything that moves.”

Other songs grapple with loneliness, estrangement and regret. In “No Ordinary Blue,” written with Keith Sykes, he contemplates the aftermath of an argument and separation: “I hope we don’t find it’s the last time we ever say goodbye,” he sings. In “God Only Knows” — the completion of a long-ago songwriting collaboration with none other than Phil Spector — he muses over hidden transgressions, the times “when I’m not true/To the things that I say and the things that I do.”

The album’s quietly desolate centerpiece is “Summer’s End.” It’s a recognition of vanishing time; it’s a plea to a past love. “Come on home,” Prine sings, and continues, stoically. “No, you don’t have to be alone.” The folky melody hints at solace and resolution. But his words, and his weary voice, don’t deceive themselves.