Consumer Guide Album

Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine Vol. 2 [Oh Boy, 2021]
If this wasn't volume two, I'd be ready to swear that Prine's songbook is both infinitely renewable and utterly unruinable. But although these interpreters are of a somewhat higher general calibre than on its somewhat disappointing 2010 predecessor, instead I surmise that the shadow of death added its usual measure of urgency to what is in brute fact a posthumous tribute album. For me the vocal highlights are the matched but distinct high-breaking hillbilly intensities of Tyler Childers's "Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You" and Valerie June's "Summer's End." But except for purist Emmylou Harris declining the Bette Midler Gender-Switch Option on "Hello in There," which along with "Donald and Lydia" and "In Spite of Ourselves" is my own most beloved among the uncountable Prine songs I adore, thiscollection may falter slightly but never trips up. Of course not every track is a knockout. But listen up buster and listen up good to Nathaniel Rateliff, Amanda Shires, Margo Price, Bonnie Raitt, and Sturgill Simpson. A-