Living in the Present with John Prine by Tom Piazza Review: A Grief-Lit Portrait That Earns Its Elegy

A National Bestseller and one of Billboard's "Ten Essential Music Books That Make Great Gifts," this hybrid work by Tom Piazza stands as one of the most distinctive music books to emerge in the years following John Prine's death.

Living in the Present with John Prine began as a magazine assignment. In 2016, Piazza — the veteran author of City of Refuge and Devil Sent the Rain, among other works — attended a John Prine concert in New Orleans and subsequently profiled the singer-songwriter for Oxford American magazine under the same title. That article grew into a friendship, and the friendship grew into a plan: Piazza would help Prine produce a memoir. When Prine died in April 2020 from complications caused by COVID-19, at age 73, the memoir was unfinished. Piazza repurposed the interviews, notes, and shared experiences he had accumulated into this book, published by W. W. Norton & Company. Fiona Whelan Prine, John's widow, contributes the foreword — a provenance that lends the project an unusual degree of family endorsement and access.

The book is structured as equal parts profile, oral history, and on-the-road adventure. It moves through the major coordinates of Prine's biography: his working-class upbringing in suburban Chicago, his deep family connection to rural Kentucky, his early commercial success with critical coverage Records, and the pivotal decision to co-found the independent label Oh Boy Records. Throughout, Piazza writes often in the first person and present tense — a stylistic choice that keeps the prose immediate and anchors the reader alongside him rather than at a retrospective remove. The book's most vivid set piece is a spontaneous road trip from Nashville to Sarasota, Florida, in a cherry-red 1977 Coupe de Ville, a journey that functions as the book's emotional center. Beyond biography and road narrative, Piazza also surveys Prine's body of work and its broad influence, gathering testimony from Prine's peers, friends, and family members. One band member, as Kirkus Reviews notes, observes that Prine's keen emotional intelligence easily overcame his limitations as a musician and singer — the kind of granular, insider detail that distinguishes oral history from fan tribute.

Kirkus Reviews characterizes the book as "a heartfelt blend of first-person journalism, oral history, travelogue, and elegy" — a description that acknowledges both the book's formal ambition and its emotional weight. A review published by Norton describes Piazza's achievement in frank terms: the book, it notes, "seems like it shouldn't work" given how scattered and few the direct encounters with Prine were, and yet "somehow" Piazza pulls it off. That same review credits Piazza for knowing that his readers are primarily interested in Prine's life rather than his own, and for "mostly" staying out of the way when the subject commands the stage. The publisher's own copy, supported by the Billboard recognition, frames it as "a vivid, joyful, moving window onto the life and heart of an American icon." Piazza's comparison of Prine to Bob Dylan — "You don't want to be him, you just want to hang out with him" — captures the accessible, unpretentious quality that made Prine's persona as compelling as his catalog, and Piazza's prose is built to honor precisely that quality.

The Norton-published review raises a pointed critique: Piazza himself characterizes the book as "a book about friendship, and loss," but that framing is not entirely accurate, because the friendship was relatively tenuous — the encounters between the two men were, by the reviewer's account, too scattered and too brief to sustain the weight that label implies. Readers who come expecting an intimate, years-long portrait of two men in deep creative collaboration may find the connective tissue thinner than anticipated. The book is frank about what it is — a mosaic assembled from incomplete materials after its subject's death — and that honesty is itself a kind of integrity. But readers should calibrate expectations accordingly: this is not a comprehensive biography, and the relationship at its center was still finding its shape when Prine died.

Living in the Present with John Prine is designed for readers who already love Prine's music and want to understand the human grain behind it — the working-class humor, the cancer survivorships, the low-key grace that, Kirkus notes, shines through the book's pages even as Prine was already in poor health during the period Piazza knew him. It will also reward readers drawn to hybrid nonfiction — the kind of book that refuses to settle into a single genre — and to music journalism at its most personally invested. Those unfamiliar with Prine's catalog are not excluded, but the book's emotional register is calibrated for an audience that already knows why it matters that Prine chose to make records on his own terms. Fiona Whelan Prine's foreword signals that this is, in some sense, an authorized continuation of a project Prine himself wanted to exist — a distinction that sets it apart from posthumous tributes assembled without the subject's participation or family's blessing.