Living in the Present with John Prine by Tom Piazza Review: A Moving Elegy for an American Icon

Living in the Present with John Prine began as a 2016 magazine assignment. Tom Piazza attended a John Prine concert in New Orleans and wrote a profile for Oxford American under the same title. That article led to a real friendship and, eventually, a plan for Piazza to help Prine produce a full memoir. When Prine died in April 2020 at 73 from complications caused by COVID-19, that project ended. Piazza repurposed the materials he had gathered — interviews, road-trip notes, accumulated time with the artist — into this book, published by W. W. Norton & Company on September 9, 2025, with a foreword by Prine's widow, Fiona Whelan Prine. The result is not a conventional biography and not quite a memoir: Kirkus Reviews describes it accurately as "equal parts profile, oral history, and on-the-road adventure," with Piazza writing often in the first person and present tense to preserve the aliveness of the time he spent with Prine.

The book traces the arc of Prine's life and career with specific, grounded detail. It covers his working-class upbringing in suburban Chicago, his family's deep roots in rural Kentucky, his early breakthrough with critical coverage Records, and his landmark decision to co-found the independent label Oh Boy Records. A centerpiece of the narrative is a spontaneous road trip the two men took together — from Nashville to Sarasota, Florida, in a cherry-red 1977 Coupe de Ville — which gives the book some of its most vivid, on-the-ground texture. Piazza also surveys Prine's body of work and its broad influence on American music. To anchor the portrait, Piazza draws on interviews with key figures in Prine's orbit, including Jason Wilber, Prine's lead guitarist for 24 years, and Dave Prine, John's older brother — the man who taught John to play guitar and first introduced him to the late-1960s Chicago folk scene where his career took root.

The book's central achievement, per Kirkus Reviews, is that Prine's "good humor and low-key grace shine through on every page" despite Prine already being in poor health — a two-time cancer survivor — during the period Piazza knew him. The oral-history dimension adds genuine depth: one band member's observation, relayed in the book, that Prine's keen emotional intelligence easily overcame his technical limitations as a musician and singer is the kind of insight only close access can yield. A Norton review by David Starkey notes that the book "seems like it shouldn't work" given how scattered and few Piazza's encounters with Prine were, yet "somehow... Piazza pulls it off" — a verdict that credits the author's craft in shaping limited but meaningful material into something coherent and moving. Piazza's comparison of Prine to Bob Dylan is telling in its specificity: "You don't want to be him, you just want to hang out with him." That single line, from Piazza's own pen, captures what makes Prine's appeal so particular and so hard to explain — and it's the kind of distinction the book, at its best, keeps making.

The book's origin story is also, candidly, a structural constraint. As the Norton review by David Starkey acknowledges, Piazza characterizes it as "a book about friendship, and loss" — but the friendship was brief and the encounters were limited in number. The oral-history sourcing is relatively narrow: two extended interviews (Wilber and Dave Prine) anchor much of what the book can claim to know about Prine directly from those closest to him. Readers expecting the comprehensive sweep of a full-scale biography — exhaustive discography analysis, wide-ranging interviews across decades of Prine's collaborators — will find the book is something more modest and more personal. That is a deliberate artistic choice, but it is a choice with trade-offs. The book delivers intimacy where a larger project might have delivered breadth.

W. W. Norton has positioned the book as a national bestseller, and Billboard named it one of its "Ten Essential Music Books That Make Great Gifts" — recognition that reflects its crossover appeal beyond hardcore Prine devotees. Fans of the singer-songwriter will find the biographical specifics and career chronicle they want. Readers drawn to literary music writing — the kind that treats an artist's humanity as seriously as their catalog — will find Piazza's hybrid form, part elegy and part road narrative, a rewarding match for the subject. Prine, who resisted easy mythologizing throughout his career, gets a portrait here that honors that resistance: unheroic in scale, specific in detail, and honest about what the author did and did not have access to. For anyone who loved John Prine, or wants to understand why so many did, this book makes a genuinely considered case.