German Afternoons
| German Afternoons | ||||
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| Studio album by John Prine | ||||
| Released | 1986 | |||
| Recorded | Jack Clement’s Cowboy Arms Hotel & Recording Spa, and Jack’s Tracks, Nashville, TN | |||
| Genre | Folk, Alt-country, Americana | |||
| Label | Oh Boy | |||
| Producer | John Prine, Jim Rooney | |||
| John Prine chronology | ||||
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German Afternoons is the ninth album by American folk singer and songwriter John Prine, released in 1986.
German Afternoons was Prine's second release on Oh Boy Records, the independent label he formed with his manager Al Bunetta, and delves further into the country-flavored sound established on his 1984 release Aimless Love. Like Aimless Love, German Afternoons was co-produced by Nashville veteran Jim Rooney but also features contributions from the progressive bluegrass band New Grass Revival as well as Marty Stuart, and this accounts for Prine's return to the folk-sound of his early albums on songs like "Lulu Walls" and "Paradise", the latter a rerecording of the self-penned classic which appeared on the singer's debut John Prine in 1971. The album was recorded in Nashville.
Perhaps the most significant song that appears on German Afternoons is "The Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness", which became a concert staple and an instant classic for many Prine devotees. Writing in Great Days: The John Prine Anthology, critic David Fricke describes the song as "a hypnotic song of lovesick melancholia set to a simple, mid-tempo rhythm that sounded like the desolate ticking of a hall way clock." "Yeah, that came out all at once," Prine revealed to Paul Zollo of Bluerailroad. "From a broken relationship I was in. I could not understand what went wrong and I had to explain to myself, and I did it through this song. The next day I thought, Jesus, that’s beautiful. I didn’t recognize it at the time, it was just pouring out of me." Prine was nearing the end of his marriage to musician Rachel Peer-Prine, who sang harmony on several German Afternoon tracks, and producer Jim Rooney recalled in his own memoir, "John and Rachel were having a very up-and-down time of it, but the resulting songs might have been worth all the trouble. Perhaps the best song to come out of the turmoil generated by Rachel and John’s relationship was the aptly titled ‘Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.’" Two songs hearken back to the singer’s roots. Prine had ended his 1972 LP with the Carter Family song "Diamonds in the Rough," and here he kicks off the album with a rollicking arrangement of A.P. Carter’s "Lulu Walls." Prine also covers the Leon Payne classic "They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me," made famous by Hank Williams, another key influence on Prine. The album comes full circle with a remake of "Paradise," one of Prine’s most famous songs that appeared on his debut album in 1971. He later explained: "The song over the years had turned into such a bluegrass standard...the first version of ‘Paradise,’ in order to get a fiddle part on it, we had to ask a guy from the Memphis symphony to come in and play the violin like a fiddle, and I always remember that, and I wanted to make a more of a bluegrass version of it."
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