Take a couple of minutes out of your day to take heed to this candy dwell model of Kurt Vile and John Prine singing Prine’s How Fortunate on the Grand Ole Opry Home, New 12 months’s Eve, 2019 (just some months earlier than Prine died of COVID in April, 2020). The primary time I heard Kurt Vile singing Prine, and singing with Prine—on Vile’s EP Pace, Sound, Lonely KV—I knew Vile and Prine have been a match made in heaven. The EP contains Vile’s pleasant cowl of Prine’s Pace of the Sound of Loneliness—he speeds it up a bit, adjustments the timing of the supply of the lyrics, and manages to maintain the spirit of the unique whereas including his personal quirky touches, like his endearing lilt all through, and his meandering improvisation of ‘run’ on the finish of the track.
The EP additionally contains Vile and Prine singing Prine’s How Fortunate collectively, which Pitchfork describes:
Vile’s music could be reassuring and, at its greatest, transporting. That includes each males singing and choosing collectively, “How Fortunate” considers all the fantastic particulars on this planet that greet us every single day, however acknowledges there are infinitely too many for our brains to catalog and archive. The purpose is, you may by no means run out. “There was all these items that I do not suppose I keep in mind,” they sing collectively on the ultimate verse, earlier than realizing, “Hey, how fortunate can one man get.” It would not really feel fairly as momentous as you’d count on from a gathering of those two mellow rock and rollers, and that is okay. It is sweetly minor, very like the opposite songs on right here.
I dunno, it feels fairly momentous to me—it is about as near perfection as I can think about. As Gerry Fournier commented on the video for Pace of the Sound of Loneliness: “The soul of John Prine lives via Kurt Vile.”
For extra dwell Vile and Prine, right here they’re performing “Paradise” (with Fiona Prine), Pace of the Sound of Loneliness, and Sam Stone (begins at 4:00), all from the identical present in Philadelphia, April, 2018.
