The John Prine concert was wonderful. John was accompanied by his electric guitar/dobro/mandolin/ harmonica guy, Jason Wilber, and his bass guitar/bass fiddle guy, David Jacques. We'd seen them last time (also with Phil Parlapiano on piano and accordian, but not this time), and they are amazing. Jason Wilber in particular is incredibly talented.* He really adds a lot. If you have any of John's last few CDs, these guys are on it. Also, if you've seen the concert video "Sessions at West 54th," you can get a good idea of what we saw (but without Iris DeMent, of course). He did lots of oldies, plus quite a few from the new CD. I'm not that crazy about the new CD, but he did more than enough of his other stuff to satisfy me. He also did five or six songs solo, and a terrific encore. The whole concert was great. The only negative point I can think of is that his voice sounded extremely gravelly and muddy at the beginning. He's made albums since his throat cancer, so I don't think that was the problem. It finally loosened up a few songs into the show, but at first it was kind of disconcerting (no pun intended).
All in all, it was as great a birthday treat as I had hoped for!
*I've just discovered that he has his own CDs, so I ordered the latest one!
Update 8/18/07: For some reason, this post attracts more spambots than usual, so I'm closing off comments. Feel free to email me if you want to make a (legitimate!) comment to this post.
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