jmjiloveyou

<h1>John Prine’s “Lake Marie” is the Most Literary Song I Know</h1><p><img src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:500/1*8iS6KTsFCxhDvrohxZ31FQ.jpeg" height="282" width="500"></p><p>It was no surprise to me when Bob Dylan took the Nobel Prize. Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited were just about as lyrically complex as you can ask for, and it doesn’t stop there. “The Times they Are A-Changin’” may not be on par with something like “Howl” but can’t we still hear it? It’s the kind of record that never needed to be recorded in order to be heard</p><p>kind of thing we’d simply always know. It had a hell of an impact.</p><p>To me, Dylan has always been rock and roll’s Gordion Knot. It isn’t that he was especially obtuse — many of his lyrics are as folksy as a folk singer’s lyrics should maybe be — it’s that he gave us so many options as to what the words might have meant.</p><blockquote>The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face…</blockquote><p>Is this Louise envying Johanna? Or is it a post-coital thing? Maybe hunger and disappointment?</p><p>It does and doesn’t matter. One could justifiably argue any number of truths. To my knowledge and to his credit, Dylan never spent a lot of time insisting on a particular meaning for those lyrics. That was never any of his business.</p><p>ver. It’s mine, it’s yours, it’s anyone’s but his. That is the essence of literature…giving strong evidence of meaning, but no restrictions upon it.</p><h2>What does Bob Dylan have to do with any of this?</h2><p>Let me re-emphasize, this write-up is not about a Dylan song. Dylan is simply important to it.</p><p>Not long ago, as I drove my kids home from the park on an early summer’s evening, there played on the radio a song about a lake. About camping, fishing, about falling in love with a girl. The song was <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjJ-5Xm8PjUAhVR72MKHWrNCkAQyCkIJzAA&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DExr-DOWJ3A0&amp;usg=AFQjCNFOTahzxt2M-mHnZ-civAsJqFC4Vw" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Lake Marie</em></a>, by John Prine. At the end of it the radio DJ mentioned, this was Bob Dylan’s <em>favorite </em>John Prine song.</p><p>I’m rarely attentive to lyrics on the first listen. I catch a few. But to hear Dylan named as a favorable critic, I wanted to give it a second listen.</p><h2>Now about those murders …</h2><p><em>Lake Marie</em> begins with the tale of two abandoned white babies found by Native Americans along the Illinois/Wisconsin border. The tribe names two nearby lakes after the babies. One of the lakes, Lake Marie, is where the Narrator at some point nearer to the present met his future wife.</p><p>The song seems at this point to be about the Narrator’s relationship with his wife. Until, that is, the song takes what Prine himself described as a “sharp left turn.”</p><blockquote>In the parking lot by the forest preserve, the police had found two bodies …</blockquote><p>It is common in literature to employ the juxtaposition of competing elements, so as to draw out certain details or questions about both. It’s an effective technique and is well-placed here.</p><p>The reason it’s so disruptive is that the murders are not obviously related to the rest of the song’s narrative. They seemingly take place at a time when the Narrator and his wife are far from Lake Marie. But the Narrator learned about the murders by watching the TV news…something he could not likely have done while camping with his wife in Canada.</p><p>These layered questions tempt critical analysis and turn the whole song into a bit of a puzzle. Who were the murdered people? Were they murdered at Lake Marie or in Canada, or neither? Did the Narrator have anything to do with it?</p><p>The placement of the murders within the narrative is doubly important when considering the lines immediately preceding and following the discovery of the dead bodies. Preceeding, we have the Narrator’s wife falling asleep in his arms. And following, the Narrator states:</p><blockquote>All the love we shared, between her and me, was slammed…slammed against the banks of ol’ Lake Marie</blockquote><p>The murders cast all meaning into a fairly glorious ambiguity, ripe for the listener’s bias. You and I, we get to make our own decisions as to what it all means. Precious few songs open up such a range of reasonable possibilities through the use of concrete and straight-forward imagery. It’s brilliant.</p><h2>Ahh Baby</h2><p>Just as important as the double murder</p>