Opus One Presents
Tommy Prine with Special Guest William Matheny
Events
Club Cafe
21 and Over * Limited seating and standing room only. Seating available on a first-come first-serve basis only
Tommy Prine
Tommy Prine's debut album "This Far South'' coming June 23, 2023 is not only a long awaited introduction but a testimony to Prine's 20's and the loss, love, and growth that has defined them. Co-produced by close friend and kindred musical spirit, Ruston Kelly, and beloved Nashville engineer and producer, Gena Johnson, the album is rich and dynamic from cathartic jams to nostalgic storytelling.
The son of late songwriting legend, John Prine, Tommy Prine grew up in Nashville surrounded by music, art and writing. As a child, he thought all parents were musicians, as his father "going to work" meant performing shows for adoring fans and writing songs. Tommy learned to play guitar by watching his father play, copying the ways his fingers moved and inadvertently developing his own singular style. Summers in Ireland lent their own inspiration, as did 10 straight years camping at Bonnaroo. Prine's musical tastes grew to become decidedly eclectic, spanning John Mayer, Outkast, Bon Iver, the Strokes and more.
It wasn't until Prine reached his mid-twenties, though, that he considered a career of his own in music and began to share with others the songs he wrote in private. His songs were quickly met with excitement and enthusiasm, which sonically brings together a colorful patchwork of musical influences and lyrically explores existential questions and emotional experiences.
The album's title track, "This Far South,'' marks a turning point in Prine's life as he found himself struggling to escape a dark, aimless period. He ultimately found the courage to act on choices that would see him to the other, brighter, side.
"There were several years where I felt without purpose, spent all my time partying, and just existing. I found myself at a fork in the road and chose the better path, and in that moment, I swore I would never be This Far South again."
Grief is a major throughline of Prine's current work. In 2017, Prine lost his best friend to an overdose.
"Since then, I have lost some more friends and have others who are still navigating the ups and downs of struggles with drug abuse."
His song, "Letter To My Brother," was written as a message to the friends he's lost, those in Recovery, and to friends who are still struggling.
He still grapples with the passing of his father in April of 2020. "The world lost one of the greatest songwriters of all time, but I lost my dad." Prine bears the loss of his father and the memories he carries for others on the track, "By The Way."
"The comment I get the most is how much I look like him, and sometimes it makes me feel like I'm a sad reminder to those who loved him."
While navigating that loss has been difficult, he's found solace in connecting through music with others who have lost loved ones.
"When I'm playing certain songs, I can literally look out in the crowd and tell who else has lost their dad," he says. "I can immediately tell which people have experienced, specifically, losing their father. They'll come up and tell me afterwards, and I'll be like, 'Yeah, like, I figured that this conversation was going to happen,' because I could see their reaction. It's been really powerful to see real-deal evidence that grief is a shared experience, and that suffering is a shared experience between humans."
Prine capped off 2022 with his first solo tour across the United States. He was heavily involved with You Got Gold, an event series in Nashville honoring the life and songs of John Prine, and performed at AmericanaFest as an official showcasing artist. He also debuted two original songs, "Ships in the Harbor" and "Turning Stones."
"Ships in the Harbor" is a tender meditation on impermanence and change, with Prine communicating the universal experience of loss through poetic observations of the seemingly mundane. The song found its way onto a series of editorial playlists including Spotify's Fresh Folk playlist and Amazon's Fresh Folk & Ameriana playlist. It was also praised by a number of outlets including Billboard, Garden & Gun, and Saving Country Music who wrote, "With one song, Tommy Prine has already accomplished what many musicians and songwriters work their entire careers to accomplish, which is to make such an indelible emotional connection with an audience."
This year, alongside his own runs of headline shows, Prine opened for Tyler Childers on his "Send In The Hounds Tour" in London. He was also named one of Amazon Music's 2023 Breakthrough Artists to Watch.
"I feel like I've learned more about myself in the last year and a half than I ever have in my life," Prine says. "And I think that speaks a lot to doing something that I'm passionate about. I love and respect the craft. Just hitting the road and doing what so many people before me have done and will continue to do, it's really resonated with me. I think it's transformed me into the person that I am meant to be."
William Matheny
Let me tell you an anecdote about William Matheny. And no, this is not the 5:15 AM drive to the Albany Airport when we both were drinking Genesee beer and black coffee because we were both thinking correctly at that hour. More on that later. It was before I really knew William, but the moment when I knew that he was great. Envision: A punk rock club in Washington, DC, its inhabitants and paid customers. Who knows why and how he had been booked? A songwriter from Mannington, West Virginia stepping into the lair of upper-crust, judgment-packed DC punks with their Fugazi-leftover orthodoxies in their wildly provincial scene. He had fifteen minutes, a Vox amp, a telecaster and no one interested in the audience. I live in DC and I would have fled. There was a 10,000% chance that the next band up was going to have a spiel about gentrification and then play “angular riffs.” Billy -- I can call him that, you can’t -- played a solo set. He played loud. He played “Out For Revenge” and “29 Candles” and “Teenage Bones” and the other great songs which you may not have heard on his debut LP. Over the course of that short set he first brought that crowd to heel and then brought the crowd around. By the end the applause was thick and the appreciation unmistakable. He did it in DC. He can do it anywhere.
But let’s talk about the other thing with the beers and the coffee and Albany. You need to know that William Matheny and I have been through some things together. We’ve seen parts of the world that I was sure existed only in Elmore Leonard novels. When I needed to pull over on the Cross-Bronx Expressway to throw up in a plastic trash bag, he was my driver and bag provider. We made it to the Bowery Ballroom an hour later for soundcheck and everything went great. William Matheny is the lead guitarist in my band the Paranoid Style, in addition to his other obligations. William Matheny is a man that makes things happen.
William Matheny may be the best songwriter working, and is at a minimum the best songwriter you might have never heard of. For those who haven’t had that good fortune, let's go, as Warner Wolfe used to say, to the videotape. Consider his 2018 standout single “Christian Name,” which is like Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down A Dream” if it had been “Runnin’ Down A Nightmare.” Or reckon with “Living Half to Death,” the comically terrifying instant classic from 2017’s Strange Constellations in which he apologizes for “abusing all his friendships and drinking all their beer.”
Over the past four years, he has assembled a wondrous catalog which situates itself amongst the indelible tradition of roots-rock misfits like Guy Clark and Lowell George, with just enough Jackson Browne-craft and Springsteen-triumphalism to make the thing potentially huge. You can’t talk about Matheny without talking about West Virginia, although it is sometimes true that he would prefer not to discuss it. Matheny is from Mannington, population smaller than your average small town. Like most of the state, Mannington fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War and represented a crucial strategic stronghold as one of the stops on the B&O Railroad. The correct side, not that it helped all that much. They say history is written by the winners, but in spite of upholding the Union, history was not written by Mannington. Heavy industry: logging and coal. An oil boom in the 1910s. Comfortable lives and then the Great Depression. Bankers and foreclosures. History was written by Mannington and then history was written on Mannington. That grand old feeling, indeed.
And while he might not always want to talk about it, West Virginia is a central character in Matheny’s songs. The dirty snow falling on the Coffindaffer Crosses, the Moundsville guards, the doomed shout-outs to Stoney Cooper, the unhappily married lovers at the Elks Lodge and the tapes from Go-Mart melting on the dashboard all enforce the notion that the man can travel wide and far from Mannington, but Mannington never leaves the man. Like so many before him -- Elvis from Tupelo or the Mekons from Leeds -- he can check out any time he likes. But he can never et cetera, et cetera. Or as he once elegantly put it, “Moon over Mannington/ Moon over Spain/ Moon over happiness/ Moon over pain.”
Two things occur to you when you realize that your lead guitar player has made a series of incredible, self-evidently life-changing records. First of all you couldn't be more proud. Secondly you wonder: “Wait -- am I going to lose my lead guitar player?” Ronnie Wood once memorably titled his own solo collection: I Got My Own Album To Do. Fortunately, that turned out to only be half-true -- or at least not career-altering -- and soon enough Ronnie was re-ensconced into the “ancient art of weaving” alongside Keith and Mick. Will Billy and I weave together again? I know we will, but we both know things are likely to be materially different once the world experiences Strange Constellations, Moon Over Kenova and his forthcoming third record. It’s like he sings on “Late Blooming Forever:”
“Oh dear friends and gentle hearts/ That I've known along the way/ I've been late blooming/ but I think it's gonna happen any day.”
It’s happened.
-Elizabeth Nelson, Durham, NC, 2nd November 2021
(Elizabeth Nelson’s bylines include Pitchfork, The New York Times, NPR and Oxford American. She is the bandleader and songwriter of The Paranoid Style.)
Selected Press:
“Literary rock’n’roller William Matheny has a knack for spinning stories about roach-infested apartments and social anxiety into indie gold.”
— NPR's Weekend Edition
“Cerebral alt. country from an unusually versatile singer.”
— Rolling Stone
“William Matheny is quickly becoming one of independent country music’s most exciting emerging artists.”
— American Songwriter