Produced with longtime collaborator Jim Rooney and involving some country songbirds, including Iris DeMent, Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris, In Spite of Ourselves points to love's inevitable and greatest cruelty: cheating. The stories in So Sad and Wedding Bells/Let's Turn Back the Years are depressing, but they're so damn sweet too. You hurt and hum at the same time. Put this record on, wallow a little in the pain, feel the warmth of these voices singing about such pain and know better days are ahead.
I was all set to not like this record -- John Prine is hardly the type of singer you'd think anyone could harmonize with (much less for an album of duets), and when I heard "Til A Tear Becomes A Rose" (with wife Fiona Prine) on local public radio, I first thought "clunker." Surprise -- this collection of country standards about relationships is a charmer, and most of Prine's partners -- including Emmylou Harris, Connie Smith, Patty Loveless, Trisha Yearwood, Melba Montgomery, and Lucinda Williams -- find w..
Listening to Dolores Keane, the great voice of Ireland, doing her solos and harmonies on "Its A Cheatin' Situation" and "In A Town This Size" is like discovering that there is finally someone who can sing in the slow-motion haunting style that once was soley the property of Pasty Cline. Then along comes Iris Dement's toe-to-toe duets with John, culminating in "In Spite Of Ourselves", in which she does the impossible - she steals the show! Fiona Prine's solo in "Till a Tear Becomes A Rose" makes me dayd..
