Tom Piazza is a novelist who occasionally moonlights as a music writer.
Across the pages of his latest nonfiction book, he’s both.
The New Orleans-based author’s “Living In the Present with John Prine” (W.W. Norton & Company) is a vivid, intimate narrative of the last two years of the acclaimed country-folk singer-songwriter’s life as viewed through the lens of their friendship.
It is not the book Piazza expected to write.
His catalog includes jazz studies and a post-Hurricane Katrina love letter to his adopted hometown, “Why New Orleans Matters.” More recently, he’s devoted himself to novels, including 2015’s “A Free State” and 2023’s “The Auburn Conference.”
What he typically doesn’t do is write musician profiles. It had been more than two decades since he expanded an article about mercurial bluegrass legend Jimmy Martin for the Oxford American magazine into a short book, “True Adventures With the King of Bluegrass.”
The cover of New Orleans-based author Tom Piazza’s 2025 non-fiction book “Living in the Present with John Prine.”
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He wasn’t looking to write another such book. But then he attended his first John Prine concert, at New Orleans’ Saenger Theatre in December 2016. Prine’s rendition of “Mexican Home” left Piazza in tears.
“It occurred to me right then that I might want to write something about him,” he writes in “Living In the Present,” “although I wasn’t sure just what, or why.”
When Prine returned to New Orleans for an Orpheum Theater gig in February 2018, Piazza arranged to meet him backstage. He presented Prine with a copy of “True Adventures With the King of Bluegrass,” only to discover that Prine already owned it: “I sent off for it with money I made singing!”
They decided to meet again at Prine’s home in Nashville. During that visit, upon learning that Piazza is a guitarist with an affinity for the songs of bluesman Mississippi John Hurt, Prine promptly handed him a guitar. Piazza played a Hurt tune and Prine started singing along. “I guess we’re friends,” thought Piazza.
Handsome Johnnys and guitars
That friendship deepened as they rambled around Gulfport, Florida, where Prine had a vacation house, for an article Piazza wrote for the Oxford American.
More visits followed. There was a memorable dinner at Prine’s home with Elvis Costello during which Prine’s vintage jukebox nearly caught fire. Prine and Piazza often stayed up late drinking Handsome Johnnys — ginger ale and vodka — and playing guitars.
Elvis Costello and John Prine during a dinner at Prine’s house in Nashville. The photo was taken by author Tom Piazza.
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“John liked to be in the present,” Piazza said in a recent interview. “He liked to respond to the moment and to whatever was happening in the moment. That was key to him, and that was why we liked to play music together so much. Because you could be in the moment with each other and all it was about was playing this particular song.”
Fiona Prine, John’s widow, wrote the foreword for “Living In the Present with John Prine.” Her late husband didn’t make many new friends in his later years, she writes, but Piazza was an exception.
Prine eventually asked Piazza to help him craft a memoir, one that would not be chronological and linear, but more like their mutual acquaintance Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles:” free-flowing, free-associated memories and impressions.
“I was kind of hesitant about it at first,” Piazza said. “A couple different music people had asked me to do the same kind of thing, write their memoir with them, and I never wanted to do it. That’s just not my thing. I’m really a novelist more than anything else at this point.
“But John’s way of roping me into this idea was he would say we could just do what we always do”— hang out, have a couple drinks, play guitar and tell stories — “and get paid for doing it.”
An unexpected pivot
The first of what they envisioned as many weekends of interviews for the memoir took place at Prine’s place in late February 2020. They talked extensively about his childhood, his parents, his early years in Nashville with producer, songwriter and all-around character Cowboy Jack Clement.
Singer-songwriter John Prine, left, and New Orleans author Tom Piazza attended a Joan Baez concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.
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They planned to reconvene in Nashville again on March 12. But the detonation of the COVID epidemic scuttled those plans. Fiona soon came down with COVID but recovered. Prine caught it and didn’t. He died on April 7, 2020, at age 73.
Piazza took Prine’s death hard, even though they’d been friends for barely two years: “For a good while after John died, I couldn’t listen to his records. It was painful.”
And he couldn’t write Prine’s memoir — they hadn’t covered enough ground.
But Piazza eventually realized the project could pivot into something else.
“If you are led by a ring through your nose by that (original) idea, you’re going to miss most of what’s important. You have to be open for what comes along. There’s an improvisational dimension that, if you don’t attend to that, you’re a different kind of writer than I am.”
Finding a way forward, Piazza interviewed Prine’s older brother, Dave, who had first showed John the rudiments of guitar and sparked his interest in country and folk music, as well as Prine’s longtime lead guitarist, Jason Wilber.
Those conversations, the February 2020 memoir session with Prine and scenes from their short-lived but rich friendship formed the basis of “Living In the Present with John Prine.”
“Little by little, I realized it was a book about mortality,” Piazza said. “It was a book about gratitude. It was a book about friendship.
“Sooner or later, in any relationship, one of you is going to be saying goodbye. What to do with that fact? How do you walk away without turning your back?
Singer-songwriter John Prine behind the wheel of his cherry-red 1977 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, in a photo by author Tom Piazza.
PROVIDED PHOTO BY TOM PIAZZA
Prine “was a powerful, powerful presence and spirit for everybody who knew him and for everybody who liked his music.” In writing about him, Piazza didn’t want the tone of the book to be, “OK, folks, I’m gonna tell you all this stuff about John Prine.”
But neither did he want it to come across as “just hanging on to John.
“I had to find a middle way where I was bringing (readers) close to John, so that they could experience John and then I could reexperience John, too.”
Piazza’s goal for the book, then, was “to bring him as alive as I could on the page. Give the reader not just information, but an experience.”
The experience of living in the present with John Prine.
“It’s not a depiction. It’s not really a profile,” Piazza said. “The relationship is the point. Hopefully in the relationship, you get as much of a profile of John as you could get.”
Tom Piazza will discuss “Living In the Present with John Prine” at Octavia Books on Wednesday, Sept. 3 at 6 p.m.