Ships In The Harbor, the beautiful debut song by Tommy Prine

Listen to this beautiful new song by Tommy Prine, the 26-year-old son of the late John Prine, who is one of the absolute best songwriters of all time, and one of my favorite musicians. John Prine sadly died from COVID-19 shortly after the pandemic hit—a passing that was deeply mourned by fans all over the world. While Tommy Prine has always written music, he's mostly kept it to himself, but when his father died, he was compelled to write more. Garden and Gun explains:

"It was the healthiest and most intense way for me to process all those emotions [of grief]," he says. "I just fell head over heels for the idea of being a songwriter and a singer."

You can listen to the song here. On his YouTube page, Tommy Prine describes the song like this:

My debut release "Ships In The Harbor" is here! I wrote this song around my birthday last year and I always get super existential around my birthday and I had a thought that we as humans can only feel as deeply as we do and love people and fear things and all the other intense emotions is because everything we experience is finite, including our own lives. So I wrote a song about these little powerful moments and reflections in the human experience to try and capture the beauty in mortality.

Here are some of the lyrics:

It takes time to know when you're wrong
It takes even longer to put it all in a song,
And I wish it was easy to, like he did

When I'm by peaceful waters
It gets harder and harder
I'd do anything just to talk to my father- but I guess he was leaving soon, as we do
Yeah I guess, he was passing through; and I am too

The song is heartbreaking, in the best of ways. It made me cry, just like his father's music still does, every time I hear it. I can't wait to hear more from Tommy Prine, and to see him live. Garden and Gun provides more info about upcoming releases and Prine's tour:

Prine will release another single, "Turning Stones," on October 14, with his debut album to follow in the first half of 2023. He's currently on tour, which includes a September 15 show in Nashville at AmericanaFest and November dates opening for fellow troubadour Todd Snider. "There's going to be a lot of people who have certain expectations," he acknowledges. "I'm very grateful for my dad's fans, but I can tell from the first song that people are like, 'This isn't John Prine Jr.' And I'm just like, 'All right, buckle up. We got fifty more minutes of not John Prine Jr.'"