I’ve been playing John Prine’s “Fish and Whistle” on guitar a lot lately, mostly because it’s such a seemingly simple song that’s deceptively hard to play. It’s lyrically dense and there are a lot of chord changes — although, like most Prine songs, the chords themselves are easy (mostly Gs and Cs).

But I’m also playing it because the song has a great back story. I saw Prine perform recently and he joked about the song. He said he had finished writing an entire album, but that his producer demanded he write one more song. Prine was so annoyed that he intentionally tried to write a song he would hate. Thus: “Fish and Whistle.”

Prine said he hated the song for many years until he woke up one day and decided he kind of liked it after all, and now it’s among his most-requested. There’s a reason for that. I’ll never write a chorus as good as this one, for example:

Father, forgive us for what we must do
You forgive us and we’ll forgive you
We’ll forgive each other ’til we both turn blue
Then we’ll whistle and go fishin’ in Heaven.

That’s a lot of philosophy packed into four simple lines. There are whole religions that should put this advice in their owner’s manuals.

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