In October 2022, a notable group of accomplished musicians including Lyle Lovett, Jason Isbell, Kacey Musgraves, Steve Earle, Bob Weir, Valerie June, Dwight Yoakam, and others gathered at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville to perform and record the soundtrack for the film You Got Gold: A Celebration of John Prine. The concert film, which began limited screenings across the US in May 2026, will continue to make the rounds of galleries and arthouse screens until its final dates in New York City leading up to the Christmas season.
Along with playing Prine's music and honoring the artistry of the late Chicago native, many of the performers are also interviewed in the film. "John was iconic in our culture. I think he represents so much of what's great about America," says longtime Prine contemporary Bonnie Raitt. "We're trying as hard as we can to carry on his legacy and his honesty through music. That's our job, that's our gig," adds Brandi Carlile, one of a group of younger musicians who consider Prine a musical hero.
If having subsequent generations follow your artistic lead is proof of a lasting influence, Prine's legacy is in good hands. In 2023, Jobi Riccio, a native of Colorado who now lives in Nashville, became that year's John Prine Songwriter Fellowship honoree. Conceived in partnership with the Newport Festivals Foundation, part of the annual Newport Folk Festival held every July in Rhode Island, the fellowship provides a week-long songwriting retreat on Nantucket prior to the festival. It also means that the honoree plays the opening slot at the festival itself.
In an essay she wrote upon accepting the fellowship, Riccio, who met Prine when she was 17 and "basically cried the entire time," says his music feels like "old friends, family members, or heirlooms." Using one of Prine's favorite adjectives, she goes on to say that his music has been "the soundtrack to some of the happiest memories of my life and been there for me at my lowest—always bringing me back to the beautiful goofy joy of life."
Riccio's sophomore album, Face the Feeling, released in May 2026, is a deeply personal collection of insights and irresistible melodies. Unafraid to dig into her emotions and foibles, her music hovers somewhere between alternative country and indie folk, much as Prine's once did. Recorded in Nashville and produced in collaboration with her producer friends Isaiah Beard and Jesse Timms, the album works because of Riccio's sturdy songcraft and her sweet, righteous vocals. In the song "Buzzkill," buzzy rock guitars are turned up, and she worries in self-deprecating Prine-ian fashion: "I don't wanna be/The guy at the party/Who makes you sorry/You decided to go/Oh no."
In her liner notes, she explains what she's learned through her songwriting. "My adult life didn't start with the bang I had anticipated, when my graduation coincided with a pandemic. It was easy to angst out about not living the movie version of what I thought my life should be at that point, while simultaneously not having much of the financial security my parents' generation had. I needed to process and accept that sometimes life sucks but that it's not because of anything I did or didn't do."
Another Prine fan is John Craigie. As the only quote on the homepage of his website, he excerpts a review from the website The Stranger that calls him "the lovechild of John Prine and Mitch Hedberg with a vagabond troubadour edge." Craigie's latest album, I Swam Here, on his label Zabriskie Point Records, makes those similarities more apparent. I Swam Here recalls Prine's eye for detail and easy-to-relate-to lyrics. Craigie, who has released 20 solo albums since his 2004 debut Second Grade Awakening, adds a decidedly Brazilian bounce to I Swam Here, which was recorded in New Orleans and Astoria, Oregon.
The album's cover art, by Brittany Schall, directly references the work of Puerto Rican expressionist painter Olga Albizu, whose work graced the covers of the samba albums by saxophonist Stan Getz in the early-to-mid-1960s including his breakthrough, Jazz Samba (1962). Craigie's way of singing is gentle and offhand, and he is skilled at wordsmithery. In the album's strongest tune, "Fire Season," in which the pedal steel provides atmosphere, Craigie captures the intensity of love: "Inhale me like one of your vices/Deep into your lungs just like you like it/Like treason I'm feeling/Fire season burn me alive."
If it's the real thing you seek, the new and very wonderful John Prine BBC Sessions was released on CD and vinyl in April 2026 on BBC/Rhino/Atlantic Records. For many years, official live Prine recordings (as opposed to audience tape bootlegs) were rare. That changed in his later years with the release of several albums including the In Person & On Stage boxed set (2010) and John Prine: Live in Asheville '86, originally released in 2016 in digital-only form by Prine's Oh Boy label. It has since appeared as an unofficial (read: bootleg) CD release. Recorded in 1973, the new BBC compilation has versions of most of his early classic songs ("Paradise," "Sam Stone," "Spanish Pipedream") and the advantage of having been professionally recorded.
Two recent books on the songwriter also add much to Prine's story. Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters with John Prine by Holly Gleason (Chicago, Chicago Review Press, 2023) collects select interviews Prine gave over his life in music. Tom Piazza's Living in the Present with John Prine (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2025) is the story of a friendship between the writer and the songwriter that began in 2018 and continued until Prine, whose immune system was compromised by treatments to fight cancer in 1998 and again in 2013, died from COVID in 2020.
