Living in the Present with John Prine

In the spring of 2018, Tom Piazza climbed into a cherry-red Cadillac Coupe-Deville with the great singer-songwriter John Prine. The two embarked on a road trip through Florida full of jokes and tall tales, afternoons digging around record stores and long nights playing guitar.

Having forged a deep friendship, they decide to embark on a new shared project - to write Prine's memoir together. When Prine died suddenly of COVID in April 2020, that unfinished memoir evolved into an intimate narrative of the artist's final years. The result is a warm and intimate story, richly detailed with hilarious stories of his youth and family in Chicago and Kentucky, his breakthrough into the national spotlight.

Piazza offers fans an unforgettable portrait of the beloved musician in the twilight of his life; as a boyish cut-up, an epic raconteur, a great American poet and most importantly, the good friend his fans have always imagined.

Tom Piazza is celebrated as a novelist and a writer on American music. His twelve books include the novels The Auburn Conference and A Free State, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and the essay collection Devil Sent the Rain. He was a principal writer for the innovative HBO drama series Treme, and the winner of a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bookforum, The Oxford American, Columbia Journalism Review, and many other periodicals. He lives in New Orleans.