Only Kacey Musgraves.
The country star appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert the other night, where she spoke a lot about her friend and mentor, the late, great John Prine .
He inspired a song on her album Deeper Well that was released back in March called “Cardinal,” and Kacey previously explained that Prine always had a big connection to cardinals and felt that they were messengers from the spiritual realm.
She told Colbert that after Prine passed in 2020, Kacey said she had some interesting moments with a cardinal that kept coming back to the same window at her house every day:
“Okay, so you guys have heard, you know, Cardinals can maybe be a messenger from the other side. And so it was after, he’s a hero of mine and a mentor, John Prine, one of my favorite songwriters of all time, he passed.
And we did have a really special connection, he was a dear friend… after he passed, there was just some interesting little things that would start happening. And one of them was a cardinal that would come and visit almost every day, and it would come and stare at me through this window.
And it sort of struck me as a song idea. There was just some other things around around the time that he passed that, I don’t know, it just felt like something was kind of speaking to me.”
She explained that she got to know his whole family and called them “super welcoming,” adding that whenever she and Prine got together to write, they barely ever finished a song because she would get so wrapped up in his stories.
And Colbert also asked her about a little song called “Burn One with John Prine,” which Kacey wrote about her friend and has performed a few times live, but has never recorded for an album.
It’s a great tune, obviously about her dreams to “burn one with John Prine” as is evidenced by the title, but also speaks to her admiration of him as an artist and how much he inspired her as a songwriter during her early days in the music business.
She explained the full story and background of it, though, which started with her first time meeting him and asking him he’d go smoke with her in the parking lot… and his answer was not at all what she expected:
“That was one of the first songs that I wrote when I moved to Nashville. and I had not met him at this point, and I just like, I had this kind of a bucket list of, you know, maybe… I did smoke a lot of weed back then.
And it was kind of high on the totem pole, so to speak. Well, I met him one time down at the Station Inn in Nashville, this legendary place, and he was he was doing a little show there. And I kinda like snuck back and got to talk to him, and I was like, ‘Hey, this might be a weird question, but do you wanna burn one out in the parking lot?’
And he was like, ‘I’ve had throat cancer, no.’ And I was like, ‘Alright, I’ll see you later. I’m sorry.’”
Classic… and so dang funny.
Kacey went onto write the aforementioned song, and eventually, the demo made it’s way to Prine’s desk and it hit him exactly who wrote it and where it came from:
“And then, okay, so apparently his story was that a cassette tape was put on his desk, and it was a song called ‘Burn One with John Prine,’ and it was this girl Kacey Musgraves. And he was like, ‘That’s that girl that asked me to smoke in the parking lot.’ But yeah, it made its way to him.”
Obviously, you have to hear “Burn One with John Prine” now, which Kacey did get to perform with Prine on the Cayamo: Journey Through Song cruise cruise back in 2015… seriously, why hasn’t this one found its way onto an album yet?
Even though it doesn’t sound like she ever got to fulfill her dreams of smoking with him, this is pretty dang cool too:
Here’s the full interview:
“Cardinal”