Photo by Lauren Taback
Chuck Prophet
Chuck Prophet
With an artist whose catalog is as extensive as Chuck Prophet’s, it’s probably no surprise that he might fall “out of like” occasionally with some of his own songs.
“Whenever I fall a little bit short with the recording of a song, it kind of poisons my relationship with it,” says Prophet, whose musical career stretches back to the early 1980s with Wild Game and Green on Red.
“Whenever you are wrestling an album to the ground, you only see the pimples, and that kind of can be very difficult,” he continues. “And if you don’t get a song to behave and the deadline’s approaching, and you’re out of time and money, sometimes a song can get cast aside.”
But Milwaukee musicians Peter Mulvey and SistaStrings (now Nashville-based) have helped Prophet rekindle with at least one of his songs: “Love is the Only Thing.”
The musicians reimagined Prophet’s 2014 song in rousing fashion for their genre-bending collaborative album of the same name from last year.
Prophet, who produced Mulvey’s 2014 album Silver Ladder, says he’s a great fan of the Milwaukee musician. “I admire him,” he says. “He is one of the last true believers out of there. He’s out there going door to door in what I call hand-to-hand combat.”
New Life
Mulvey and Sistastrings breathed new life into “Love is the Only Thing,” Prophet says. “I very rarely played that song live, but after I heard his version, it snuck back into my set,” he says. “He had a different angle on it, whatever it was, I made peace with the song. I started to like it again.”
Mulvey is not the only person to dip into Prophet’s deep songwriting catalog. Alejandro Escovedo, Kim Richey, Steve Wynn and Kelly Willis are just a few of the others. Prophet called it the “thrill of a lifetime,” when Heart recorded his song “No Other Love.”
“The sound of Ann Wilson’s voice is part of my DNA and my childhood,” he says. “It was like meeting Elvis. She was just so beautiful in person. She just had a glow about her.”
Despite his affection for Heart, he was less than pleased about one of their changes to “No Other Love.”
“She did take a liberty with the song and change the word ‘mama’ to ‘darling,” which made it into like a boy-girl song. Whereas my version is really about my mother and God and women in sort of an interchangeable way.
“Often times when people cover my songs there’s something about it that bothers me,” he adds laughing.
Prophet’s last full-length album is 2020’s The Land That Time Forgot, which comes from a line in the song “High as Johnny Thunders,” not the 1974 monster movie of the same name or the 1918 novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs from which the film originated.
“Johnny Thunders is a guy I like to think of as having the whole package—just like Chuck Berry,” Prophet says. “He had the sound, he had the look, he had the style. And he had the songs, and he had an instantly recognizable guitar style.”
The album’s artwork came about after Prophet attended a film noir festival in San Francisco that featured a couple of obscure 1950s Mexican noirs. Prophet enlisted an artist from Mexico to draw the art for the cover.
Writing Discipline
He ultimately would also use the title for his Substack blog, which he created to enhance his writing discipline. “I don’t really pick things; they just kind of a float to the top,” he says. “All of that stuff was swilling around the record. You bring it to a boil and see what floats to the top.”
Currently, Prophet is writing songs for what he intends to be a Cumbia album, but he’s still trying to figure out his way into the genre, or “circling his prey,” as he describes it.
“Cumbia is a music that came out of Columbia and Peru in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and it’s kind of a Latin dance music that has a lot of surf guitar and psychedelic guitar. I just found myself listening to it a lot.”
Prophet says he know he will have the “cumbia police” coming for him, but there’s something about the music that excites him.
“That’s really been the secret to how I make my records,” he says.” I’ve been lucky enough to find things that make me excited, and when I wake up excited, that’s a good day.”
Prophet says he has always had an especially healthy appetite for listening to music.“Before I was a guitar player, I think I was a pretty good listener, and I continue to be a pretty good listener,” he says. “I guess the challenge is to find new ways to do the same old shit.”
With that goal in mind, Prophet found himself listening to an unlikely source: Ron Howard. He took a MasterClass from the famed director during the pandemic.
“He put a lot of emphasis on fresh. His attitude as a director is that it helps to know what’s out there so you can understand, get a feel if what you are doing is fresh. And I felt like I understood what that meant,” he says.
With writing and recording songs, touring, and maintain his Substack and a regular show on the radio streaming station Gimme Country, Prophet does not have an abundance of down time. But he insists he’s perfectly capable of relaxing.
“I’m definitely a person who can appreciate doing nothing,” he says. “I’m really good at it. I love just staring out the window.”
Chuck Prophet performs 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 25, at Shank Hall. Louie & the Flashbombs open.
