"Last night, John Prine died, and there's too much to say," Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday's Late Show. The first mixtape his wife ever made for him, before they were married, started with the Prine song "Paradise," he said. "I love that song, and I loved her for showing it to me. I learned it on the guitar so I could play it over the phone to her, because we were living in different cities." He later got to perform for Prine and with him, Colbert said, and meet other people who also loved John Prine. Among them was Brandi Carlile, whom Colbert asked to play one of Prine's songs in tribute. She chose "Hello in There."
"I have been asked to record one of John Prine's songs for tonight, and it's a great honor for me," Carlile said from home. "I've been thinking long and hard about it because there's so many amazing and powerful messages that John Prine has left the world, and for the people that weren't familiar with his music, they're about to get a whole lotta truth dropped on 'em, which I am really happy about."
"I think that this is a song that John would've liked me to sing," she said, "because this song refers to the people that we're all staying home to protect, and it reminds us that older people aren't expendable, that they made us who we are and they've given us every single thing that we have. So even though John never got to get old, and we all would've liked for him to, at the age of 24, when he wrote this song, he understood this."
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Late Night's Seth Meyers also picked "Hello in There" for his Prine remembrance, performed by Prine on Saturday Night Live in 1976. Watch below. Peter Weber
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