John Prine "Aimless Love" (1984)

BACK TO BASIC

• John Prine, one of the most unheralded major songwriters of the 1970's, was back with his first album in more than four years, ''Aimless Love,'' recorded on his own West Coast label, Oh Boy Records.

• Mr. Prine, who made his reputation in 1971 singing bleak dramatic monologues like ''Sam Stone'' and ''Hello, In There,'' has explored rockabilly and Southern country-soul idioms with varying degrees of success, but on ''Aimless Love'' he has returned triumphantly to the ultra-spare country-folk idiom of his earliest and finest records.

• Prine's latest songs are wry, pithy vignettes of rural life with dirt- plain melodies sung in a keening true- grit voice that has always borne a close resemblance to Bob Dylan. The album's best songs are peopled with typical Prine characters - grotesque losers viewed with a mixture of compassion and tough humor. ''The Oldest Baby In the World'' draws a sharp portrait of a hot-blooded middle-aged woman who is unable to grow up. In ''Maureen, Maureen,'' a man tells his wife he's shot a doctor on a plane and bailed out of the aircraft to come home. When his wife doesn't believe him, he admits ''the things that I'm thinking ain't necessarily the things that I say - there's a hole between us.''

• Many of the songs' oddball characters are so desperate for adventure and love that dreaming up such wild fantasies is the only way they can really feel alive. Songs like ''Be My Friend Tonight'' and the album's title song compellingly evoke the rock-bottom loneliness that Mr. Prine sees as an essential condition of many American lives.

Track-List in the Comments