John Prine Remembered by Friend Sturgill Simpson: ‘You Left on a Gorgeous Moon’

Following the death of country music legend John Prine, the late singer is being fondly remembered by his friend and fellow country music songwriter Sturgill Simpson. Prine passed away on April 7, after contracting the coronavirus in March. He had been hospitalized since March 26.

In a post shared a few days after Prine’s death, Simpson shared a photo of the two of them together on a motorcycle, as well as some photos of trees. “I’m very sorry it took me so long,” Simpson’s message began. “I had to go into the woods and let myself ‘just feel’ this for a while. You left on a gorgeous moon.” Simpson continued: “There are sometimes people in this life that you meet, seldom and few and far between it would seem, whose souls are so good and pure and beautiful that when they leave it seems if only for a brief while that everything else good and pure and beautiful in this world just left along with them.

He went on to say, “It blows you apart leaving everyone to see you broken. But then you come out of the woods and the funk to see the signs of Spring all around you and remember the joy and love they put into the world by always giving so much of themselves and you suddenly see them everywhere. There is so much I never said only because I didn’t want to bother you with it. After all you never asked to be ‘John Prine.’ There is so much I’ll never get to say now. You reminded me so much of my Grandfather it hurt sometimes. I never told you that.”

Simpson shared that he “will miss the tours” and “lunches” he shared with Prine, then quipping, “I will miss you listening to me bitch and complain about all the things you understood all too well and making me feel better sometimes by just sitting there saying nothing. I will miss catching flies in mid-air with my hand just to make you laugh. I will miss showing up to the office and knowing I’d just missed you there by finding my drums upside down. I will miss your corny ass jokes. I will miss you. Every day. So long old man. You will always be loved.”

Notably, Simpson also announced that he had tested positive for coronavirus, but he did not find out until about a month after he’d come down with severe symptoms of it. “Almost one month later on April 6th my wife and I were both tested after finally finding a free drive-thru testing facility outside a National Guard depot,” he wrote in an Instagram post shared on Saturday. “Yesterday on Friday April 10th, after almost one month without any symptoms, I received a call from the Nashville CDC stating that my test resulted in a positive detection for COVID-19.” Simpson has since made a full recovery.