I don't know where to start on a day that brought news of the deaths of JOHN PRINE and HAL WILLNER, two towering figures in different corners of weird/wonderful/essential American music. Both fell victim to what I'm hearing too many people refer to as simply "the virus." This horrible thing that's raging across the country, while the men in charge who know nothing of the culture and the lives it's destroying continue to act like it's a minor irritation that will soon pass, has become so familiar that its name needn't be spoken anymore. There's a murderer in the house and we've already dropped the formalities. And it's come for the storytellers... John Prine was a Mount Rushmore figure among American singer/songwriters, beloved by the DYLANs and SPRINGSTEENs and CASHes, none of whom, if you told them Prine could write circles around them on his best days, would necessarily disagree. He had a poet's eye for small details, a devilish sense of humor and an extraordinary empathy for ordinary lives. And because I really don't know where to start today, I'll let ANN POWERS remind you how deep a songwriter he was (an amazing essay, btw). MARISSA R. MOSS explains how he might have had a good laugh at all this eulogizing (and talks about his generosity). The TENNESSEAN's MATTHEW LEIMKUEHLER has the details of a life fully and somewhat wildly lived, and the late ROGER EBERT—one of the first people with any influence to recognize Prine's talent a half-century ago—can fill you in on exactly what he saw in his 23-year-old fellow Chicagoan. Oh, and in this interview with PAUL ZOLLO, Prine goes deep on his songwriting process and philosophy. As for me, I'm stuck on this one line in "ANGEL FROM MONTGOMERY" in which Prine, singing in the voice of a middle-aged woman trapped in a bad marriage, wonders, "How the hell can a person go to work in the morning / And come home in the evening and have nothing to say?" And on how, describing his own life to ROLLING STONE nearly a half-century later, he sort of answered his own question: "I look busy for a living. I leave the house so it appears I did something. Fiona [his third wife] knows to never ask me what I did today. She knows it’s absolutely nothing." In between the question and answer lies perhaps all you need to know, if you could just decode it, about one of the greatest songwriters who ever walked among us. I love, too, that he wrote himself the last laugh. Here's hoping that at this very moment he's smoking a cigarette that's nine miles long and blowing the smoke in your face, men in charge. MusicSET: "John Prine Wrote the Songs That Made the Other Songwriters Cry"... Hal Willner had an enviable career producing albums for LOU REED, LAURIE ANDERSON, MARIANNE FAITHFULL and others across a wide range of styles, and spending four decades overseeing the music for SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE's sketches. But he came into a lot of our lives, and stayed there, for a different reason: his borderless not-quite tribute albums to artists like THELONIOUS MONK, KURT WEILL, NINO ROTA, CHARLES MINGUS and the music of classic DISNEY films, in which he assembled dizzying collections of current artists, with little regard for genre, to renew, rethink and redraw classic catalogs. They were albums on which magical connections routinely happened and one plus one always added up to three and a half. He was a curator, playlister, activist judge and maker, in the NEW YORK TIMES' words, of "the mixtapes of a city’s imagination." I don't think I realized, until years after I first encountered his work, how much Willner colored my perception of how NEW YORK CITY sounds and feels. The purposeful noise. The clashing ideas. The unexpected fusions. The SUN RA ARKESTRA doing "PINK ELEPHANTS ON PARADE." Willner leaves behind a rich musical life and an unreleased T. REX project. MusicSET: "The Toll: Artists Lost to the Coronavirus"... APPLE MUSIC has created a $50 million coronavirus relief fund that it will pay out as recoupable advances to indie labels—"in good faith," says Apple, "that labels will channel funds to artists and label operations based on financial need." The advances are reserved for labels that have direct distribution deals with Apple and earn at least $10,000 quarterly from the service... TROY CARTER is leading daily music-biz panels on ZOOM to talk about how labels, artists and managers are adjusting in the face of the pandemic... RIP also MAC P DAWG... MusicREDEF will be off tomorrow for Passover. Back in your inbox on Friday.