"Lake Marie" is arguably the album's most popular track. The song was inspired in part by Prine's crumbling marriage and a series of grisly murders the singer remembered the Chicago news media having a field day with when he was a kid. The John Prine Shrine website quotes the singer discussing his inspiration for the song: "It's an actual place along the Illinois-Wisconsin border. There's an entire chain of lakes along there, small lakes, and I remember as a teenager growing up in Chicago, a lot of the teenagers would go to these lakes and in the summer time kind of get away from the city. Lake Marie was kind of just one that stuck out in my mind. About '59, '60, '61, I grew up in Maywood - it's a western suburb of Chicago, and we started hearing about murders that weren't related to the mob. You know, John Wayne Gacy was like, about two towns away from me and you just hear about it. The suburbs were kind of thought to be a pretty safe place at the time, and then some of these unexplained murders would show up every once in a while, where they'd find people in the woods somewhere. I just kind of took any one of them, not one in particular, and put it as if it was in a TV newscast. It was a sharp left turn to take in a song, but when I got done with it, I kind of felt like it's what the song needed right then." In 2005 Lloyd Sachs wrote that the song was "one of Prine’s masterpieces." In a 2009 interview with The Huffington Post, Bob Dylan commented, "If I had to pick one song of his, it might be 'Lake Marie'."
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