Aimless Love

Aimless Love is the eighth album by American folk singer and songwriter John Prine, released in 1984.

Prine and his longtime manager Al Bunetta formed Oh Boy Records in an attempt to take control of his own music.

In a 1985 interview with Bobby Bare on The Nashville Network, Prine explained that he'd been inspired to start his own label by Steve Goodman's modest success with Red Pajamas Records and named it "Oh Boy" because of how the expression is apropos for both good and bad situations.

"There ain't no middleman, there is no like swarthy little character in Cleveland that gets the money from the people that want the music," Prine told Bare, "and then he takes most of it, twirls his moustache, and then sends me twelve cents."

In the years leading up to the release, he had settled in Nashville co-writing songs for other artists, notably the number one country hit "Love Is On a Roll" by Don Williams.

Prine's wife at the time, Rachel Peer-Prine, sings harmony on "Slow Boat to China" and takes a verse on "Unwed Fathers.

On the sleeve of his 1988 release John Prine Live, the singer noted that the girl in the song "is just trying to hang on to a shred of innocence.

In 1985, Don Shewey of Rolling Stone magazine wrote that Aimless Love showed that "John Prine, the elegant pop songwriter, is still in top form."

Writing for AllMusic, critic William Ruhlman wrote of the album "On this label debut, he is under no commercial pressures, but that seems to make him more low-key, less striking... his new sweetness, which is as winning as, if less impressive than, his witty older songs."