"Please Don't Bury Me" was a rollicking country toe-tapper with some intricate guitar interplay but had been redrafted, with Prine recalling in Great Days, “That song was originally about this character I had in mind called Tom Brewster.

I ended up trashing that whole part and came up with this idea of the guy just giving all of his organs away, and I made a whole song out of that.” The album cover is a far cry from the somewhat naive portraits of the singer on his first two LPs: a bearded, denim-clad Prine - wearing sunglasses and pointy-toed cowboy boots, a cigarette jutting from his lips - sprawls across the leather front seats of a 1959 Porsche convertible, the "first toy" the singer purchased with his record company money.

It's the odd actions of everyday detail - as in the "four way stop dilemma" of "The Accident" - that heighten the reality of his songs, and his elementary insight that social circumstances do actually affect individual American lives that distinguishes him politically from his fellow workers.

Rating: A"[6] Writing for Allmusic, critic Jim Smith wrote of the album "Sympathy takes a back seat to cynicism here, and while that strips the record of some depth, Prine's irreverence is consistently thrilling, making this one of his best.

It's not as uniformly brilliant as the debut, but it did steer his music in a new direction — where that record is often hallmarked for its rich sensitivity, Sweet Revenge established cynicism as Prine's dominant voice once and for all.

Steven Stolder of Amazon.com writes, "This outing isn't as musically distinctive as Prine's other albums from his early period, but as collections of songs go, it's first-rate.