The world has progressed, he says, but in the wrong direction. You weren't even born, what the f- do you have to do with it?" MP3s? "A terrible way to listen to music." This lead into a lengthy rant that peaked with his favorite declaration: "The Internet is the most dangerous invention since the atomic bomb." Before this, he had some choice things to say about the recent election, such as: "I love it when the right starts talking about all they've done - referring back to World War II and what their grandparents did. Mellencamp sees demons all around him, mostly technological ones. "He thinks he's got me / but he ain't got me," he sings - either victorious or overconfident, it's never clear. How do you walk into Robert Johnson's house without a song about the devil? So I wrote 'Right Behind Me' real quick." The song's narrator is off to see his baby ("She in Chicago"), and the devil's over his shoulder. "I looked at the songs I'd written and realized I hadn't written a song about the devil. "The only song written especially for one of the locations was 'Right Behind Me,'" Mellencamp said. (the first stop on the Underground Railroad during the Civil War), and Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in downtown San Antonio, where a young Robert Johnson sat and recorded 16 now-legendary blues songs (including "Sweet Home Chicago") this week in November 1936. Other songs were taped at the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Ga. Much of the album was captured in single takes at Sun Studios, the Memphis storefront where Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash made landmark debuts. Released in August on revered folk label Rounder Records, its 13 new songs were recorded at three historic locations, and in mono. Mellencamp's new album, "No Better Than This," showcases his desire to rewind and replay. I always looked at that song like a graphic novel, and now it takes on a whole new seriousness I never realized existed in it. It doesn't sound anything like that version on radio. It's the folk song it always meant to be. It's the first time I've enjoyed playing it in 20 years. Last night during a show during a slow, quiet section, someone yelled out, 'Jack and Diane!' I said, 'You're impatient.' I play it, but you don't know what it is till I start singing it. I'll play "R.O.C.K." again, but not in a way you'll imagine. The only thing to do is to try and figure out a way to get to people who want to hear songs like "Easter Eve" and do a good job at it. If you played it like you did in 1985, perhaps.Ī. Playing "R.O.C.K." tomorrow night would certainly be insulting. No matter what you do, someone's going to be insulted. Am I worrying about insulting people? Well, there's no winning that. By denouncing those early records, aren't you also insulting your fans?Ī. There was no way those folk songs were ever going to get anywhere unless I had hit records. You have pretty clear contempt for your early work.Ī. Anything, he said, that might detour around, say, 1983's "The Kid Inside." And this is what much of our conversation was about: looking to the past without being nostalgic, back-tracking through decades of "progress" to a point further back - and taking a different route from there. If he could erase parts of the past and start over, he said he would. If people are coming to see 'The Coug,' they should stay home." Jumping off an amp at my age would be stupid. She said, 'Really, I like the old John better.' And I said, 'Well, Cathy, that guy doesn't exist anymore.' It'd be foolish of me to try and do at my age now what I was doing at 32. "I talked to my next-door neighbor this morning," Mellencamp, 59, said during our recent interview from his Indiana home.
(That same year, he helped found Farm Aid with Neil Young and Willie Nelson.) Each album since - an admirable catalog of a dozen more records with a thoroughly Midwestern blend of Friday-night fun and corner-diner speeches - has received various and consistent acclaim.īut people at the shows still expect him to do the splits. in the U.S.A." but also rootsy, populist tracks like "Small Town," "The Face of the Nation," "Justice and Independence" and "You've Gotta Stand for Somethin'." It was a bid for critical respect, and it worked. The turning point came when Mellencamp, a native of Seymour, Ind., released 1985's "Scarecrow," a transitional album that gave us "R.O.C.K. The name change, for one - Johnny Cougar, then John Cougar Mellencamp, cat-free since '91.
#John mellencamp hurts so good lyrics full
When he speaks of his first eight albums of pandering pop-rock - full of Top 40 hits, mind you, like "I Need a Lover," "Hurts So Good," and signature songs like "Jack & Diane" and "Pink Houses" - it's with a scoff and a sneer.
He has nothing but contempt for his own early work as a late-'70s/early-'80s, floppy-haired heartland poster boy. He doesn't want to become Johnny Cougar again - God, no. John Mellencamp wants to go back and start again.