But I'm looking for trouble."ĮSQ: Of course. "A lot of people get to be a certain age and they just kind of lose interest or they give up. Because what kind of person's interests stay the same their entire life? What I'm drawing from now and what I was drawing from as a kid are totally two different things. If you read Shakespeare - and I don't mean to sound like a dick - he talks about all of these things, you know? He says so much in one line. It has nothing to do with what I started out to do. Now my inspiration is John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Shakespeare. From being 22, 23 years old, my inspiration was the Rolling Stones. And my inspiration over the years has changed dramatically. Because I'm trying to write for people my age. JM: That's why I asked you how old you were. "Troubled Man" and "The Isolation of Mister" come to mind. So I would go back and I would go, "What was I trying to do here?"ĮSQ: Some of the album's most intriguing moments are when you look at your life in the harshest light. So you know, I don't ever throw anything away. Like "Troubled Man" off the new record: I think I started writing that song in the early nineties, but I just couldn't get it to sound somehow like I thought it should. But I wasn't mature enough to release them. JM: A lot of the new songs have been around for a long time. Ever since Life, Death, Love, and Freedom, I've loved your more introspective, hard-hitting music. But that's probably because I was drunk.ĮSQ: I did. JM: Probably got drunk and fell down, didn't yah?ĮSQ: I don't remember the falling down part. I've gone there several times in the past to visit friends at college. How about yourself?ĮSQ: Ah, I love Bloomington. JOHN MELLENCAMP: So where am I talking to you from, Dan?ĮSQUIRE.COM: I'm in Chicago. It just never did register with a young guy." And the idea back then that it was a lifelong occupation was just. "I just can't even imagine that I'm still doing this," he says with a laugh. As demonstrated with poignant precision on his recent work - principally 2008's unflinching self-evaluation, Life, Death, Love, and Freedom, and now his latest LP, the fierce, poetic Plain Spoken, out next week - the 62-year-old, however, has never been more dialed in to his craft. "I prefer the more bumpy road," he offers, with blunt assessment, of a decision to turn his pen inward. Talking on the phone from his longtime home in sleepy Bloomington, Indiana, Mellencamp looks back on a two-decade run since then spent riding a freewheeling collision course with his own shortcomings. "I decided that having hit pop records was not a very pleasant road to travel down," says the singer-songwriter, who for each of the preceding six years had notched a Billboard Hot 100 top-10 song and, to that end, etched himself into the American Songbook with radio-friendly heartland rockers like "Jack & Diane," "Pink Houses," and "Small Town." It was sometime around 1988, John Mellencamp recalls, when he found himself having little use for pop music.
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