“I’m a singer-songwriter, that’s my real job, but I paint every day. A storage room was reimagined as an art studio for Mellencamp, whose paintings explore Americana through a lens influenced by the German expressionists of the 1900s. Mellencamp recruited his roadies to redo the three-bedroom house in three weeks, repainting the interiors in fresh white (including the brick and the wood beams). it takes a certain kind of colorful person to want to be up there. “You get this thing, particularly at night when the winds blow. Situated on six acres, the retreat is a remote one. Put more specifically, the former ranch is positioned on one of the peaks of Santa Barbara’s Toro Canyon, a perch which yields bracing views all the way out to the Pacific Ocean. “It does have a very romantic feel to it. “Quite honestly, I see it as a place for me to go with an invited guest,” he explains, from his suite at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. John Mellencamp wants to go back and start again.On his 1983 album, Uh-Huh, John Mellencamp sang, “Little pink houses for you and me, oh yeah, for you and me.” But, in 2022, the iconic musician is humming about a little white house in Montecito, California. He doesn't want to become Johnny Cougar again - God, no. He has nothing but contempt for his own early work as a late-'70s/early-'80s, floppy-haired heartland poster boy. 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. The name change, for one - Johnny Cougar, then John Cougar Mellencamp, cat-free since '91. 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. 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. (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. "I talked to my next-door neighbor this morning," Mellencamp, 59, said during our recent interview from his Indiana home. 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. If people are coming to see 'The Coug,' they should stay home." Jumping off an amp at my age would be stupid. If he could erase parts of the past and start over, he said he would. 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. You have pretty clear contempt for your early work.Ī. There was no way those folk songs were ever going to get anywhere unless I had hit records.
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