The old-school traveling song "Driving in the Rain" features a simple, constant tambourine swing, adding to the mournful innocence of a melody reminiscent of the 1930s. But on the wistful-yet-defiant "Simply a One-Eyed Jack," the fiddle provides powerful drive. On the opening track, "I Always Lie to Strangers," Merritt Lear plays an unsteady fiddle obbligato that emphasizes the darkness of the melody. It's not just the presence of acoustic instruments but how they're used that define the album's sound. On the sardonic "I Am a Man That Worries," Mellencamp's singing has as much grit as the guitar fingerboard his slide presses into. The vintage effect is intensified by Mellencamp's always rough voice, which age has battered into a more melodic version of the Tom Waits growl. The fact that the bass is less thunderous doesn't diminish the thrill. Now we're sitting next to him on the porch while he strums his acoustic guitar. In the 1980s, we felt like we were in Mellencamp's garage, the drums rattling our bones.
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lang) and indie (Michelle Shocked, Juliana Hatfield) experience to know how to bring out Mellencamp's current character. Leonard has the right blend of alt-country (Dwight Yoakam, k.d. The two have worked on several albums together over the past two decades. Mellencamp, who produced Strictly a One-Eyed Jack, turned to veteran engineer David Leonard to help craft its rich and detailed sound. Either way, the past few years have generally worn everyone out, so it's easy to connect with all that minor-key gloom. It feels like a declaration, maybe about the state of the Midwest Mellencamp loves so much. But then there is the extraordinary fact that nearly every song is in a minor key, and many of the melodies seem clearly crafted to sound modal and archaic. Sure, the banjo, accordion, fiddles, acoustic guitars, and autoharpmany of them played by music director Andy Yorkconjure up the bygone years of the American nation. On his new album, Mellencamp wanders even farther into the forests of Americana, in metaphorical as well as ethnomusicological ways. The result was one of the first alternative country albums, effectively reviving the country-meets-rock sound, sometimes called No Depression, that the Flying Burrito Brothers had spearheaded at the end of the 1960s. But rock stayed at the core, surrounded by a country mantle. In 1985, with Scarecrow, John Cougar Mellencamp augmented his approach to musical landscape-painting, introducing folk instruments into his sound. He was rewarded, too, with big sales for singles like "Pink Houses," "Crumblin' Down," and "Authority Song."Īll that success gave him the fortitude to reclaim his own name, first as John Cougar Mellencamp then removing "Cougar" altogether. He'd found a way to express the inner complexities of a simple life, and he was loved for it. But in 1982, with the album American Fool, he became specifically identified with small-town vignettes.
The result is a powerful baring of the soul, which, to many Americans, will also be a glance in the mirror.Īmerica has related to Mellencamp since he first came on the scene in the 1970s, when his management forced him to use the moniker John Cougar. On his latest album, the 70-year-old Indiana native has nestled deeper into his rural Midwestern roots, eschewing rock defiance for folk philosophy. Instead, John Mellencamp's long career has been a tale of determined development and often improvement. You might think an artist with 22 Top-40 hits would identify his winning formula and stick with it.
John Mellencamp: Strictly a One-Eyed Jack
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