2 and 16 weeks in the top 10, and "Jack & Diane", which was a No. They need to hear it. Following the delivery of his address, Indiana University bestowed upon him an honorary Doctorate of Musical Arts. On November 19, 1994 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Mellencamp performed an acoustic cover of Billy Joel's "Allentown" at a tribute event to Billy Joel. With guitarist Andy York now on board as Larry Crane's full-time replacement, Mellencamp launched his Dance Naked Tour in the summer of 1994, but had a minor heart attack after a show at Jones Beach in New York on August 8 of that year. Noted art writer Hilarie M. Sheets, a contributing editor to ARTnews who writes regularly for The New York Times, called Mellencamp "a natural storyteller" in a 2012 essay she wrote about his artwork. The ASCAP Founders Award goes to pioneering ASCAP songwriters who have made exceptional contributions to music by inspiring and influencing their fellow music creators. "On this record, we ended up quite a bit away from where we started", Mellencamp told Guitar World Acoustic in 1998. In 2005, Mellencamp toured with Donovan and John Fogerty. And then it just kept evolving and evolving and evolving, and the songs that she was bringing and the songs that I was bringingthey weren't so religious. ", Mellencamp has also honed his skills by his own self-education in art history, visiting museums across Europe and America whenever he was on tour and studying a broad spectrum of artists and the mechanics of their work and by looking at signs and billboards out the windows of cars and buses while crisscrossing the country. Upcoming John Mellencamp tour dates, ticket links and venue information If you listen to the lead Larry [Crane] plays on 'Face of the Nation,' he never would have played that 'cause he didn't really know who the Animals were. On August 13, 2007, Mellencamp began recording his 18th album of original material, titled Life, Death, Love and Freedom. You can make this much money! Blah, blah, blah. He's young, and he grew up listening to Grand Funk Railroad. I walked away feeling: I get it just put all the things you love into what you do.' When we walked out onstage, there wasn't a band on Earth to touch us. Please login or register . According to Sheets, "In recent years, Mellencamp has incorporated the looser, more jangly rhythms of street art into panoramic canvases that reflect his social and political activism also present in his music. While he was on tour, Mellencamp recorded a new album titled No Better Than This that was again produced by T Bone Burnett. I have 17 more songs to record. [21], On July 8, 2014, Mellencamp released a new live album called Performs Trouble No More Live at Town Hall without any advance notice. [90], Mellencamp was married to Priscilla Esterline from 1970 until 1981 and to Victoria Granucci from 1981 until 1989. Mellencamp would leave the stage as Donovan played seven or eight of his songs (backed by Mellencamp's band) and then return to finish off his own set after Donovan departed. 8), "Check It Out" (No. Joe McCandless knows what really happened; he saw it all. 28). We asked why and they said, 'She can't fit here, period.' "There were personal problems, cross-pollinated with professional issues. News: Visit Mellencamp.com's NEWS section for all of the latest updates! Out of my agony came a couple of really beautiful songs. "[70], Mellencamp wrote the score for the Meg Ryan movie Ithaca, which premiered on October 23, 2015, at the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia and was released in theaters and on-demand by Momentum Pictures on September 9, 2016. Take an old Rascals song for example there's everything from marching band beats to soul music to country sounds in one song. On this tour, which ran through the summer of 2012 and covered the entire United States and Canada and much of Europe, Mellencamp opened each concert with a showing of a Kurt Markus documentary about the making of No Better Than This called "It's About You" before hitting the stage to play three different sets: a stripped-down acoustic set with his band, a solo acoustic set, and a fully electrified rock set. Concerts. I've recorded 10 and I have 17 more to do and I'll pick 10 of the 27 songs". In addition to the score, Mellencamp wrote two original songs for Ithaca: "Sugar Hill Mountain" (sung by Carlene Carter) and "Seeing You Around" (sung by Leon Redbone). [88][89] He donated $1.5 million to the school to build an indoor athletics training facility, which was named John Mellencamp Pavilion. He is of Dutch ancestry. Mellencamp is also one of the founding members of Farm Aid, an organization that began in 1985 with a concert in Champaign, Illinois, to raise awareness about the loss of family farms and to raise funds to keep farm families on their land. [7] DeFries insisted that Mellencamp's first album, Chestnut Street Incident, a collection of covers and a handful of original songs, be released under the stage name Johnny Cougar, insisting that the bumpy German name "Mellencamp" was too hard to market. Mellencamp, who works in a very different, very personal idiom, makes plainspoken paintings, he says, because he's a plainspoken man. Mellencamp performed "Small Town" at a Barack Obama rally in Evansville, Indiana on April 22, the night of the 2008 Pennsylvania primary. "Our Country", the first single from Freedom's Road, was played as the opening song on Mellencamp's 2006 spring tour, and the band that opened for him on that tour, Little Big Town, was called on to record harmonies on the studio version of "Our Country", as well as seven other songs on Freedom's Road. in the U.S.A.", "Paper in Fire", and "Cherry Bomb". I write a lot of sad songs, so it's like Sad Clowns & Hillbilliesthat's where it came from. On his 2007 album, Freedom's Road, Mellencamp included a hidden track called "Rodeo Clown", which was a direct reference to George W. Bush ("The bloody red eyes of the rodeo clown"). A third single, "Hand to Hold on To", made it to No. Mellencamp released Freedom's Road, his first album of original material in over five years, on January 23, 2007. [34], In October 2018, it was announced that Broadway Licensing have redeveloped Ghost Brothers of Darkland County and made it available for worldwide licensing beginning in 2019. The worst thing was that I could have gone on making records like that for hundreds of years. It included 50 oil and mixed-media paintings, including several never before seen by the public. [71], In a May 6, 2016, Q&A after a screening of the movie at Geena Davis' Bentonville Film Festival, Ryan said: "The music is so beautiful. "I started messing around with oil paints when I was about ten but, you know, without instruction," he remembers. What happened was the girl he fell in love with got sent to Haiti, he went down and met with the devil and bad things happenedYou can read about Orpheus in Greek mythology."[51]. That same month he released the two-disc career hits retrospective Words & Music: John Mellencamp's Greatest Hits, which contained 35 of his radio singles (including all 22 of his Top 40 hits) along with two new tunes, "Walk Tall" and "Thank You" both produced by Babyface but written by Mellencamp. Harper Collins published Paintings and Reflections, an overview of Mellencamp's earlier work as a painter, in 1998. In an interview with the Bloomington Herald-Times in March 2008, Mellencamp dubbed Life, Death, Love and Freedom "The best record I've ever made." "The singles were stupid little pop songs," he told Record Magazine in 1983. Album Rock Heartland Rock Roots Rock Contemporary Pop/Rock Contemporary Folk Contemporary Singer/Songwriter Rock & Roll Bar Band Hard Rock. He opened each show on this tour with a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" and also played a solo acoustic version of the Cuttin' Heads track "Women Seem" at each show. And they gave me this script called Thelma & Louise and they said, 'The guy wrote the part with you in mind, John, you really gotta do this part.' People are worried. ", Mellencamp told VH1 that he was originally offered the Brad Pitt role in Thelma and Louise: "You know they used to want me to be an actor all the time and I used to get more movie role offers. [22] Two songs performed at the 2003 Town Hall concert, the 1962 Skeeter Davis hit "The End of the World" and the traditional folk song "House of the Rising Sun", did not make the final track list despite the album's official press release stating that the CD and digital versions "feature the complete 15-song concert. [1] She began her career as a violinist for John Mellencamp. Live at the Royal, which peaked at No. She harmonizes with Mellencamp on "My Sweet Love" and provides background vocals to three other songs on Life, Death, Love and Freedom, which became the ninth Top 10 album of Mellencamp's career when it debuted at No. If these works are any indication, plain painting can be extraordinarily eloquent.". They don't care how they hear it as long as they hear it good and loud and clear the way you've always been saying it all along. 28 single in late 1979. To bend over? Mellencamp's band provided the backing on both tracks and performed all the music that is in the movie. Mellencamp participated in a tribute concert for Pete Seeger's 90th birthday on May 3, 2009, at Madison Square Garden in New York City which raised funds for an environmental organization founded by Seeger to preserve and protect the Hudson River. With a lo-fi setup that included portable amps and a battery-powered P.A. "Wild Night" became Mellencamp's biggest hit in years, peaking at No. [33] "We wrote a couple of songs together, and she wrote some and I wrote some," Mellencamp told USA Today of the material on Sad Clowns & Hillbillies. The play is called "Ghost Brothers of Darkland County", about two brothers who hate each other. The album is really about one guy, just one guys voice speaking about his life, Mellencamp explains, speaking of Strictly a One-Eyed Jack. And what a group of names they were: John Mellencamp, Dwight Yoakam, Joe Ely, James McMurtry, and John Prine made up the Buzzin' Cousins, Mellencamp's lark of an answer to the Travelin'. They stare at the viewer or off into space with eyes both tough and vulnerable, projecting intensity akin to Beckmann's self-portraits with his sad, glowering eyes. Mellencamp also tried to control how his band members cut loose. I wish I would've been able to enjoy it, but I was too busy slugging. Mellencamp (music/lyrics) will team with Naomi Wallace (book) to form the creative team behind the still-untitled musical, with Kathleen Marshall, winner of three Tonys out of nine nominations, signed on to direct and choreograph. Her album Geek the Girl (1994) was chosen as a top album of the 1990s by Spin magazine. I do not want some guy walking up to me going, Hey John, I saw you in Detroit or something, it was a great show except my wife got COVID and died. Just the thought of hearing thatThe business side of my career is like, This many people will see it! To anybody who's said thank you to me, I say, 'You're very nice, but, really, thank you. Id walk in and the guys in the band would look at me and go, Not the same guy talking, so wed just move on to another song. Mellencamp and Green's final collaboration was "Yours Forever", a song that was included on the soundtrack to the 2000 movie, The Perfect Storm. But some of those songs we didnt record were pretty good, too.[49], In the summer of 2022, Mellencamp confirmed through his social media channels that he is, indeed, working on the follow-up to Strictly a One-Eyed Jack.
.png)