Once you add a band then it changes everything. Sometimes I’ll write something and go, “I can’t believe I wrote that.” But then I need to record it, and it’s not an easy transformation from a little folk song to a rock song. It doesn’t leave much time for writing songs because you’re exhausted.Ĭan you recall the first one you wrote where you were able sit back, listen to what you’d done and say to yourself: “Now that’s a song”? That meant that I was doing record, tour, record, tour, record, tour, for 20 years. That became a challenge because, when I was a kid, my record contract dictated that I had to make an album every 18 months and I had to do a certain number of shows to support it.
So I really grew up in the public eye, learning how to write songs. I wouldn’t even call it a hobby it was just something I tried a couple of times. I had played around with writing songs but it wasn’t an ambition of mine. I said, “There are so many songs already written that I couldn’t sing all of them if I started today and sang for the rest of my life. As a matter of fact, I questioned why they even wanted me to write any songs after they told me that I’d have to. So I was like, “OK, I’ll take the money.” It turned out that The Art Students League wanted money and the record company wanted to give me money.
I went to New York thinking I might go to The Art Students League, but I also took a demo tape with me. I was singing in bars but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Given your interests in painting and film, did you always envision a musical career for yourself when you were growing up? John Huston was a ruffian and that’s how I saw myself as a young man I always identified with John Huston more than I ever identified with Mick Jagger.
I am a fan of John Huston and it’s not only his work it’s his personality. Since it was a low-budget film, the studio said, “Go ahead and make it if you want to.” Look what he did with it. The Misfits and Treasure of the Sierra Madre are two of my favorites. What are your favorite Huston films and has he always been an influence? You programmed that film for TCM last September. You mentioned Gay Langland from John Huston’s The Misfits. Mellencamp recorded Strictly a One-Eyed Jack at his home studio in Belmont, Ind., enlisting his friend Bruce Springsteen to join him on three tracks, including the meditative first single, “Wasted Days.” As he has done for most of his career, Mellencamp self-produced the album, although he worked with T Bone Burnett for a stretch in the late 2000s and early 2010s and credits Burnett with some advice that remains applicable: “He reminded me of something I already knew, but I had forgotten. These characters are kind of floating, free-range, down-and-outers, who are proud of themselves.” The guy was a John Huston character for sure- he’s Gay Langland or another one of his characters. That’s when I was able to look back and realize that all the songs were coming from the same place, the same voice. “We had started recording and then the pandemic hit, so we had to stop. I’ve never planned anything in my life,” John Mellencamp says, while musing on the process of selecting the material that appears on his intimate, absorbing new studio record, Strictly a One-Eyed Jack.