I've seen beautiful art on the sides of buildings. I've seen beautiful art in museums. I've seen beautiful art in galleries. Beautiful art is everywhere.
— John Mellencamp
A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.
For me to pretend I'm the keeper of the small town mentality or that's all I'm interested in is wrong.
I believe in something, even if it's just me.
My best songs come from a place outside myself.
I'm as left-wing as you can get.
Life should never be viewed from the vantage point of achievements. It is total folly.
If I laugh a couple of times a day, I'm doing good. People think it's their God-given right to be happy, and it's just not. It's something you've got to work at. I like to paint the human condition, and the human condition is not smiles and happy people.
Radio was my friend after 'Jack & Diane' and 'Hurts So Good.'
Music was so important to the culture when I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies. We just expected that Bob Dylan was going to make a great record, and it was normal. It was like, 'Okay, here's another great record by Bob Dylan; here's another great record by Led Zeppelin.'
I've been around so many people for so long that I take great delight in my own company.
'Jack & Diane' was originally about race. I was playing nightclubs, and I was seeing new American couples, mixed-race couples. I thought it was cool. The song was my effort to make a song about that, but of course the record-company guy didn't like it.
The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased.
If you hide information from people, don't want people to see the Ten Commandments or don't want people to hear about Darwin, aren't we hiding things that we know from our future generations? I just think that that's incorrect.
As I've matured as a songwriter, I realize that if it's out there, it's mine.
We had an exercise in speech class in school, impromptu speaking, that I was always real good at.
Hanging out is a waste of time. The only time I would hang out was when I was a kid, I would hang out in the streets. But once I started making records, I stopped hanging out.
When did Jimmy Stewart not play Jimmy Stewart? When did John Wayne not play John Wayne? But that's what we like about them. When you talk about acting, you really have to respond to somebody's personality.
This cycle of make a record, tour has been going on for 20 years now. I don't even know why I do it sometimes. Do I need more money? Do I need more platinum and gold records? The only thing I can think of is ego.
American folk songs were about tragedy, right? They were about suffering and tragedy, and a lot of my songs are about that, even though they were misunderstood.
I ended up writing songs and growing up in public with my songwriting. And it's a good thing for me back then: in the early '70s, there was a thing called artist development, where an artist could find his feet, find himself, find his voice. I think I made five or six albums before I sold five or six albums.
I think Roosevelt had four terms, didn't he? I think we should go back to that, and we should go back to four years for a senator, four years for a congressman, and I think we'd see a huge change in our society.
I need a long and lingering death to make sure that I have time to have a deathbed conversion.
I wish my grandmother and grandfather were still alive, because they were able to keep me grounded.
I want my paintings to look like they were found in a garage. If they get a scratch or a hole in them, it just becomes part of the painting.
I used to think that eating healthy was ordering a fish sandwich at McDonalds.
Regret should be handled swiftly, and you shouldn't hold onto it. People spend their entire lives regretting what they didn't do and what they should've done. Hey, man, you did what you did.
'Crumbling' Down' is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president - he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.
If we have any hope for survival of the music that we all love, compassion must replace name-calling, fairness must replace greed, and we need to come together as a musical community and try to understand each other's problems.
I just think if the song's good, sing it. I don't care who's doing it. I don't care if it's a country act. I don't care if it's a rock act. If the song's good, sing it.
It sounds funny, but I always try to keep an open mind about what I'm writing about. Sometimes I squeak my opinions in there, but generally I don't. I try to be objective about things that I'm writing about.
Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.
Take 'Jack and Diane.' I was so disgusted with people thinking the line 'Hold on to sixteen as long as you can' meant to stay a teenager forever. What I meant was keep doing whatever makes you feel alive.
If I'm painting, I paint every day. I'll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.
There are a lot of actors who try to get records made and try to make record deals, and everybody goes, 'Ugh.' It used to be expected in the entertainment business. I mean look at Sinatra, Bing Crosby. All these guys started out as singers.
When I wrote 'Pink Houses,' nobody was talking about that, right? The next thing I know, you can't see the TV without hearing commercials with 'Listen to the heartbeat of America,' or 'Born the American way.' That whole America thing now - I hate it.
As I get older, I have a different look on life. I just try to be a little more tolerant and a little bit more centered about what's going on around me and not so emotional.
Broadway is a very different kind of place. It's kind of like Nashville in that there's a certain amount of people that are involved, and those people are what run it.
A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts.
Everything I have is for sale. Material items are just things that pass through your hands that mean very little or nothing.
I wanted to study at the Art Students League in New York when I was young, but I didn't have the money. Then I was fortunate enough to become Johnny Cougar Mellencamp. At the time, I thought I'd make a couple of records and get back to painting. It never dawned on me that I'd be 64 years old and still making music.
One quality of a good songwriter is to be vague. A vague notion, a vague image, but enough to give the listener the opportunity to make more out of what's being said than is there. That's the great thing about Bob Dylan's songs: We the listeners have made more out of them than he ever intended.
I have to say when a man lives for himself, it's hard to live with him. That's pretty much the story of all my divorces. I've been making records since I was 22 and done things my way, and it's hard for me to compromise. And of course, to have a successful relationship, one has to compromise. Sometimes I'm not good at it.
I was born with Spina bifida. That's where you have a hole in your spine, and your nerve endings come out.
My task with 'Uh-Huh' was to make a more even record and get away from juvenile topics like 'Hurts So Good.' But I also knew if I wanted to continue, I had to have more hits.
Sound quality was supposed to be one of the big selling points for CDs but, as we know, it wasn't very good at all. It was just another con, a get-rich-quick scheme, a monumental hoax perpetrated on the music consuming public.
Oh, I think country has changed tremendously. I think country has totally changed. Country music when I was a kid was Hank Williams. If you put Hank and Elvis together, there wasn't that musical difference. But as the Beatles showed up and the English invasion, I think country music got pretty far away from rock n' roll.
My grandmother made sure that I went to church every Sunday. And she'd come over and pick us boys up, and we would go to the Nazarene church. And back then, that was about as close to heaven as I ever got, because just the time to be able to spend with her, and she was very, very religious.
I was one of those guys, you know, playing and singing, and there was no reason for me to write a song, because there were so many beautiful songs out. And Bob Dylan was always the ultimate songwriter, and nobody could ever write a song as good as him, and nobody ever has written a song as good as him.
All I'm doing is painting. It's my hobby. And that's that.
