A Quote by John Mellencamp
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.
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For me the Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together - many of them only because they helped Jews.
Cornelius Cardew's folk songs were very, very literal, and they were just about workers smashing their chains. It was like reading Das Kapital over a folk-song melody, and it's a spectacular failure, in my opinion.
The first songs I learned were 'It Takes a Worried Man' and Woody Guthrie's 'Grand Coulee Dam,' 'Rock Island Line' - those kind of American folk songs that were probably on the edge of blues. After that was Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry songs. And then I heard Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Big Bill Broonzy on the radio.
If you were president 50 years ago, the tragedy in Syria might not even penetrate what the American people were thinking about on a day to day basis. Today, they're seeing vivid images of a child in the aftermath of a bombing.
I grew up listening to topical music - songs that were about things. So when I write songs, a lot of the time, they're about the things weighing on my heart that I want people to think about.
I was able to notice in a very early stage, there were discrepancies between the people who are writing the songs and discrepancies about the self that I was writing about. I was feeling that there were all these different people, both writing the record and having the record being written about them, even though ostensibly it was me sitting down and documenting a series of life experiences. Part of that, when I recognized this unconscious thing I was doing, was about these spaces, about these gaps.
Music that was made in the 60s and 70s did come from a really soulful place. The seed for the songs written in the 90s were planted in those songs, even though they were samples.
We enjoyed the fact that we were called to the folk festivals and we got to know Joan Baez, Dylan. We were singing strictly gospel, but then after we started hearing songs that they would sing, we saw that those songs were very fitting for us because they were singing the truth, and truth is gospel.
I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks.
If you are speaking about my own songs, I would think so because we were talking about that particular era and I was singing one of my songs that I recorded 50 years ago.
There was a time that I was only known for being a plagiarist. It used to hurt at times because there was so much effort I was putting into music. And instead of that, it was a couple tunes that I had reproduced from folk songs to remake as film songs, which were being written about.
There were a lot of songs during my MCA years that I thought should have been singles but were not. You can't worry about what wasn't - I was very lucky to have as many hits as I had.
All the signs were right. And when I mean all the sings were right, the only signs that we care about when we start a project of making a record is, do we have the songs - it's that simple.
We made it. Despite the fear and predictions of doom. We made it. Even though there were days when we were tired and there were days when we forgot who we were. We made it. And we must thank the stars for this. And the birds for their beautiful songs. And the strangers who were careful to smile. We made it.
I wrote most of these songs right before the end. A lot of these songs are about that. Even if it's not direct, you can feel the beginning of the end of the breakup in these songs.
I do want people to know that the songs that I wrote when I was with women were really about women. And the songs that I've written since have been fairly obvious about men.
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