He'd started out with a stage name, John Cougar, but before long had the power to drop the name and become himself. His concert tours filled football stadiums across the country. He was on the radio constantly in the 1980's, and I mean constantly - replays only partly driven by state pride. I rarely bought a Mellencamp album when I was growing up in his native Indiana, but I didn't have to.
"I just see it as looking for the truth of life." If you disagree, that's all right with him: "I'm not for everybody." There was a time when it seemed that he was for everybody, or at least that everybody knew his name. The first line of the first song on the album is: "I always lie to strangers." "I don't see it as dark at all," he said. Three divorces and decades of fame have led him to the conclusion that all of us hide our true selves from other people - that each of us is alone. But having borrowed the words, the singer made the thought his own. "What I've discovered at my ancient age is that we are all in solitary confinement inside our own skins, and we don't really get to know anybody." He was paraphrasing a line from a play by Tennessee Williams, another student of American tragedy and longing. When we spoke this week, he said the lyrics distill something he's learned across 70 years of life. The songs on Strictly a One-eyed Jack are narrated by a character whose soul seems as battered as Mellencamp's cigarette-darkened voice. John Mellencamp's music has captured the moods of several eras - and at the start of 2022, his new album dwells on loneliness and lying.
John Mellencamp performs during the Farm Aid 2021 music festival at the Xfinity Theatre on Sept.
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