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" 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. "

John Mellencamp

Right

Tragedy

American

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" I don't want to be a politician. I don't like politics. It's petty; it fights dirty. "

John Mellencamp

Dirty

Petty

" 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. "

" My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material. "

" As I've matured as a songwriter, I realize that if it's out there, it's mine. "

" I'm your average Joe guy. I don't really care for politicians. "

" Everything I have is for sale. Material items are just things that pass through your hands that mean very little or nothing. "

" 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. "

" '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 fans are going to turn on me because of this, they weren't my fans anyway. I couldn't betray a whole 25 years of record making and not do this. I had to. "

" 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. "

" This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it. "

" I wish my grandmother and grandfather were still alive, because they were able to keep me grounded. "

John Mellencamp

Keep

Grandmother

" My best songs come from a place outside myself. "

" Wait a minute, guys, I have always been on your side. I have always spoken for you, always tried to put on a good face for the state of Indiana. All of a sudden, some of you people think I'm a bad guy? "

" I used to think that eating healthy was ordering a fish sandwich at McDonalds. "

" I'm wide open and will entertain anything anybody has to say, but if it's MTV and radio, well, they're great things, but can't be the only thing. I don't know that it would work even for the Beatles. "

" 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. "

" I couldn't have recorded this record 15 years ago. My voice didn't have the depth to pull these songs off. "

" When politicians use fear, they are playing into the enemy's hand. "

" 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. "

" People have the right to say what they want to. "

" I need a long and lingering death to make sure that I have time to have a deathbed conversion. "

" Bob Dylan's first couple of records in the 60's weren't considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album. "

John Mellencamp

Two

First

" I thought I knew a lot about music. Then you start digging and the deeper you go, the more there is. "

" I went to New York in 1974, to either try to get a record deal, get into the New York Art Student League, or be a dancer. So that was my plan. Some plan. And I had no money. "

" I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace. "

" '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. "

" For me to pretend I'm the keeper of the small town mentality or that's all I'm interested in is wrong. "

John Mellencamp

Small

Pretend

" 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. "

" I want to sell to people my own age, because that's the way I write songs. "