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" 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. "

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" Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth. "

John Mellencamp

Truth

Time

Great

" I'm the guy who wrote The Authority Song. Did they think I was kidding? Did they think it was only a song to entertain? "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" It's my responsibility as a singer-songwriter to report the news. "

" 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. "

" In so many musicals today, the story is moved forward by a song. I don't think we're gonna try to do that. "

" Radio was my friend after 'Jack & Diane' and 'Hurts So Good.' "

" I've been around so many people for so long that I take great delight in my own company. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I would never say John Kerry would be a great president. I will say that George Bush has divided us; he has filled this country with hatred. "

John Mellencamp

Great

Divided

" I'm as left-wing as you can get. "

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

" 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 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" People in Indiana have known me for 25 years. They've known George Bush four. "

John Mellencamp

Indiana

Years

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

John Mellencamp

Dirty

Petty

" 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. "

" We could walk 3 minutes and be on the beach. I think the music kind of suffered because of it. It kind of smelled like Jimmy Buffett, which is a bad thing. "

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

" I was born with Spina bifida. That's where you have a hole in your spine, and your nerve endings come out. "

" 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. "

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

John Mellencamp

Keep

Grandmother

" 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 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. "