Words matter. These are the best John Mellencamp Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
When politicians use fear, they are playing into the enemy’s hand.
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.
A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.
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.
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.
What’s the difference? One guy’s the same as the other.
Radio was my friend after ‘Jack & Diane’ and ‘Hurts So Good.’
I’m your average Joe guy. I don’t really care for politicians.
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.
What is there to be afraid of? The worst thing that can happen is you fail. So what? I failed at a lot of things. My first record was horrible.
I’m as left-wing as you can get.
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.
As I’ve matured as a songwriter, I realize that if it’s out there, it’s mine.
‘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.
This is about black people selling out other black people.
I’ve just been fortunate to havehad a lot of hit records, though Human Wheels doesn’t qualify as a hit record-but it’s really the best single I’ve ever had.
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.
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.
It’s my responsibility as a singer-songwriter to report the news.
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.
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 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.
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’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.
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.
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.
I’m using my art to comment on what I see. You don’t have to agree with it.
My best songs come from a place outside myself.
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 need a long and lingering death to make sure that I have time to have a deathbed conversion.
I don’t want to be a politician. I don’t like politics. It’s petty; it fights dirty.
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 people are afraid, they make emotional decisions.
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 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.
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 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.
People have the right to say what they want to.
All I’m doing is painting. It’s my hobby. And that’s that.
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.
Life should never be viewed from the vantage point of achievements. It is total folly.