Some people call it inspiration, but I think I’m just a conduit for something. “With this record here, I never sat down once, not one song, and thought, ‘I need to write a song about this….’ The songs just come to me now, sometimes at very obtuse times, but they come to me and I’ll write ’em down and then I’ll find them later and be like, ‘When did I write this?’ That’s the way my songwriting has been for the last 20 years, really. “About 15, 20 years ago I quit trying and I got out of my own way,” Mellencamp says. Mellencamp says Strictly a One-Eyed Jack, written mostly before the pandemic and finished up after restrictions pulled back, was “a very easy record to make.” He credits a familiar studio routine with the musicians, as well as a more relaxed attitude toward the process that he embraced after his explosion of hits during the ’80s. But some of those songs we didn’t record were pretty good, too.” I’d walk in and the guys in the band would look at me and go, ‘Not the same guy talking,’ so we’d just move on to another song. So they were eliminated, and it didn’t take me long to make that decision. And I wrote quite a few songs for this record, and some of the songs didn’t have his voice, didn’t have the feeling that this record has. “When I put it together it felt like John Huston sent me all these songs. “The album’s really about one guy, just one guy’s voice speaking about his life,” he explains. I’m just not interested in repeating myself.” Mellencamp does, however, have a potential head start with songs that he wrote while making Strictly a One-Eyed Jack that he deemed inappropriate for that project. “Andy and I and Mike have already talked about the direction the music is going to go so these guys can start honing their skills on stuff they don’t normally do. “The record will sound completely different than this record,” he promises. Working again with his band, including guitarists Mike Wanchic and Andy York, and engineer David Leonard at his home turf Belmont Mall Studios, Mellencamp adds that the next album likely won’t reprise the stripped-down, parlor quality of Strictly a One-Eyed Jack, his first set of all-new material since 2017’s Sad Clowns & Hillbillies.
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