For John Cougar Mellencamp, mainstream acceptance proved to be an extended sport. The Indiana singer-songwriter debuted with 1977’s Chestnut Road Incident, however hit information eluded him till the early 80s. Additionally, whereas his earlier materials drew optimistic comparisons with the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, Mellencamp felt he solely actually got here into his personal on his triumphant eighth album, 1985’s Scarecrow.
Admitting as a lot in PR for his 2016 Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame exhibit, he mentioned: “With Scarecrow, I was starting to find my feet as a songwriter. Finally, for the first time, I realized what I thought I wanted to say in song…I wanted it to be more akin to Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, as opposed to The Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan.”
In equity, even previous to Scarecrow, he’d proven indicators of great inventive progress. 1982’s American Idiot featured the Billboard Sizzling 100-topping “Jack & Diane” and the Grammy-winning “Hurts So Good,” whereas the U.S. Prime 10 success of ’83’s Uh-Huh additionally spawned three U.S. hits and gave him sufficient clout so as to add his actual surname (Mellencamp) to the stage title (John Cougar) his first supervisor made him undertake within the mid-70s.
Having attracted a sizeable viewers, Mellencamp was decided to ship his finest but with Scarecrow. Recorded at his personal studio in Belmont, Indiana, with help from a decent, well-drilled band and future R.E.M. producer Don Gehman manning the console, the album featured a gritty but radio-friendly assortment of resonant blue-collar rock songs. Its go-to tracks have been arguably its U.S. Prime 10 hits (“Lonely Ol’ Night” and the storming, anthemic “R.O.C.K In The USA”), however Scarecrow additionally had energy in depth. Tracks with socio-political content material corresponding to “The Face Of The Nation” and the Steinbeck-esque “Rain On The Scarecrow” commented on the rise of company enterprise and America’s financial melancholy through the mid-80s, whereas the impassioned “Small Town” discovered Mellencamp espousing his love of his midwestern roots quite than chasing the intense lights of his nation’s greatest cities.
First launched in July 1985, Scarecrow definitely struck a chord with like-minded followers and critics. In one of many document’s many optimistic critiques, Rolling Stone declared that it “brings both Mellencamp’s 60s rock fixation and his fiercely patriotic distrust of big business and big politics into the muck of the modern world with scintillating results,” and his viewers clearly agreed — the album peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and it secured Mellencamp’s popularity among the many most celebrated singer-songwriters of the last decade.
“I think John really found his voice on this album,” revered music critic Anthony DeCurtis informed Related Press in 2022. “There were signs of it before, like on ‘Jack & Diane’ and ‘Pink Houses,’ but the sense of him looking at the world, taking his personality as someone who grew up in Seymour, Indiana, and making a wider statement about it, that was a big deal for him. It raised him to the level of someone who was an important musical voice in the culture.”
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