Zitat des Tages von John Mellencamp:
I wish my grandmother and grandfather were still alive, because they were able to keep me grounded.
What's the difference? One guy's the same as the other.
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.
When people are afraid, they make emotional decisions.
A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.
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.
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.
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.
In so many musicals today, the story is moved forward by a song. I don't think we're gonna try to do that.
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'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 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.
I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines.
Natalie from the Dixie Chicks could have said what she said before 9-11 and no one would have cared.
People have the right to say what they want to.
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.
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.
I'm using my art to comment on what I see. You don't have to agree with it.
Everything I have is for sale. Material items are just things that pass through your hands that mean very little or nothing.
I'm as left-wing as you can get.
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?
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.
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.
You cannot expect the guy who drove the car into the ditch to navigate it out of the ditch. You have to put a new driver in the seat. I'm not saying the new driver is going to be any better, but we need a new driver. Kerry is the only choice.
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.
I want to sell to people my own age, because that's the way I write songs.
I don't want to be a politician. I don't like politics. It's petty; it fights dirty.
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.
I thought I knew a lot about music. Then you start digging and the deeper you go, the more there is.
A lot of record company people, even though they're our age, want to be perceived as young hip guys, and they're hurting the business.
I couldn't have recorded this record 15 years ago. My voice didn't have the depth to pull these songs off.
I was born with Spina bifida. That's where you have a hole in your spine, and your nerve endings come out.
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.
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.
People in Indiana have known me for 25 years. They've known George Bush four.
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.