RECORD REVIEWS
EDITOR’S PICK
RECORDING OF THE MONTH
JOHN MELLENCAMP
Strictly a One-Eyed Jack
Republic (16/44.1 stream, EMI/Qobuz). 2022. John Mellencamp, prod.; David Leonard, eng.
You might think an artist with 22 Top-40 hits would identify his winning formula and stick with it. Instead, John Mellencamp’s long career has been a tale of determined development and often improvement. On his latest album, the 70-year-old Indiana native has nestled deeper into his rural Midwestern roots, eschewing rock defiance for folk philosophy. The result is a powerful baring of the soul, which, to many Americans, will also be a glance in the mirror.
America has related to Mellencamp since he first came on the scene in the 1970s, when his management forced him to use the moniker John Cougar. But in 1982, with the album American Fool, he became specifically identified with small-town vignettes. He’d found a way to express the inner complexities of a simple life, and he was loved for it. He was rewarded, too, with big sales for singles like “Pink Houses,” “Crumblin’ Down,” and “Authority Song.”
All that success gave him the fortitude to reclaim his own name, first as John Cougar Mellencamp then removing “Cougar” altogether. In 1985, with Scarecrow, John Cougar Mellencamp augmented his approach to musical landscape-painting, introducing folk instruments into his sound. But rock stayed at the core, surrounded by a country mantle. The result was one of the first alternative country albums, effectively reviving the country-meets-rock sound, sometimes called No Depression, that the Flying Burrito Brothers had spearheaded in the 1960s.
On his new album, Mellencamp wanders even farther into the forests of Americana, in metaphorical as well as ethnomusicological ways. Sure, the banjo, accordion, fiddles, acoustic guitars, and autoharp—many of them played by music director Andy York—conjure up the bygone years of the American nation. But then there is the extraordinary fact that nearly every song is in a minor key, and many of the melodies seem clearly crafted to sound modal and archaic. It feels like a declaration, maybe about the state of the Midwest Mellencamp loves so much. Or maybe old age has just made him dour. Either way, the past few years have generally worn everyone out, so it’s easy to connect with all that minor-key gloom.
Mellencamp, who produced , turned to veteran engineer David Leonard to help craft its rich and detailed sound. The two have worked on several albums together over the past two decades. Leonard has the right blend of alt-country (Dwight Yoakam, k.d. lang) and indie (Michelle Shocked, Juliana Hatfield) experience to know how to bring out Mellencamp’s current character. In the 1980s, we felt like we were in Mellencamp’s
