Mellencamp: American Troubadour

By David Masciotra

An in-depth biography of “a major artist whose work is sometimes obscured by the shadows of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen” (Craig Werner, author of Up Around the Bend: An Oral History of Creedence Clearwater Revival).
 
Despite his numerous hits and Grammy nominations—and his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—John Mellencamp remains one of America’s most underrated songwriters. In Mellencamp, David Masciotra explores the life and career of this important talent, persuasively arguing that he deserves to be celebrated alongside artists like Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan.

Starting with his modest beginnings in Seymour, Indiana, Masciotra details Mellencamp’s road to fame, examining his struggles with the music industry and his persistent dedication to his midwestern roots as he found success by remaining true to where he came from.

From a cultural critic who has contributed to the Washington Post, Atlantic, and Los Angeles Review of Books and who “writes with the precision and integrity and humanity of a great journalist” (New York Times–bestselling author James Lee Burke), this thoughtful analysis highlights four decades of the artist’s music, which has consistently elevated the dignity of everyday people and honored the quiet heroism of raising families and working hard.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813147345

Book preview

Introduction

No Pop Singer

After a few generations, it’s gone. Rock ’n’ roll—as important as we think it is, and as big as it was, and as much money as people made on it, and as proud as I am to say that I was part of it—at the end of the day, they’re gonna say: Yeah, there was this band called the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, and this guy named Elvis and this other guy named Bob Dylan. And the rest of us? We’re just gonna be footnotes.

—John Mellencamp, 2010

From the American heartland came a voice as strong and restless as a tornadic wind blowing up dust devils on a wide open prairie. In the beginning that voice was given the unfortunate moniker of Johnny Cougar, and its possessor would spend nearly a decade, from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, fighting to define himself as a man and as an artist, crawling out of the shadow of his record company’s limited vision for his talent. His manager and record company—Tony DeFries of MainMan Management, which had a close relationship with MCA Records—found a brash, handsome, and hungry young man from Indiana and offered him a record contract because they liked his demo, but first and foremost because they liked the way he looked. They envisioned a pop star brat who would make girls swoon with his James Dean swagger and cause radios to light up with the sonic styling of another Neil Diamond. When the record company executives told the young man their plans and punctuated it with the demand that he change his performance name from John Mellencamp, his birth name, to Johnny Cougar, he protested. No one’s ever called me Johnny in my life, he said before addressing the humiliation of a tag like Cougar. The conversation ended abruptly when an executive brought his gavel down on the table: You can be Johnny Cougar or you can go back to Indiana and do whatever it was you were doing there. What Mellencamp was doing was making minimum wage working for the phone company in his hometown of Seymour, Indiana. He’d come to New York City to get a record contract and, in the spirit and tradition of the explorer, adventurer, and artist, he was determined to meet the challenge of the task—a challenge that ends with many people forced, without ceremony or even farewell, to return to their hometowns to do whatever it was they were doing there. Mellencamp signed the deal, and Johnny Cougar was born.

Fourteen years later, in 1989, after selling millions of albums and scoring several top ten hits as both John Cougar (Johnny became John by the early 1980s) and John Cougar Mellencamp (his surname first appeared on a record in 1983), Mellencamp released a single called Pop Singer. The song is a stimulative and hypnotic blend of funk and folk—the funk foaming from a Sly Stone bass line and a Stax sisterhood of backup vocalists, and the folk fomenting from the fiddle, imported from Ireland, and a beach accordion. Mellencamp’s voice—car wheels on a gravel road of confidence—begins a biography and commences a confession:

Never wanted to be no pop singer

Never wanted to write no pop songs.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Just wanted to make it real

Good, bad, or indifferent

That’s the way that I live and the way that I’ll die, as a Pop singer

Mellencamp said that his grandfather was no bullshit, adding, and that’s how I’ve always tried to be. It takes the pugnacious toughness and tenacity of a prizefighter and the commitment of a nun to be no bullshit in a culture that is built on it and driven by it. The fallback position of most Americans is to treat a display of sincerity with suspicion. Many Americans have grown accustomed, even to the point of boredom, with lies from politicians, manipulation from the media, and deceit from the multibillion-dollar advertisement industry. Mellencamp could have been just another slick brand, another carefully crafted image faithfully filling cash registers and the bank accounts of record company executives, high-priced attorneys, paid publicists, and himself. A committee of company men invented Johnny Cougar and expected Mellencamp to happily play the role of bullshitter. These men demanded that he slap the label on his chest and smile through his scripted lines.

The late Jacques Derrida argued that freedom in modern, technologized society has degraded into the ability merely to choose a role rather than forge an identity. Passively accepting an assigned role is a condition to which many Americans can relate. The demands of the market, the surveillance of social networking, and the extended reach of the employer remove the divide between public life and private life, putting a premium on conformity. When Mellencamp sang that he never wanted to be a pop singer, he didn’t mean that he never desired popularity as an entertainer or that he never wanted hits on pop radio. He sang as a resister and dissenter against the branding of his identity and the restriction of his humanity. He wanted to be an artist, not a product. He wanted to be a man, not a brand. He wanted to explore the open plain of his soul, and the open land of his country, to find a small piece of territory he could conquer and call his own. He wanted to be no bullshit, following the instructional and inspirational example of his grandfather.

It seems that Mellencamp saw in his grandfather—in his wrinkled flesh, deliberate steps, and intense eyes—a human being. That might sound like a reduction of the man’s uniquely singular life, characteristics, and personality traits, but how many people, especially in an era of self-surveillance, state expansion, and mass media, develop a life that is fully human?

It is fashionable, because it is easy, to delineate an artist’s vision or mission. Many critics engage in overwrought analysis and close readings of an artist’s most insignificant details because they believe that art is a puzzle. By relegating the puzzle maker to the role of a machinist who mechanically pumps out the product of a preprogrammed vision, the critic is able to sketch the image that appears when all the jigsaw pieces interlock.

It is much more interesting and important to examine how great artists become great artists: not by executing an agenda but by slowly and steadily discovering their humanity. When the discoveries begin to produce and permeate into the work, artists have something they can call, and audiences can appreciate as, art. It is hard to understand what makes an artist human because it is hard for any individual to understand what makes him- or herself human. As much as we avoid admitting it, we are all strangers to ourselves. Great artists influence and inspire millions of people because they offer the promise that through the discovery of their own humanity, they can present clues pertaining to the intractable mystery of the human heart. We search for insights in the artist’s creative output, and when we find them, we believe we are also finding the map leading to the spring of meaning, purpose, and beauty from which we all hope to drink. People suffer in their quest for truth, and with each grasp at something that resembles it, we assuage our fear that truth is, ultimately, unattainable. In the song Check It Out, one of Mellencamp’s best from one of his best albums—The Lonesome Jubilee—he describes the rewards and punishments of the typical American middle-class family, and states with wonder and woe: This is all we’ve learned about living. Our attempts to solve the mysteries of the heart and grasp at the truth of humanity are fraught with disaster and disappointment. All that we’ve learned about living manages to capture the ambition of the human experience along with its disappointments. It also, in a single lyric, embodies Mellencamp’s march from brand to man.

John Mellencamp is a great artist, and his artistry is directly traceable to his humanity. The excitement and depth of his music, along with the joy of his story, arise from more than his talent for making raucous rock ’n’ roll that shoots through the loins to enliven the libido as well as poignantly compassionate folk and soul songs that lasso the heart into a wider world of feeling. The value of his music is found in the intellectual and spiritual journey of the artist from product to producer, from commodity to human being, from brand to man, from Johnny Cougar to John Mellencamp.

Under the guise of a case study of humanity, Mellencamp: American Troubadour is an artistic biography. It is a look at John Mellencamp’s life through his work: always generous in spirit, large in thought and, perhaps most important in the context of rock ’n’ roll, fun. An artistic biography keeps alive the idea that art is more important than gossip. In a culture that treats even beloved artists, whether in music, film, or literature, as celebrities whose divorce proceedings are more important than their work, Mellencamp: American Troubadour drives directly into the funnel cloud of cultural frivolity and triviality, believing that the force of impact can, miraculously, alter the wind and push the twister back into the sky.

I wrote this book among the wreckage of an F5 supercell. American culture has become more homogenous. There is no equivalent to John Mellencamp on popular radio, and while the Internet has given Americans better access to the garden, the fruits and vegetables that make it to the supermarket shelf have become fewer in diversity and variety. American culture preaches the gospel of mobility to an increasingly self-absorbed youth. If your life, the dogma goes, does not take you to New York City, Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C., your life isn’t worth much attention, and in a culture addicted to fame, self-surveillance, and reality television, attention is the ultimate prize of the new American dream. Radio mimics the mobility mind-set. Due to changes arising from centralization and charting measurements, small stations in places such as Ann Arbor, Michigan, Indianapolis, Indiana, or (like the one Mellencamp grew up listening to) Louisville, Kentucky, no longer matter much. Everything comes out of New York, Los Angeles, or Nashville. One of the many unpleasant results is that a boring blend of country and pop has replaced heartland rock as the soundtrack of midwestern and blue-collar life.

Mellencamp never much liked the term heartland rock, but there is no denying its importance in his career. His music incorporates blues, soul, and folk, and over the span of his still-developing catalogue, a John Mellencamp song increasingly became a blend of multigenre and multiform Americana. Hallmarks of heartland rock, however, like Jack and Diane and Pink Houses, both of which combine the down-home ease of the front porch with the rock ’n’ roll crunch of the Saturday night stage, made Mellencamp. The erasure of heartland rock, which has left a void, is but one of many ways to measure the emptying out of American culture.

Despite his lucrative and lavish commercial success, Mellencamp was never committed to commercialism. His best artistic achievements reveal a man motivated more by a desire for greatness than for success. The consistency of excellence in his corpus is without parallel in rock ’n’ roll. From 1982’s American Fool to 2010’s No Better Than This, there is not a bad album in the mix and, perhaps more impressive, there is not a redundant one either.

Mellencamp followed the ribald, Rolling Stones–inspired, revved-up rock of American Fool and Uh-Huh with Scarecrow—an album for the ages. Scarecrow is equal parts past, present, and future. It suffers from multiple personality disorder, but each incarnation is equally charming, edifying, and appealing. It is a tribute to the spirited defiance and warmth of 1960s rock ’n’ roll. The invention of the No Depression alternative country rock movement, it is the definitive statement of heartland rock.

Early in his career, Mellencamp characterized his sound as boom, boom, crack, crack. That changed in 1987 with The Lonesome Jubilee. The album, with Mellencamp stretched alone across the top and a black-and-white photograph of the songwriter and an old blue-collar worker together at a bar spread beneath, introduced Mellencamp’s fans to a new sound and a new style. Mellencamp’s tonic brew of gypsy rock featured countermelodies of fiddle and accordion, the added spice of Dobro, banjo, and harmonica, and the gospel passion of black backup singers. Boom, boom, crack, crack still provided a foundation, but Mellencamp added layer upon layer of texture and taste in the form of Americana—Delta blues, African American church music, and Appalachian folk. From the Deep South to the heart of the heartland, Mellencamp took his listeners on a musical carnival ride, singing sweet but solid songs to strengthen the stories of everyday people—their triumphs, their defeats, their lives, and their deaths. It was more than artistic innovation, it was invention.

Mellencamp enhanced his gypsy rock sound with the follow-up to The Lonesome Jubilee, 1989’s Big Daddy. Lyrically, the underrated album is the most introspective of his entire career. In quality of music and depth of introspection it surpasses Springsteen’s Nebraska, but in critical circles, for biased and bizarre reasons, the two are never mentioned in the same breath.

To remind anyone who thought he was going soft of his roots in rock ’n’ roll rebellion, Mellencamp put out an album called Whenever We Wanted in 1991. He called it "American Fool with better lyrics," and it was an answer to a challenge from a teenage fan he met on the beach involving the lack of sexuality in the songs of The Lonesome Jubilee and Big Daddy. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Mellencamp released a diverse collection of records, ranging from R & B–inflected rock with a street edge to traditional folk. His 2010 album, No Better Than This, earned him some of the best reviews of his career. He awakened the ghosts of America’s past, summoning them to haunt the cacophonous radio waves of computergenerated music and the creaky stages of music’s blood-stained, sweat-soaked history. Mellencamp recorded the songs on No Better Than This at Sun Studios in Memphis, in the hotel room in San Antonio where Robert Johnson made good on Lucifer’s bargain, and at the first African American church in Savannah, Georgia, which hid beneath its wooden floors a pathway on the Underground Railroad.

The man who wrote one of America’s signature anthems, Pink Houses—which he considered his compositional classroom, the moment he learned to create a good song—spent a career exploring, as few other songwriters have, the beauty and brutality of America. America is at once a beautiful seductress in a white dress and a vicious bitch in black leather. Mellencamp, from Small Town to Peaceful World, courted and held hands with both Americas. The Steinbeck Center at San Jose State University honored Mellencamp’s aggressive engagement with his country by granting him the John Steinbeck Award.

America’s unlikely and perpetually pissed-off poet from the southern Indiana region colloquially called Kentuckiana has also won Grammys, American Music Awards, and American Songwriting Awards, sold millions of records, and been inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. But all John Mellencamp’s achievements were mere milestones on the trek toward the discovery of his humanity. While he ascended and fell to new heights and depths, he found continual inspiration in the tumult of his love life, the deaths of his family and friends, and his turbulent flight through the firefight known as American citizenship.

John Mellencamp’s method of artistry links him with all great artists, from Ernest Hemingway to Frida Kahlo. He is simply sharing secrets. The secrets in his head and heart that he works overtime to decipher he translates into the universally understood language of music. The music is a means through which Mellencamp harpoons the fury of several seemingly combative but closely related American traditions—traditions that form at the church, on the corner, and in the club. Mellencamp often complains of record company executives and fans asking him, When are you going to make a Mellencamp record? His standard answer is, I just did. A Mellencamp record, in the minds of many, is the boom, boom, crack, crack of Hurts So Good and R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. In reality, however, the body-stimulating hard drive of Hurts Go Good is only one element in the combustible mixture of music that Mellencamp creates. A John Mellencamp record is a hybrid of rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, funk, and folk.

In the spirit and tradition of John Mellencamp, I have written this book as a hybrid of biography, musical criticism, and cultural commentary. It is about John Mellencamp, but because Mellencamp’s music is about America, this book also is about America: the America we knew when holding hands meant something, the America of thundering hearts, the America brimming with the electricity of integration and miscegenation, and the America forever suspended between a laugh and a tear.

Shortly after I graduated college, I made an error similar to that of many American music critics by writing a book on Bruce Springsteen’s political vision. The vision trap is on every road the critic walks, and I lowered my foot directly into its steel claws. I managed to escape, but my first book, while it has some strengths, is the journey of an amputee without a prosthetic. There was only so far I could go. Since then, I have also learned why the conventional wisdom that Mellencamp is the poor man’s Springsteen amounts to collective nonsense.

Springsteen’s music often seems like the result of exhaustive research. When he writes about everyday life, it is as if he has just attended a lyrical composition class taught by Flannery O’Connor and Bob Dylan, and when he writes about politics, it is as if he just caught up on back issues of the Nation. He is a man of brilliance and extraordinary talent, but he is a guard standing at the gate of his own music. His creativity goes through a scrambler of secrecy before broadcast. The overblown romanticism of his songs appealed to me as a high school and college student because the experiences Springsteen imagined were experiences I wanted. Once I had accumulated actual experiences, his vision—if I can call that—seemed like the naïve and melodramatic property of fantasy. But coming from the other speaker was John Mellencamp’s music, and it grew and gained in my appreciation as I grew and gained in experience. The experience that informs Mellencamp’s music is not imagined or guarded, it is direct. It comes through him, not merely from him.

In music, visual art, film, political activism, and life, Mellencamp has attempted to imbue everything he does with the no-bullshit philosophy and lifestyle he learned from his grandfather. He has often succeeded, but as his honest, introspective songs make clear, he has often failed. Regardless of how many times he’s failed, he provides an important and alternative example of authenticity in American culture. Philosopher Charles Taylor warns that liberal democracy, mainstream media, and modern technologies have thoroughly degraded the concept of authenticity into the atomization of the individual, creating a culture in which people abandon communities and ignore the public interest in favor of private pursuits. Taylor submits that authenticity must include the personal aspect of an independently created or discovered orientation toward life, but that true authenticity also requires openness to horizons of significance—larger communal, political, and spiritual sources of meaning. In an unlikely venue—the world of rock music and popular entertainment— John Mellencamp provides a profound and powerful example of true authenticity: independence balanced by openness to horizons of significance. His music wrestles with authenticity and ebbs and flows between individualism and communal loyalty.

The way that Mellencamp used his music as a means of self-exploration, self-discovery, and self-actualization is a particularly revealing, resonant, and relevant example of independent identity making. It is instructional, and even inspirational, in a culture that continually tries to narrow the options of freedom and limit the possibilities of becoming a fully human person. The nexus of corporate interest and consumer expectation imposed on Mellencamp a false identity and attempted to permanently brand him with its desires and demands. He resisted, broke the door off the cage, and became a songwriter of his own priorities, an artist of his own passions, and a political activist of his own positions. To study how Mellencamp took advantage of his opportunities and abilities to create is to study a model of how Americans can truly take advantage of freedom rather than allow forces larger than the individual—the corporate structure, the state, the mainline media—to limit their freedom to the acceptance of a role. Mellencamp removed the Cougar mask, shed the Cougar persona, and became free. One of the most important challenges for any American in the twenty-first century is to remove the mask and shed the persona that regulates life, to actually work to achieve a fulfilling and freeing identity. It is a process of liberation, and Mellencamp’s music is its soundtrack.

As we take a reading tour of John Mellencamp’s music, we uncover fascinating, moving, and challenging insights into American music, the legacy of race, the fun and troubling heartbreak of sex and love, the truth of the Midwest, and the quiet persistence of class as a shaping hand in American life. We also learn about ourselves and how hypocrisy is a disease to which no one is immune. We learn ways to diagnose it and ways to treat it. Mellencamp’s music is entertaining, but it is also tough. Mellencamp is tough on his country, tough on his listeners, and tough on himself.

John Mellencamp calls his albums postcards. If that is so, they are postcards from a man’s soul, and although that soul is not locatable on any map, it is traceable and it is recognizable—if only because it is the soul right there within us all.

John Mellencamp’s music is about love, happiness, death, fear, friendship, freedom, family, responsibility, sex, youth, adulthood, work, class, poverty, race, religion, politics, power, community, and individuality. All that we learned about living, indeed.

1

Thundering Hearts

In 1969, I’m sixteen years old. I’m riding around with four guys in the small town of Seymour, Indiana, is how John Mellencamp begins the story of a dramatic turning point in his life. This drumbeat comes blaring out of the three-inch speaker, he goes on to say, and this voice sings, ‘I wanna tell my tale, come on.’ Mellencamp’s heart must have leapt out of his chest, because he says that he immediately asked, Who the fuck is this guy? and told the driver to pull over to the shoulder where there would be no static. He listened to the song entirely enthralled, eagerly waiting for the DJ to identify the song and singer. It was Bob Seger. The song was ‘Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,’ Mellencamp remembers. It was love at first sound—That was the beginning of a long love affair with Bob Seger’s music, thoughtful and bad ass in one measure. Mellencamp then makes an important point about the genesis of his genre—If there really is such a thing as Midwest Rock, it started for me that night. And now, all these years later, I am proud to be part of his brood.

John Mellencamp, even when he experimented with styles that Seger never used and even when he dove deeply into dark social commentary, never left Bob Seger’s brood. The Ramblin’ Gamblin’ beautiful loser from Ann Arbor, Michigan, sang with toughness and sensitivity about open fields, small-town characters, and lonely teenage nights that struck a chord with midwesterner Mellencamp. Seger’s characters occupy an emotional netherworld where joy and despair swirl together in the air like the winds of different direction that form a funnel cloud. Mellencamp—that afternoon in the car and throughout his career—felt and feels this world deep in his soul. When Mellencamp asked, Who the fuck is this guy? he wanted to know his name, but in attempting to answer that question about the singer of Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man, he would commence an investigation into Seger’s soul and his own. Any analysis of what gave Bob Seger’s music its resonant power would lead to questions about the character of life in small midwestern towns, and thereby lead to questions about the character of John Mellencamp’s life.

At sixteen, Mellencamp probably had not developed the obsessions that would eventually define his discography—class, freedom, and responsibility, generational change, and race. He was in the full sweep of youth. He was the same age as Jack and Diane—the teenage lovers from Mellencamp’s number one hit of the same name who are terrified of growing old. Like most teenagers, Mellencamp’s only obsession was probably with his own life—the fights, dates, and exaggerated drama of high school, late nights, and soft rebellion. It is difficult to find a popular songwriter of recent decades who more effectively captured the equally distributed joy and angst of small-town youth than Bob Seger. Like Mellencamp, Seger obsesses over growing older, generational change, and the transition from adolescence to adulthood, but the two artists express their testimonies differently. Seger’s obsession is more personalized and tearful. John Mellencamp wonders in Between a Laugh and a Tear where your energy’s gone wrong. Many of Seger’s best songs launch the same inquiry into the heart, and some of them emerge on the other side with newfound zeal and aggression, while some seem to suggest that once the energy has gone wrong, there is no possibility of psychological repair. In rock ’n’ roll and in psychology, Bob Seger is a major influence for John Mellencamp. Nowhere is this more obvious or striking than in Mellencamp’s early songs about fully living the experience of being young in a small town.

There is an urgency that accompanies adolescence in the small town because teenage life in provincial America is a constant battle between boredom and desire. The winter days they last forever, Mellencamp sings in his hit Cherry Bomb, but the weekends went by so quick. The summer days are hot and long, and unlike in Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles, outside the window there isn’t much going on. Teenagers are forced to make their own plans, improvise their own activity, and live according to the restless whims of hormonal explosion, psychological confusion, and the promises of unrealized freedom. Teenagers have reached a stage of life where the world of childhood—which once seemed to encompass the entire universe—suddenly shrinks into a cage. Teenagers want nothing more than to break free from that cage but are incapable of doing so because of the limits placed on them by older authorities. In the small town, the confinement of the cage seems worse because all the teenager hears, sees, and smells is all the teenager has heard, seen, and smelled since birth. There is no unexplored neighborhood to discover, no significant possibility of an exciting new visitor from out of town, no new development in town. Life seems stagnant, but underneath the plain veil of monotony lie the color, beauty, and pyrotechnics of emotional fury. The urgency of small-town youth is a product of the wild energy of desperation. All teenagers feel desperate—for action, for movement, for life—but in the small town, where less life seems to be available, that desperation maximizes into an untamable beast. Most fascinating is that the feral quality of teenage desperation finds a balancing point in small towns. The same stability that informs the urgency also imbues the teenager with the realization that the pleasures, joys, and promises of youth are finite. Everything comes with an expiration date. The visibility of life’s bittersweet cycle is unclouded in the small town, and the mind translates what the eye sees into the fear that life may peak before it really begins. As Mellencamp sings in Jack and Diane, Hold on to 16 as long as you can / Changes come around real soon / Make us women and men.

The John Mellencamp who wrote Jack and Diane is impossible to understand without acknowledging his voluntary membership in Bob Seger’s brood. In 1977, Bob Seger released the single Mainstreet. The eponymous street is that of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Seger tells a profoundly simple story in between solos of a guitar that cry so nakedly it could fry the wires within the radio speakers. His voice—thoughtful and bad ass in one measure—looks back on his teenage years of running with pool hall hustlers and watching the action in a nightclub through its storefront window. He loved a young woman, and the image of her body softly swaying to that smoky beat filled his sleep. The song begins with the line I remember standing on the corner at midnight / Trying to get my courage up. There isn’t a young man who cannot relate to that thought and experience—the inner turmoil, a product of biology, psychology, and spirituality, that accompanies the risk he takes to find sex and intimacy. The song ends with Seger confessing, Sometimes even now, when I’m feeling lonely and beat / I drift back in time and I find my feet / Down on Mainstreet.

The image of an adult Seger returning to the center of his hometown— either physically, spiritually, or both—is an encounter with the spectral presence of memory that haunts everyone. The internal conflict of joyful nostalgia and unidentifiable longing that always accompanies reminiscence is there. The crying guitar, the tough vocal delivery, and the sweet but muscular lyrics all emphasize the fractured power of that universal experience, and it all comes