In the Studio: Mr. Happy Go Lucky

In the Studio
Rolling Stone, June 13, 1996

By Susan Richardson

"People keep asking me what's the style of this new album," John Mellencamp says of his 14th effort, Mr. Happy Go Lucky. "So tell them the style is 'John's next record.' "

The singer/songwriter never looks back. Mellencamp says that Lucky, due out in August, is the polar opposite of 1994's Dance Naked. Dance was put together in a mere 10 days; Lucky has been a more extensive effort, continually reworked and revised. It was recorded during a period of a year and a half at Belmont Mall, Mellencamp's studio in Bloomington, Ind., and now Mellencamp is mixing it at New York's Hit Factory.

The mordant, slightly self-mocking humor of the album's title and lyrics reflects what the 44-year-old Mellencamp has been thinking about for the last couple of years, ever since his heart attack in the summer of 1994. "I felt I was bulletproof before the heart attack," he says. "And when I had the heart attack, I thought life was over. Then I realized there was life afterward; I realized that my destiny was in my own hands. I take better care of myself now" -- he exhales a puff of cigarette smoke --"but there were many dark moments when you confront what heart disease means. These songs come out of that."

In addition to his own reflections, Mellencamp was inspired by the urban undercurrent of a lot of '90s pop. Tony! Toni! Toné! bassist, Raphael Saddiq, guests on one track, and techno-dance producer Junior Vasquez served as a musical adviser. "I took a look at the best of the musical styles of the '90s," Mellencamp says, "and wanted to use them with what we already do. My songs are always folk songs first. Then we turn them into something else. With this album, that was real exciting -- adding strings, organ, more percussion."

There are still elements of Mellencamp's old Middle American unpretentiousness. In the easy-rockin' "Just Another Day," he sings, "It's just another day/Watching girls on the streets/That's all right with me." And "Key West Intermezzo" is, in his words, a "stolen moment."

But Mellencamp's demons haunt the album. Set against a backdrop of Daniel Lanois-like guitar effects, "Jerry (The Man in the Moon)" is about the goblin inside each of us who's sometimes goofy and sometimes threatening but always out of control. And "The Full Catastrophe of Life" takes on the theme of life's ambiguity against a sashaying backbeat and hypnotic guitar riffs.

Mellencamp has succeeded in broadening his range while remaining true to his home-grown rock & roll style. In a comment tellingly evocative of his predecessor Bob Dylan, Mellencamp sums up his style. "I'm a song-and-dance guy,'' he says. "I want to write songs people will still dance and fuck and throw a Frisbee to years from now."