There are some artists that want nothing to do with their hit song. For John Mellencamp, that’s not the case.
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Mellencamp took part in an extensive interview with WXRT’s Marty Lennartz as he spoke about the classic single “Small Town” from his 1985 record Scarecrow. When he was asked about people associating him with the song, Mellencamp had a succinct response. “I don’t mind,” he said.
“I never really wanted to be part of anything anyway, so the idea that I was separated from what was hip, or what was in the moment, or in pop culture, I never really wanted to be a part of that.”
It’d be easy to think that Mellencamp had a grand process when writing “Small Town,” but it was the same method he uses to this day. Putting his lyrics down on pen and paper or using his typewriter.
Mellencamp called his handwriting “atrocious” and said he has to quickly find somebody to type up lyrics onto a computer so he can remember them. “I can’t read my own handwriting,” he said. “A couple days go by and it’s like, ‘what the hell? What is this? What am I trying to say here?’”
“Everything is written in Mellencamp abridged cliff-note scribble,” he added with a laugh.
When Mellencamp was writing “Small Town,” he took the same approach, but used a different outlet for penning his lyrics. “At the time, somebody thought it’d be a good idea if they bought me this computer typewriter, this electric computer typewriter that dinged everytime you misspelled a word,” he said. “Of course it didn’t show you the correction, it just identified that you had misspelled a word.
That component led to some unintentionally hilarious results. “I wrote that song in the laundry room because there were a lot of people in my house,” he explained.
Mellencamp’s wife and kids were in the kitchen at the time and a lot of noise was being made. “I went downstairs and went into the laundry room and was just typing. They could all hear me writing the song, it was just like ‘click, click, click, ding, ding, ding!’” He added with a laugh. “I could hear them up there laughing. I knew what they were laughing about, they were laughing about me misspelling all these words.”
He then went upstairs and asked his family if “you think this is funny?” in a lighthearted manner. “I played them ‘Small Town’ and they all just kind of went quiet,” he said.
Listen to Mellencamp’s full conversation with Marty Lennartz about his 1985 album Scarecrow along with music from the record here.
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