John Mellencamp Quotes

29 quotations by John Mellencamp

When you live in hysteria, people start thinking emotionally.

When politicians use fear, they are playing into the enemy's hand.

What's the difference? One guy's the same as the other.

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.

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.

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?

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.

This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it.

People in Indiana have known me for 25 years. They've known George Bush four.

People have the right to say what they want to.

People didn't listen to the song; they just heard the word Baghdad. They got angry. I was commenting on his economic position, not the war.

Natalie from the Dixie Chicks could have said what she said before 9-11 and no one would have cared.

My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material.

It's my responsibility as a singer-songwriter to report the news.

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 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.

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.

I'm using my art to comment on what I see. You don't have to agree with it.

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 would never say John Kerry would be a great president. I will say that George Bush has divided us; he has filled this country with hatred.

I want to sell to people my own age, because that's the way I write songs.

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.

I didn't know if I was ever gonna finish the record. We just kept working on it and working on it and it got to a point where we quit.

I couldn't have recorded this record 15 years ago. My voice didn't have the depth to pull these songs off.

For me or a Bruce Springsteen to sit up in our ivory towers and make comments about racism, well, we're not really in it, are we?

Do I think it's OK to fight authority as long as you're only talking about the high school teacher? No.

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.

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.

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.